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How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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Why I Regret My Antiwar Protest Vote in 1968
While I see many parallels with the choice we faced back then, I now think differently about how to register my opposition to war.
Nov 02, 2024
In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.
I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.
But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.
Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.
When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle.
Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.
What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.
I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.
Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”
This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.
In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.
Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?
In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?
More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.
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The Consequences of the Choices We Will Make on Election Day
Some questions for those who rightly hold this Democratic administration responsible for genocide and want to punish the Democratic nominee for president.
Oct 29, 2024
This presidential contest has generated an intense debate within the Arab American community. If it were a normal election year, I’d be out in the field urging my community to vote for Democrats. I’d be warning Arab Americans that we needed to do everything we could to stop Donald Trump from re-entering the White House. I’d remind them of his racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric. I’d point to the danger he poses to women’s rights, civil rights and civil liberties, the environment, health and safety protections in the workplace, health care, academic freedom, civil discourse, and the Constitution. It would be, as we say, “A slam dunk.” But this isn’t a normal election.
My community has been deeply traumatized by the genocide in Gaza and now the devastating war on Lebanon. They are justifiably furious at the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce U.S. laws that could rein in Israel’s unconscionable and illegal actions, and accuse them of enabling Israel’s impunity.
Given this, there’s been a significant decline in Arab American support for Democrats, an uptick in support for the GOP, and many saying that they want to punish Democrats by voting for a third-party candidate. I, too, feel this pain and am torn as to how to move forward. I wish it were different, but it just isn’t.
However, I have some questions for those who rightly hold this Democratic administration responsible for genocide and want to punish the Democratic nominee for president. When they say they are voting their conscience by supporting a third party, I ask them to explain how punishing Vice-President Harris and enabling Donald Trump to become president will end the genocide—especially as we have allies in the progressive side of the Democratic Party who support and have been working with us to advance our foreign and domestic policy concerns and will be with us to pressure a Harris White House?
I wish it were different, but it just isn’t.
Meanwhile, the party of Trump is dominated by hardline hawks who have little or no concern for Palestinians or our civil rights. Or how voting for parties that have been around for decades and struggle to gain even 1% of the vote will advance anything other than helping elect Donald Trump? Or how turning our backs on all of the groups who have been our allies in the struggles for our civil and political rights and for a just foreign policy adds up to “voting one’s conscience”?
It reminds me of a lesson I learned from the late Julian Bond in the aftermath of the 1968 election. A decade ago, I wrote a reflection on that lesson. I ask you to consider it again:
***
It was 1968 and the U.S. was reeling from the Vietnam War, urban unrest, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy.
In the wake of voter opposition to the war, President Lyndon Johnson had been forced to end his reelection bid in favor of his Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
All of this was in the air when Democrats met for their convention to formally nominate Humphrey. On the first night of the convention, there was a fight over whether to recognize the all-white Georgia delegation or the mixed black and white delegation led by a young Georgia civil rights leader Julian Bond. The mixed delegation won a partial victory. On the second night, the convention wrestled with an effort to amend the platform to oppose the continuation of the war. Bond was a leader in this fight too. The amendment lost.
On the third night, when the convention met to nominate Humphrey’s vice-presidential running mate, the anti-war delegates proposed Bond to run against the party leaders’ hand-picked choice, Senator Ed Muskie. When the party leaders couldn’t silence the anti-war opposition, they brought in the police who were televised beating delegates who were chanting Bond’s name.
On the final day of the convention, after Humphrey and Muskie gave their acceptance speeches, Julian Bond came on stage and in a show of unity held up Humphrey’s and Muskie’s hands. Many young activists, like myself, were devastated.
A few years later, I got to know Julian Bond, and asked him why he did that and told him how let down I had felt. In response, he told me that there were two types of people. Those who looked down at the evils of the world and said, “I’m going to stand on my principles because it’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.” Then there are those who say, “I’ve got to get to work to see if I can make it at least a little bit better.”
He told me “I’m with the second group because if I took the first view, I’d be allowing too many people to continue to suffer while I maintained my purity and refused to do anything to help. At the convention, it wasn’t Julian Bond versus Ed Muskie. It was Hubert Humphrey versus Richard Nixon, and I had to make a choice as to who would help make life at least a little bit better.”
