Ep. 13 – Echoes of ’68: Are We Stronger Today?

What if the fire of 1968 and the anxiety of today are different kinds of hard? We take a clear-eyed look at war, political violence, civil rights, the economy, and trust to see where the late 1960s truly outpace our current moment, and where 2024–2025 may be more fragile. Vietnam drafted our neighbors and filled living rooms with combat footage; Ukraine and Gaza reshape foreign policy and campus protests, but don’t send most American families to the mailbox in fear. The civil rights movement was a moral reckoning that transformed law and life, while today’s culture fights feel smaller yet still divisive. And political violence? 1968 carried the assassinations of MLK and RFK; our era saw January 6 and a near-fatal attempt on Donald Trump. Inches mattered, and the nation exhaled.

Economics flips the narrative. The 1960s ran on growth and manageable debt; today, the federal burden hovers around total GDP, interest costs box in policy, and upward mobility feels uncertain. That background pressure shapes every argument, from foreign aid to social programs, and hardens partisan lines. Layer in the media shift, from curated nightly news to an endless feed where rumors sprint and corrections limp, and you get a slow erosion of institutional trust that’s hard to reverse.

We’re not reliving 1968, but we are carrying a quieter, structural strain. Our take: use history for perspective, focus on stabilizing what’s within reach, budgets, norms, and shared facts, and avoid the false comfort of outrage. Listen for a grounded comparison and practical ways a radical moderate can keep the center from collapsing. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your take: which era feels harder to you and why?

