The improbable rise of Donald Trump in the
2016 US presidential race illustrates a trend that I think started with
the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980: The popular legitimacy of minor
celebrities in the highest ranks of politics. Up until recently, this
was really very unthinkable in the USA.
Washington and Lincoln have had books written about their preoccupation with their persona. Yet, one of the hallmarks of these leaders is that they delivered the greatness that they earlier advertised. Two of the last leaders of this long period were FDR and Truman. FDR, a man of great charm and charisma from the upper classes, was partially paralyzed from polio, but this was hidden from the public; but he really was the strong and intelligent leader, both pragmatic and visionary, that he "pretended" to be in public. His successor, Harry Truman, a hat salesman from Missouri, was in some sense the anti-FDR. If he carefully cultivated the public image of the tough little guy who did not put up with B.S., he also happened to more than live up to that image. (His last name points so blatantly to his genuineness -- a "true man" -- that it seems like something out of a novel, a confection of the ordinary that is simultaneously fictitious yet authentic.)
Here we find the formation of a very different pattern: a leader of great substance who cloaks himself in the mantle of lesser celebrity.
the Kennedys (the President, and his brother Robert, who was then Attorney General) were actually not in favor of the civil rights movement. At all. They were suspicious of it, and saw it as a dangerous distraction from the very real and imminent possibility of nuclear war. In fact, when JFK spoke the famous words at his inauguration "Ask not what your country can do for you...", he was directly challenging the civil rights movement.
Johnson might not have been worrying directly about the possibility of domestic chaos from demonstrations leading to international conflict. But he was very conscious of how the civil rights movement would undermine the Democratic Party. Hence his creation of the Great Society program, which was aimed at a broad audience. LBJ was more of a pragmatist in introducing such legislation than we might think.
The dominant anxiety within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was the fear of nuclear war. That seems remote today, but in the documentary "The Fog of War", former defense secretary Robert McNamara posits that nuclear war was not only possible, but inevitable, and it was a fluke that it did not happen during the Cold War. (WW2 was a nuclear war, albeit one-sided. We forget that nuclear war has already happened probably because it happened in Japan, and not to white people. If two cities in Germany had been nuked, attitudes toward nuclear weapons among the great powers might have been quite different.)
The civil rights movement really revved up in the 1950s (e.g., Rosa Parks and the bus boycott in Alabama in 1955). This was part of a general reaction to WW2 and against fascism, and it involves the resulting de-colonization process that was happening globally in the post-war era. But it also involved economic changes. (Britain and France were no longer powerful; also, in the bus strike in Alabama, blacks carpooled instead of taking the bus. Blacks owned cars! This showed the growing economic power of blacks as the US was booming.) But this was also during the Cold War, and so there was a sense within the establishment that civil rights was a peripheral concern.
Television changed that. When blacks were attacked by police in the southeastern US, all Americans could see on TV that one region of their country was essentially a vast prison camp.
But foreigners could also see this. Europeans up until then had no idea that the US was segregated. The US was the champion of the process of de-colonization -- which increased American power globally (re-colonization). The new awareness of apartheid in the US cast American democracy in a new light, making the US look like a giant version of South Africa.
In a sense, the US was now at a disadvantage in the Cold War because of the exposure of American reality on global TV screens. (Likewise, the Soviet Union was discredited when the Soviets crushed the Hungarian revolt in 1958.) In particular, the de-colonizing countries (now called "developing" countries) were up for grabs between the American and Soviet spheres of influence.
Here's an example of a future communist leader of Ethiopia (Mengistu) being radicalized while receiving military trained in the US for six months (in Maryland) during the 1960s.
At this point, civil rights goes from something the establishment avoids in the face of the Cold War, to becoming an imperative because of the Cold War.
Here is the congressional voting pattern for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Republican Party had been the party of the north since the Civil War, just as the Democratic Party had been that of the South. That has reversed since the 1970s. The point is that by the mid-1960s, the establishment in both parties was all in for civil rights. The reasons for this, however, were more complicated than the pious liberal propaganda that we are now socialized into (political correctness).
One curiosity is the way that the Vietnam War was lumped together in the American consciousness with the civil rights movement. World War Two is seen as the "good war" and the Vietnam War is somehow seen as the "bad war". All the "bad things" people think about in terms of civil rights (racism, imperialism, etc.) were projected onto the Vietnam conflict.
But the Vietnam War was not so different from the Korean War, which did not incite protest. The divergent responses might have something to do with television coverage, or so it is now widely assumed. People are horrified with combat when it is brought into their living rooms.
But that does not seem to be true. When American movie audiences during WW2 were shown clips of combat and quizzed afterwards, it was found that viewing the violence of war only increased their commitment to fighting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. So context is important. People felt (rightly) that WW2 was a war for national survival, but they were less sure about the wars in Korea and Vietnam (understandably).
The casualty rate was crucial; 33,000 American troops died in Korea, and 58,000 died in Vietnam, so the latter war drew more protest. In dubious wars, public resistance is directly proportional to the fatality rate; but against a powerful enemy (Germany, Japan) who is able to and desires to destroy one's homeland, the fatality rate is inversely related to the will to fight, that is, as more men die, the will to fight increases. (This is why the French have their Foreign Legion, and the Americans now rely on mercenary forces like Blackwater: it is a way of hiding fatalities during questionable wars, although it makes little military or financial sense.)
So, the point is that what most people think of "the 1960s" is basically mythical. These three issues of the era -- the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the role of television -- are each poorly understood, even distorted, and they are sort of bundled together in the national consciousness (kind of the way sub-prime mortgages and other securities garbage were bundled together and sold on the stock market not so long ago).