I never forgot that lesson and am challenged daily to apply it. It is the reason why I have so little patience for ideologues from the right or the left.
They often miss the muck of the reality in which most of us live and the tough, and often less-than-perfect, choices with which we are confronted in the never-ending challenge to make life a little bit better—whether in the struggle for human rights, improvements in the quality of life, or the provision of security for those who are most vulnerable.
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Is the Ghost of Hubert Humphrey Stalking Kamala Harris?
As a pivotal election neared, a candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting an unpopular war or speak out for a meaningful change. Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Harris faces it now.
Aug 15, 2024
After the Democrat in the White House decided not to run for reelection, the vice president got the party’s presidential nod—and continued to back the administration’s policies for an unpopular war. As the election neared, the candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting the war or speak out for a change.
Hubert Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Kamala Harris faces it now.
Despite the differences in eras and circumstances, key dynamics are eerily similar. The history of how Vice President Humphrey navigated the political terrain of the war in Vietnam has ominous parallels with how Vice President Harris has been dealing with the war in Gaza.
From Landslide to Chaos
For millions of liberals, during the first half of the 1960s, Hubert Humphrey was the nation’s most heroic politician. As the Senate majority whip, he deftly championed landmark bills for civil rights and social programs. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put him on the Democratic ticket in 1964, progressive momentum was in high gear.
LBJ defeated ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. As vice president, Humphrey assisted Johnson to follow up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a huge set of antipoverty measures while enacting broad social programs in realms of education, health care, nutrition, housing and the environment. Midway through the summer of 1965, Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law.
The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory.
Meanwhile, escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam was taking off. And, as Martin Luther King Jr. soon pointed out, “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”
At first, Vice President Humphrey wrote slightly dovish memos to Johnson, who angrily rejected the advice and retaliated by excluding him from key meetings. Banished to the doghouse, Humphrey licked his wounds and changed his approach. By early 1966, he was deferring to Johnson’s war views in private and advocating for the Vietnam War in public.
As the war escalated, so did the vice president’s zeal to extol it as a fight for freedom and democracy. “By 1967 he had become a hawk on Vietnam,” biographer Arnold Offner noted. Beneath the lofty rhetoric was cold calculation.
“Humphrey’s passage from dove to hawk on Vietnam was not the result of one-sided White House briefings or of his ability, as one journalist had noted, to see silver linings in the stormiest clouds,” Offner wrote. “His change of position derived from a case of willful mind over matter, from his strong anti-Communism combined with political expediency driven by ambition, namely desire to remain in Johnson’s good graces and perhaps succeed him whenever his presidency ended.”
That desire to be in the president’s good graces did not dissipate after Johnson suddenly announced in a televised address on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Four weeks later, Humphrey launched a presidential campaign that pitted him against two antiwar candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.
From the outset, Humphrey was plagued by his fear of antagonizing Johnson if he were to depart from a pro-war script. The United States had “nothing to apologize for,” Humphrey said. He didn’t run in any primaries and was not willing to debate McCarthy or Kennedy.
Humphrey mouthed the same old rhetoric to rationalize the administration’s policies for the war in Vietnam. Several high-level supporters—including Iowa’s Governor Harold Hughes, Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff, and the venerable former New York governor and ambassador Averell Harriman—advised him to resign the vice presidency and thus free himself from entanglement with Johnson. But to Humphrey, such a step was unthinkable.
And so, Hubert Humphrey rode in the caboose of the war train all summer. In late August, the day before the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, he told viewers of the CBS program Face the Nation that the administration’s policies in Vietnam were “basically sound.”
The convention nominated him while, outside, tear gas filled the air during what a report from a special federal commission later called a police riot that meted out violence to antiwar demonstrators as well as some journalists. Inside the turbulent convention, dissenting delegates were outshouted, outvoted and suppressed by the pro-Humphrey forces.
The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory. In polls, Humphrey trailed the Republican candidate Richard Nixon by double digits.
