Nixon ran as a Republican challenger to an incumbent vice-president, casting himself as an agent of change. Today the parties’ roles are reversed
THE DEATH of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked protests across America. President Donald Trump responded not by soothing tensions, but by inflaming them further—at one point threatening to deploy active-duty troops to quell the unrest. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29th, echoing a well-known phrase dating back to the civil-rights era.
One goal of violent protests is to attract media attention and they received even more coverage when police officers also resorted to violence . Mr Wasow writes that civil-rights leaders were aware of this, and chose the cities of Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, to stage marches precisely because they knew that police there would respond with brutality even as they told their followers not to be the first to use force.
It is far from clear that today’s protests will have the same political consequences as they did in 1968. The civil-rights marches of the 1960s and 1970s were far larger and better-organised, but also much more destructive and violent. Moreover Nixon ran as a Republican challenger to an incumbent vice-president, which allowed him to cast himself as an agent of change. Today the parties’ roles are reversed.
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