How Parallels Between 1968 and 2024 Are – and Aren't – Instructive

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The President of the United States’ support for a foreign war incites intense opposition and polarizing protests on college campuses. A candidate for president is shot at. The Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago after the sitting Democratic president drops his re-election bid partway through the campaign.

This could describe both 1968 and 2024, as the Northwestern University professor of American history Kevin Boyle knows well. He’s the author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s, among other books that include a National Book Award winner, and has written editorials in the past few years that draw parallels between the late 1960s and early ’70s and today.

But Boyle doesn’t want us to identify resonances with the past and view them as predictive. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” he says. “The past is most useful to us as a way of understanding how we got to where we are today, rather than seeing it as somehow being repeated. It’s about the roots of the life we live now, and I really do think there are serious roots in the late ’60s, ’68, and in the Nixon years that helped to create the world we live in now.”

Boyle focuses on three strands that he argues were at the forefront in the tumult of the 1960s and have continued to be divisive all the way through the present: race, government regulation of private life, and disagreements over foreign policy. Race has always been an undercurrent in American politics and remains so, in an election that could lead to the first Black woman and South Asian president in Kamala Harris. Ever since the Supreme Court removed the federal right to an abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortion has been a top issue for voters. And Biden has faced heated disagreements over his support of Israel’s war in Gaza, just as Johnson was decried for the Vietnam War.

But parallels always have limits. Whereas the Vietnam War was an integral factor in leading Johnson to suspend his re-election campaign, Biden’s age, not Gaza, seems to have been the decisive issue in Biden’s choice to bow out of the race. The result of those decisions has also been the opposite. This year, Democrats immediately unified around Vice President Kamala Harris as a candidate, whereas in 1968 the party was in turmoil and faced a chaotic convention in Chicago, even though Vice President Hubert Humphrey officially had the nomination locked up by the time of the convention. (Humphrey and his rival Eugene McCarthy provide a more superficial similarity to today: They were both Minnesota liberals, just like Harris’ vice presidential pick, Tim Walz.)

Anti-war Democrats in 1968 had lost a popular standard bearer with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy over the summer. But candidates like McCarthy and George McGovern still contested Humphrey’s crowning. Protesters on the streets of Chicago clashed with the police, who attacked with tear gas and clubs. The televised unrest and division on display at the ’68 convention arguably helped Nixon win the election as a law-and-order candidate promising stability. A large portion of the public “saw what happened [in Chicago] as a sign that Democrats weren’t fit to lead the country,” Boyle says.

But while Trump is in some ways using a similar playbook to Nixon, Boyle argues that a better 1968 precedent for his campaign is George Wallace’s run for the presidency as a segregationist third-party candidate.

“It was George Wallace who took the really aggressive, militant law and order line that was painfully obviously racialized,” Boyle says. Nixon’s courting of the “silent majority” that was against unrest and extremism was not an appeal to the right wing but an appeal to the center, Boyle says. After the election, the two mainstream parties incorporated more of Wallace’s law and order concerns into their agendas; Nixon exponentially increased federal spending on police departments.

But Boyle points out one way in which Trump has surpassed Wallace. “In ’68, George Wallace would have never gone to the explicit Black-person-as-rapist trope,” he says. “That would have been out of bounds for him. Donald Trump went to that very thing five minutes into his first speech as a candidate for the president of the United States,” when he accused Mexico of “sending” rapists to the United States.

Trump’s focus on immigrants as a source of crime recalls Nixon’s invocation of inner city drug dealers in what Boyle calls a “fusion of race, crime, and fear.”

“Now it has really been weaponized, with undocumented immigrants becoming the great source of fear in the way that, back in the ’60s, inner city poor Black people were,” Boyle says. “That’s a change. But the politics is largely the same.”

Nixon’s shadow also falls on Trump regarding the Supreme Court. When the Watergate investigation turned up evidence that Nixon might have committed criminal acts in order to win re-election, Nixon’s lawyer claimed to the Supreme Court that presidents had immunity from criminal prosecution. The Court unanimously rejected the claim within two weeks.

Trump’s lawyers made a similar claim in February of 2024 regarding his alleged engagement in election interference after the 2020 election. On July 1, the Supreme Court overturned assumptions in place since Watergate and determined that the president is entitled to “a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” leaving open to an extent the determination of what is and is not an “official act.”

Even though the Supreme Court ruled against Nixon, he did inaugurate a lasting change in it. “Richard Nixon set in place the idea, much more than it had been, that Supreme Court justices needed to be appointed for their ideological purity rather than for other reasons,” Boyle says. “Certainly presidents before Nixon did care about ideology, but there was no litmus test.” That idea took root amongst presidents of both parties, and helped lead to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the majority opinion overturning a federal right to abortion was joined by three justices appointed by Trump.

Roe v. Wade was decided during Nixon’s presidency, and three of the four justices he appointed voted for Roe; his appointee Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion. Abortion had yet to become a litmus test for justices, but its politics were shifting, as Boyle points out. As the case was being decided, Nixon arguably made a pitch for the Catholic vote by extolling the church’s role as “defenders of the right to life of the unborn.”

Demographic and partisan alignments were changing – especially as the country became more diverse after a homogenous era. Decades of restrictive immigration acts had brought the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. to an all-time low. Reform of the immigration system and its quotas in 1965 inaugurated a change in direction, beginning an upward trend that has continued into he present. Now Trump is pledging to bring back country-specific immigration restrictions and carry out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, hearkening back not to Nixon or the ’60s but even further into history.