The 1972 Nixon-McGovern Presidential campaign and the 2020 one

Now that the Presidential primaries are close, we're getting lots of interesting political points being made. As well as a lot that are trivial or worse. I'm both amused and a bit mystified at the people popping up in my Twitter feed from political people who are whining that politics is getting political!

It's hard not to think of this as a real case of Unclear On The Concept.

And of course, generations are Democrats are still traumatized in one way or the other by Richard Nixon's victory over George McGovern in 1972 and even more so by the Presidency of St. Reagan.

I honestly view Richard Nixon as one of the real villains of American history. Trump makes Nixon's threats to the Constitutional order look like small-time delinquency by comparison.

But 1972 was an era when there were hardcore segregationist Democrats. And the now-extinct species called "liberal Republicans" were still alive, thriving, and even serving in Congress.

Nixon in 1972 had drastically reduced the number of US troops in Vietnam with his "Vietnamization" program. He concluded the extremely important SALT 1 nuclear arms control treaty and thus started "detente" with the Soviet Union.

He took a giant step toward normalizing relations with "Red China" with his "pingpong diplomacy" and a Presidential visit to Chairman Mao Zedong. The Beatles 1968 release "Revolution" contained the lines, "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow," a jibe directed at the more theatrically radical Western protesters of the time. But Nixon's triumphal Republican National Convention that year featured photo display of Nixon smilingly consorting with General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong (then conventionally spelling Mao Tse-Tung in English).

Nixon established federal "affirmative action" programs to mitigate racial discrimination though somehow managed at the time to campaign against it ("quotas") in the Presidential campaign.

He enforced the final end of de jure school segregation in the South, admittedly reluctantly and at the demand of the Supreme Court.

And to combat a level of inflation that would look tame compared to that later in the decade, he had imposed wage-and-price controls nationwide and had declared himself a Keynesian. Nixon had served during the Second World War under John Kenneth Galbraith, the deputy head of the Office of Price Administration (OPA) that administered wartime domestic price controls.

Gorge McGovern during the campaign supported withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, the SALT Treaty, improved relations with the USSR and China, affirmative action programs and ending school segregation, though he wanted faster and complete troop withdrawals from Vietnam.

McGovern opposed the wage-and-price controls.

And, of course, in October Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger famously declared "peace is at hand" in Vietnam.

No one can afford to write off the possibility that Trump could win, whether Status Quo Joe or Grumpy Bernie or someone else is the Democratic nominee. But it's hard to imagine a political scenario very comparable to Nixon-McGovern playing out in 2020.