For a while now I have been struggling to write about the summer of 1972, when I was nine years old. I lived in a little, semi-detached brick house in Washington, DC, with my parents, my seventy-eight-year-old grandmother, and three much older siblings—the nearest in age to me would turn twenty that fall. That summer stands out for me because it was a unique juncture, the last time my family would all live under one roof and the first time I can remember being awake to the world around me.
So much was going on. The older of my sisters, a new college graduate, brought three things home that summer. One was her Afro. In those glory days of Black hair, my sister’s was committed, not a short, self-contained ’fro but a big one that seemed to reach for things beyond. Another was chess. We knew about checkers—my father and I had played many, many games—but this was new, mysterious: I came downstairs one morning and there, on the coffee table in our little living room, was a checkerboard whose checkers had grown taller, changed color, and, in some cases, come to resemble horses. What was this? The last was my sister’s boyfriend, whom I’ll call Ben. Because I was nine, Ben seemed very tall, tall and lean. His Afro was short, as if in close communion with itself, and Ben was like that too—reserved. I knew only vaguely who Mr. Spock of Star Trek was, but in retrospect Ben reminds me of him, utterly serious even when being friendly. And he was friendly: My sister taught us all chess, and Ben and I played. He seemed to think I had a knack, and in his grim way he was encouraging—almost absurdly so, when I think of it now. But I keep in mind that he was around twenty years old, and I am touched and grateful still. “You could be as good as Fischer,” he told me. “Maybe even Spassky.” Fischer, maybe even Spassky—that lets me know that Ben was talking to me at a particular moment, because only then would Spassky have been seen as the better player. Spassky, the Russian, seemed to be kicking Bobby Fischer’s ass, until Fischer, in what we have come to think of as true American fashion, turned things around.
There was more. That summer was my third in a day camp I loved, where, speaking of kicking things, I played a lot of kickball. That year’s summer Olympic Games, the first I was aware of, played out on our TV, Mark Spitz churning the water white as he swam across the screen. And most crucially for my purposes here, during that summer of ’72, TV brought us the runup to the first presidential election I was aware of: the Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon, versus the Democratic challenger, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota.
Thinking about it, I realized that what all of these things had in common—chess, kickball, the Olympics, the election—was the notion of competition. That, together with the uniqueness of that summer for me, seemed to hold promise as a theme. And yet, as I tried to write about the summer of ’72, I struggled to make sense of it all, because, as I eventually realized, I didn’t know what the story was. I had interesting (at least to me) ingredients to work with, but what could I make with them? What happened that summer?
But it seems to me now that this story of competition did not take place in 1972—it only began then. It has continued ever since, not just in a little house in a lower-middle-class Black neighborhood in DC, but all over the nation.
*
A rapidly dwindling percentage of Americans actually remember the 1972 presidential election, and yet it has its own wing in the Political Ass-Kicking Hall of Fame. Massachusetts and my hometown of DC went for the liberal McGovern; Nixon won everything else, including poor McGovern’s home state. Nixon seemed invincible then, and yet, as my sister would put it a little later, “He didn’t trust his own luck.” Or, anyway, those around him didn’t. The scandal that brought Nixon down centered on a burglary—the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in DC’s Watergate Hotel, where operatives in the Republican camp sought information that could help them retain the White House—and the subsequent attempt to cover it up. That these events ended a presidency seems laughably quaint fifty years on. And yet, in the events from that fog-shrouded year of 1972 can be found previews of the horror show that is our present reality.
We tend to think of democracy as the most highly evolved form of society because it allows the people to determine how they are governed. But, of course, that is not what happens. Even in elections free of voter intimidation, disenfranchisement, corporate ownership of politicians, and all the rest, the people do not get their way. Usually, about half the people do. Sometimes, thanks to the Electoral College, it’s less than half. The other half, often as not, and especially in recent years, are left hopping mad. So the essence of democracy is not the idea that everyone helps steer the ship—and certainly not that everyone is happy—but that the majority rules. If some are left unhappy, at least, ideally, all can agree that the process is fair. Fairness, then, is central to the whole shebang. Sharing the nucleus with fairness is the process that determines outcomes: elections, which is to say, competition. Those who compete in any arena have one main goal, which is to win. Competition plus fairness equals democracy. Competition without fairness equals the jungle.