And yet, like a true warhorse, the VP could not bring himself to break from the president’s steely insistence on maintaining the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. The Democratic ticket of Humphrey and Maine’s senator Edmund Muskie was in a tailspin, propelled downward by Humphrey’s refusal to break ranks with Johnson.
It wasn’t until Sept. 30 that Humphrey took a meaningful step. His campaign bought 30 minutes of national TV air time on NBC, and he used it to deliver a speech that finally created a bit of daylight between him and Johnson’s war. Humphrey said that as president he’d be willing to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. The speech revived his campaign, which nearly closed the gap with Nixon in October. But it was too little, too late.
Trying to Square a Circle of Mass Murder With the 'Politics of Joy'?
Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president. She has toed President Biden’s war line, while at times voicing sympathy for the victims of the Gaza war that’s made possible by policies that she supports. Her words of compassion have yet to translate into opposing the pipeline of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military as it keeps slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
As the Democratic standard-bearer during carnage in Gaza, Harris has been trying to square a circle of mass murder, expressing empathy for victims while staying within bounds of U.S. government policies. Last week, Harris had her national security adviser declare that “she does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”
Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president
If maintained, that stance will continue to be a moral catastrophe—while increasing the chances that Harris will lose to Donald Trump. In effect, so far, Harris has opted to stay aligned with power brokers, big donors and conventional political wisdom instead of aligning with most voters. A CBS News/YouGov poll in June found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61 to 39 percent.
Last week, Harris described herself and running-mate Tim Walz as “joyful warriors.” Many outlets have heralded their joyride along the campaign trail. The Associated Press reported that “Harris is pushing joy.” A New York Times headline proclaimed that “joy is fueling her campaign.” The brand of the Harris campaign is fast becoming “the politics of joy.”
Such branding will be a sharp contrast to the outcries from thousands of protesters in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention next week, as they denounce U.S. complicity with the methodical killing of so many children, women and other civilians in Gaza.
Campaigning for joy while supporting horrendous warfare is nothing new. Fifty-six years before Vice President Harris called herself a “joyful warrior,” Vice President Humphrey declared that he stood for the “politics of joy” when announcing his run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.
At that point, the Pentagon was several years into its massive killing spree in Vietnam, as Humphrey kicked off his campaign by saying: “here we are the spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy; and that’s the way it’s going to be, all the way, too, from here on out.”
If Kamala Harris loses to Trump after sticking with her support for arming the slaughter in Gaza, historians will likely echo words from biographer Offner, who wrote that after the 1968 election Humphrey “asked himself repeatedly whether he should have distanced himself sooner from President Johnson on the war. The answer was all too obvious.”
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Why Josh Shapiro Is Not the Right Choice for Harris VP
A running mate who intensely connects her to Biden’s policies on the Gaza war that are so unpopular with much of the Democratic base, party unity—and the chances of defeating Trump—would be undermined.
Jul 29, 2024
Kamala Harris has gained strong support as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. Putting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket would likely fracture that support.
The most divisive issue among Democrats is the U.S.-enabled Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza. To unify the party and defeat Trump’s MAGA forces, Harris needs to distance herself in a meaningful way from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy. If she does so, she can win back the votes and energy of young activists, progressives, racial justice organizers, Arab Americans and Muslims—many of whom devoted weeks or months of their lives in 2020 to defeating Trump on behalf of the Biden-Harris ticket.
But a Harris-Shapiro ticket would jeopardize all that.
Today, parallels are apparent with pivotal events of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson—increasingly unpopular among Democrats and others because of his Vietnam War—stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek reelection. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party nominated LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as its standard-bearer. Humphrey’s halting efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s war policy were too little, too late, and he was unable to connect with many of the dedicated Democratic activists and voters who were antiwar. Failing to detach himself sufficiently from the president’s war policy, Humphrey lost a winnable election to Republican Richard Nixon.
If Harris now chooses a running mate who intensely connects her to Biden’s policies on the Gaza war that are so unpopular with much of the Democratic base, party unity—and the chances of defeating Trump—would be undermined.
A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need.
Overall, Josh Shapiro is liberal and sometimes progressive on domestic issues (though notably not on fracking or tax subsidies for private schools). But on the contentious issue of Israel’s relentless war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Shapiro sounds much less bothered by the lethal violence than by U.S. ceasefire activists, many of whom he has demonized. Here’s a bit of the history:
In 2021, after Ben & Jerry’s (a company founded and led by Jewish Americans) refused to sell its products in Israel’s illegal settlements, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro threatened the company by urging Pennsylvania state agencies to enforce a constitutionally suspect law targeting advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel over its discriminatory policies. Shapiro smeared such advocates by claiming that “BDS is rooted in antisemitism” – although the effort has wide support globally, including from many Jews, as a thoroughly nonviolent tactic in advancing Palestinian rights.
After the horrific Hamas attack of October 7, several dozen Pennsylvania-based Muslim groups wrote a letter protesting Governor Shapiro’s one-sided comments: “Not only did you fail to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict, you chose to intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza.” Responding to the letter after Israeli bombs and missiles had killed more civilians in Gaza than had been killed by Hamas in Israel on October 7, the governor’s spokesman said: “We all must speak with moral clarity and support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Last December, after he amplified the Capitol Hill demagoguery of MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Gov. Shapiro contributed to the firing of the University of Pennsylvania president. Referring to UPenn’s president, Shapiro said: “I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” By then, after two months of Israeli bombing, more than 17,000 Gazans had been killed, mostly women and children—and later that month, Israel was charged with violations of the Genocide Convention in South Africa’s filing at the International Court of Justice.
In early April, after Democratic governors in other states had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, Muslim leaders in Philadelphia criticized Shapiro for his refusal to do so.
Beginning in late April, Gov. Shapiro and his office repeatedly prodded campuses to “restore order” and take action against student encampments, including the University of Pennsylvania Gaza Solidarity Encampment which called on the college administration to provide greater transparency on university investments, divest from Israel, and reinstate the banned student group Penn Students Against the Occupation.
On May 9, Shapiro invoked student “safety” in demanding the encampment be shut down. Police shut it down the next day, arresting 33. In two different interviews, Shapiro seemed to compare campus ceasefire activists, many of whom are Jewish or students of color, to “white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs” and “people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who’re African American.”
In May, as activism continued to grow over Israel’s lethal violence against civilians in Gaza, Gov. Shapiro issued an order aimed at Israel’s critics that revised his administration’s code of conduct to bar state employees from “scandalous or disgraceful” conduct—a vague and subjective directive criticized by the legal director of Pennsylvania’s ACLU as a possible violation of free speech protections.
In a July 23 post on X, progressive leader and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote: “Choosing Governor Josh Shapiro for Vice President would be a mistake. Governor Shapiro compared pro-peace protesters to the KKK. That’s simply unacceptable & would stifle the momentum VP Harris has. Hopefully she is looking to build a broad coalition to beat Trump.”
A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need. Making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president is exactly what we don’t need.
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The Land of Optimism Is in the Dumps, But Refuses to Accept How It Got There
Not since Watergate has such pessimism afflicted Americans. They want politicians to lift them without facing the cause
Oct 15, 2007
On April 27 1968 the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, announced his presidential candidacy. It was a particularly troubled moment in America's recent history. Just three weeks after Martin Luther King's assassination, the cities were still scarred by riots while the country as a whole was deeply divided over the Vietnam war.
Presumably seeking to capture the mood of the nation, Humphrey started his speech thus: "Here we are, the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, the politics of joy; and that's the way it's going to be, all the way, too, from here on out." Within six weeks Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.
America's self-image as the home of unrelenting progress - a nation of historic purpose and unrivalled opportunity where tomorrow will always be better than today - is the linchpin of its political and popular culture. Optimism, it seems, is a truly renewable national resource. It was used to build Bill Clinton's "bridge to the 21st century" in 1992, and powered the alarm clocks for Reagan's "new morning in America".
"The American, by nature, is optimistic," said John F Kennedy. "He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly." This optimism is the source for much of what makes the US simultaneously so revered and reviled, dynamic and deluded, around the world.