The men who broke into the Watergate in 1972 were, of course, much more concerned with competition than with fairness. Their act, and Nixon’s subsequent attempt to cover it up, shocked and disillusioned many people. (The African Americans around whom I grew up were not among those people, having long been acquainted with bad behavior on the part of the US government.) For the disillusioned, Watergate was a kind of inoculation. After that, it was not possible to be sickened, at least to the same extent, by the terrible behavior of politicians. And so Watergate, I would argue, helped get us to where we are now, with considerable help from three other factors.
#1
TV, as I have noted, brought everything to us back in ’72—coverage of the chess matches, the Olympics, the election. In that little house in DC, I watched a lot of TV. I had a favorite watching spot. Our set was in the dining room; the dining room table was supported at either end by a wooden tripod whose legs were curved. I would lie against the leg nearest the TV, my back conforming to the curve of the wood, and gaze up at the screen. (It’s a wonder that my posture isn’t worse today than it is.) Not counting UHF stations like the snowy Channel 20 and the practically white Channel 45, we had four stations to choose from.
It is sobering to realize that one’s life encompasses what feels like ancient history, but mine does. My family watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, as did at least a plurality of American households. I can remember Uncle Walter—“the most trusted man in America”—talking about Watergate in 1973 or so, rising from his seat to lay out on a chart what was understood at that point. When Walter Cronkite told us something, we believed it. But what is crucial is that nothing radically different was being said on the other stations’ news programs. The news on ABC and NBC were more like off-brands, at least in our house. Viewers might—and did—have radically different responses to the news, but we got, more or less, the same news.
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press,” according to Thomas Jefferson, “and that cannot be limited without being lost.” To believe that, as I do, is to feel that our current situation represents perhaps too much of a good thing. The internet, without a doubt, has enriched our lives in innumerable and immeasurable ways: it has made information more accessible than at any previous point in human history; it has offered a platform to important “alternative” voices; and, together with the unapologetically slanted news coverage of certain cable channels, it has made the United States into two countries, if not 332 million. In 1972, when there was no internet and no (or no widely watched) cable TV, we all responded to the same events, whatever our thoughts about those events. No more. In the summer of 2017, for a book I was writing, I went from my home in Brooklyn to California to interview a couple of Trump voters. That was a memorable experience all around, but one thing in particular stands out for me. It came out during my talk with one of those seventyish men that a woman named Lois Lerner was emblematic, for him, of what ailed the country, while the corresponding figure for me was Eric Garner. Garner’s name rang no bells for the man I talked to. I had never heard of Lerner.
“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy,” Cronkite said, “it is democracy.” I wonder what Uncle Walter and old Thomas Jefferson would make of the current day. Freedom of the press allows the public to make informed decisions. But in an age when my phone shows me news stories based on what an algorithm somewhere thinks I like to read, when I might be said to make up a public of one, the question becomes: informed about what?
#2
Dirty tricks are as old as politics, and they are not (at least historically) the exclusive domain of one party. In his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson relates the following story about an early Texas campaign of Lyndon Johnson’s:
The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away [with] calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
Anything to win, in other words. But what changed after 1972 was that, once Watergate got the American public used to the idea of dirty tricks at the highest level of government, one political party in particular took advantage of this cherry-popping to make us even more accustomed to if not always dirty tricks, then certainly the idea of victory at any cost—even if the cost included the coarsening of public discourse and the shafting of public interest. In the 1980s Lee Atwater gave us Willie Horton; in the ’90s came House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who organized congressional Republicans into soldiers in lockstep, sending bipartisanship into a coma from which it has yet to emerge; in the early 2000s that evil genius Dick Cheney sold the Iraq War in part by feeding the New York Times misinformation and then justifying his own claims by saying that, hey, it was in the Times.