On one hand it articulates a hope, bordering on certainty, that a better world is not just feasible but already in the making. Released from the hogties of tradition and formality, such confidence is driven by possibility rather than the past. Winston Churchill once said he "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future". An American politician who wanted to get elected would say precisely the opposite. This optimism underpins the notions of class fluidity and personal reinvention at the core of the American dream. Where others might ask "Why?", it asks "Why not?". Such is the root of so much that is great about America's economy, culture and politics.
On the other hand this optimism has within it the notion that the US is the exclusive repository of these hopes and the sole means by which a better world can be made. Unfettered by history, consensus or empirical evidence, it is driven by myth rather than material circumstances. Even as class rigidity entrenches and personal reinvention slips, the dream remains. Like Stephen Colbert's spoof of George Bush, it has the capacity to "believe the same thing Wednesday that [it] believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday". It posits America as the world's future whether the world wants it or not. Such is the root of so much that is terrible about America's economy, politics and foreign policy.
This sense of optimism has been in retreat in almost every sense over the past few years. According to Rasmussen polls, just 21% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, a figure that has fallen by more than a half since the presidential election of 2004. Meanwhile only a third think the country's best days are yet to come, as opposed to 43% who believe they have come and gone - again a steep decline on three years ago. These are not one-offs. In the past 18 months almost every poll that has asked Americans about their country's direction has produced among the most pessimistic responses on record - a more extended period than anyone can remember since Watergate.
America, in short, is in a deep funk. Far from feeling hopeful, it appears fearful of the outside world and despondent about its own future. Not only do most believe tomorrow will be worse than today, they also feel that there is little that can be done about it.
There are three main reasons. Closest to home is the economy. Wages are stagnant, house prices in most areas have stalled or are falling, the dollar is plunging, and the deficit is rising. A Pew survey last week showed that 72% believe the economy is either "only fair" or poor and 76% believe it will be the same or worse a year from now. Globalisation is a major worry. Of 46 countries polled recently, the US had the least positive view on foreign trade and one of the least positive on foreign companies.
The sense that things will improve for the next generation has all but evaporated. Another Pew poll from last year found that only 34% of Americans expected today's children to be better off than people are now - down from 55% shortly before President Bush came to power.
Second is the Iraq war and the steep decline in America's international standing it has prompted. A global-attitudes Pew poll from last year showed that 65% of Americans believe the country is less respected by the rest of the world than it was - double the figure of 20 years ago. The fact that only half those polled thought this was a problem is telling.
For if the war in Iraq were going well then this probably wouldn't matter. But it isn't. All surveys show that for some time a steady majority of the public believe the war was a mistake, is going badly and that the troops should be withdrawn. One of the central factors in which America's self-confidence was predicated - global hegemony based on unrivalled military supremacy - has been fundamentally undermined.
Last week Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of US troops in Iraq, spelled out the national despair, branding the war a "nightmare with no end in sight".
Which brings us, finally, to the political class. Once again the American public have lost faith. The rot starts at the top. Almost as soon as they elected Bush in 2004 they seemed to regret it. Since Katrina, his favourability ratings have been stuck in the 30s and show no signs of moving - or at least not upwards. Bush's only comfort is that public approval of the Democratically controlled Congress is even worse, hovering just below where it was shortly before the 2006 elections. In other words, however Americans believe their country will return to the right track, they no longer trust politicians to get them there.
Little suggests that anything will change any time soon. After four years of being told they were winning a war they have been losing and are better off when they are not, Americans are more wary of political happy talk than they have been for a long time. But that doesn't mean they want to hear sad talk instead, even if it happens to be true. For the central problem is not that they were lied to - though that of course is a problem - but that they have constantly found some of these lies more palatable than the truth. Bush may have exploited the more problematic aspects of this optimism. But he did not create them. Enough of the American public had to be prepared to meet him halfway to make his agenda possible.
Herein lies the challenge for the presidential candidates in the coming year - how to respond to this pessimistic mood without reflecting or discussing its root causes: to lay out a plausible explanation of how Americans can get their groove back, without examining how they got in this rut in the first place.
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