And then . . . drum roll, please . . .
#3
This must be said for Donald Trump: he has hosted a reunion, of sorts, of competition and fairness. Well, not fairness, exactly. More like the idea of it, which is to actual fairness what a butterfly is to butter.
Trump is appallingly ignorant about quite a few things (“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice”), but what he knows, he knows well, and that frightful knowledge includes an understanding of the power of utter shamelessness. Thus could he telephone state officials in the hope of obtaining a vote count (as opposed to votes) that would help him to be declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election—thus, in other words, could he engage in egregiously unfair behavior—while exploiting what was left of his base’s sense of fairness to claim that the election was “stolen” from him and that he is still the legitimate president. While the important part of that plan failed, the other part succeeded admirably: according to polls, a comfortable majority of Republicans continue to believe him, or at least to say that they do.
Trump’s attempt to change the outcome of the election is common knowledge, or ought to be. That said knowledge has not led his base to abandon him is the direct result, I contend, of either the diffuse nature of news in our time, or the half-century-long Republican embrace of the principle of victory at any cost and its erosion of our collective sense of fairness, or both. And we had already seen this in action.
Decades after the Russian Boris Spassky appeared to be kicking the American Bobby Fischer’s ass, Russia made a series of moves against the United States that, sadly, did not take place on a chessboard. The US intelligence community concluded in a 2017 report that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf. The report stopped short of saying that Russia had succeeded, but it didn’t say otherwise. What has not been determined beyond a doubt is whether (1) the country endured four years of a presidency essentially put in place by a foreign power and (2) whether Trump colluded in that effort. What has been determined, according to a 2017 poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, is that roughly three-quarters of Trump voters believed that he should stay in office, regardless of whether he was proven to have colluded with the Russians. This is where we are.
Meanwhile, in the last decade, the enemies of fair competition have found allies in the United States Supreme Court and Senate. In its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Court nullified the coverage formula of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which had required states with the most egregious histories of voter discrimination to get federal approval for any changes to their voting laws. Since then, those states and others have resembled children with new toys, taking actions blatantly aimed at restricting ballot access for African Americans and members of other minority groups—such as gerrymandering election districts, limiting access to drop boxes for absentee ballots, and making it illegal to provide food or water to voters standing in line. Doing its part, in January 2022 the Senate failed to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have restored key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. What is most maddening about all of this is its sheer brazenness, as if these villains—having learned the lessons of Watergate and all that has transpired since—are betting that large swaths of the public will respond to these attacks on democracy with a collective shrug, out of ignorance, or indifference, or both. It is hard to say they are wrong.
*
The summer of 1972 seems special to me in part because its circumstances did not last. All of the members of my original family were under one roof then, but within the next couple of years, my siblings all moved out, and my father, my old checkers and chess companion, died. Ben and my sister broke up. (My sister’s Afro didn’t last beyond that decade, either.) In subsequent decades, my grandmother and then my mother passed away. The family endures: while some members are gone, others have arrived. I have a nephew and nieces, even grandnephews and grandnieces, as well as now-grown children of my own. Still, there is no going back to that little house in DC.
Is there any going back to a collective sense of fairness, that key component of our democracy? Can we, like Bobby Fischer, turn things around? A key feature of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power, according to which everyone accepts the outcome of an election and thus embraces the winner of that election—however unhappily—as their leader. Trump is unprecedented in my lifetime in being a kind of shadow-president, the one to whom members of his party still defer, even during a new administration. In some ways this situation recalls the days when the Roman Empire had multiple emperors, and we know what happened to the Roman Empire. One slim ray of hope, perhaps, is that even if Trump’s supporters do not actually believe the election was stolen, even if they do not really think that their hero’s defeat represents an act of unfairness, they say they do in order to justify their position, and that suggests in turn that, somewhere deep down, there is still some comprehension of the principle of fairness, even if that comprehension is on life support. Until it stops breathing altogether, we will not have officially adopted the law of the jungle. But it is not hard to imagine the next Grand Republican Competitor coming along and pulling the plug.
For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.