Transcript

Why 1968 Is A Benchmark

Vietnam’s Draft And Daily TV War

Ukraine And Gaza In Contrast

Civil Rights Era Versus Today’s Debates

Assassinations And Political Violence Then

Near Miss With Trump And Modern Risks

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome everybody to the Radical Moderate Podcast. I am your host, Pat O'Brien. And this week I am going to ask a question. And that question is: Is the United States living through a moment now similar to or even worse than 1968 and really the late 1960s? I'm asking this question because to be a radical moderate, it's very important to have historical context. And I know that uh when I go through my daily life and whether, you know, I'm reading the news and trying to trying to be a good citizen. I ask myself, you know, have we been through this before? And I know that if you look at the the history of our country, there's absolutely been worse times. You know, the Civil War comes to mind uh most readily. World War II immediately comes to mind. I certainly only have read about those in my history books in World War II's case. I, you know, my father was a veteran of that war. So I had some insight there. But in general, I say, well, of course, those are far worse times. But now, and specifically talking about our politics, our discourse, uh, the way that social media, I think, divides us as opposed to do what I thought it was going to do, which is bring us closer together, most of the time I say this is not a good time period that we're living in. It I really don't think it is, but but what should we compare it to? And so I thought to myself, comparing it to that period of 1968, uh, 20, so I'm really saying 2024 to 2025, comparing it to that period of of the late 1960s, I think is at least in the ballpark. And I'm going to go through on this episode and and discuss uh similarities, differences, and and do my best to try to compare and contrast and and answer that question. Is are we living through a more difficult moment? Now, I I use 1968 specifically because there's a bunch of books about 1968. It was an extraordinarily consequential year. One of those books is 1968, the year that rocked the world by Mark Kurlansky. Uh there, but you can you can find a plethora of information about 1968 and the the years following it, especially going all the way to 1970, where we had uh in Ohio, the the National Guard uh shot and killed four students at Kent State University. It was just a very tumultuous time in our history. So I want to kind of frame this discussion this way. When historians talk about 1968, they describe a country under extraordinary strain. There's assassinations, war, protest, and a deep crisis of confidence in the country. So I don't know that the question uh the question isn't whether today looks the same. It's more do we fun how well do we function under similar pressure? Or whether it's a just simply a different kind of stress altogether. So let me let me talk about war first. The Vietnam War, 1968, uh is a period of history that I tried to study probably more than average person did, but certainly something that a lot of us are are familiar with and all the roots of it. I want to really focus, though, on the late 1960s. And so think about it this way. One of the big things that you have with Vietnam is direct U.S. involvement. I mean, it is our troops on the ground there. And that ends up resulting in uh 58,000 young Americans dying. Because at that time there was a draft. And I'll compare that uh to the conflicts that we've seen, you know, in the 2023, 2024, 2025, uh, to where we this country doesn't have a draft anymore. Uh in Vietnam we did, and it was just uh, I think a shocking thing for for many Americans. Keep in mind that television was still relatively new. I mean, it had been around for quite a while, but it was the 1960s that it really became commonplace in everyone's in everyone's home. And so it was definitely the first time that Americans were watching and seeing bloodshed and conflict on their TV screen daily. And I think it really um at that time there was a clear sense of national responsibility, just to kind of one example given of why we were in the Vietnam War, is that we were trying to stem communism, both Russian communism and Chinese communism. And so the theory was that the North Vietnamese being communists were part of uh this ideological spread that was if we didn't stop it in Vietnam, it was just gonna roll across uh Europe eventually. And and like World War II, we'd end up getting involved. Now, I tend to believe that none of that is accurate, that it was really just a civil war, but that was the belief at the time. And so I don't think that I'm I'm 56 years old. I was born in 1969. So everything I know about Vietnam, I've really read in the history books. I would say that, though, it's very difficult for people right now uh under a certain age to understand what it could have been like to be around Vietnam. Certainly there have been conflicts with Iraq uh and Afghanistan, but we have a volunteer force now. We didn't we don't have a draft. So if you're going to those things, you signed up for it. That's a very, very different scenario than we have now. And so let's juxtapose the Vietnam War to the conflicts we have at this time. And there are serious conflicts. Ukraine is the biggest one. Putin unprovoked goes into Ukraine, and it is, in my opinion, uh, it was imperative that we fund that war and the war against Putin and help Ukraine fight against him. And so we, of course, also funded the Vietnam War, but we had troops on the ground. And in Ukraine, we don't have troops on the ground. So we're buying or selling arms or donating arms uh to Ukraine, and they're fighting the war and they're losing a lot of people, and we're hearing about it through social media and all our various channels, but we're not fighting it, and no American blood is being spilled because of it. And so while it's an it's a very important conflict and and for the Ukrainians, it's the survival of their country, I don't think it hits the same way in any form or fashion as what Vietnam did and what Vietnam meant to America. Now, Gaza is also something that has happened. And I don't know, I've thought about doing an episode on Gaza. I I I say this, if I thought I had some answers, I wouldn't hesitate. I don't have any answers. I mean, that that conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on, you know, since the beginning of time, essentially. And I don't have any answers there, but I do recognize it in this historical context that it is something that uh created protest in this country, much more so than the war with Ukraine, which I feel like most Americans are pretty united about. The war and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, let's be clear on that. Hamas is a terrorist group, and the their Israel's response to the October 7th attacks by invading Gaza and wrecking the country and causing a humanitarian uh crisis, all of that is incredibly significant. And we've also funded quite a bit of that. We do have, as Americans, we do have responsibility for that. And while I think that there's a lot of tragedy that's occurred, and it did start with the loss of Israeli lives on October 7th, and there's definitely been a lot of innocent Gazans who've lost their lives in Israel's response. It did provoke a lot of protests here. I I would say more so though, on you know, in your your higher ed campuses, particularly on the probably on the East Coast and the West Coast, not so much in the heartland. And I don't think it there's really any comparison uh to what happened with with Vietnam in terms of protests. So just doing a historical uh perspective there, I would say that it was a lot worse in Vietnam. I mean, let's just kind of let's give that category and this comparison to say that when you're losing American lives to 58,000, that is that is a lot worse than what's going on now. And it's not to diminish Ukraine and Gaza, but I would say that this is not a more difficult moment uh because of the war's situation. Um, you know, one of the things that that really existed, uh, to use another uh point of comparison in the 1960s that doesn't really, it doesn't exist to much level now, and that is you had the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which was massively consequential. You've got the Voting Rights Act, and I mean you could go on and on of the things that were being being done to African Americans, uh including and up to lynching. There's really no comparison in modern day. I know that there's uh there's what people call DEI and woke and things like that. And I'm not saying that there's nothing there. Uh and clearly there's been a backlash to to wokeism and and DEI, but it it just doesn't compare to the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was a completely just thing that needed to happen. Our country had to go through that, and it did, but it all pretty much happened in the 1960s, and we don't have anything that really compares to that in in modern day. So again, I'd say that those moments in 1968 were really far worse. And that kind of leads into my next part of the comparison, which is political violence. So 1968 is the year that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and that assassination, I believe, uh ignited almost 300 American cities that night being in turmoil and many of them burning. Uh, and it was just the the amount of division that was caused by that assassination is really nothing that I think we can compare uh to modern day. And then that same year, Bobby Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, uh former attorney general, United States senator, and in 1968, presidential candidate, and a person who I think had a very good chance of winning the presidency, he was also assassinated in Los Angeles. So you have two incredibly consequential uh assassinations occurring literally within months of each other. And and you know, when Mark Kurlanski talks about the year that rocked the world, those two assassinations were a massive part of that. Now, even going back five years earlier when uh John President Jack Kennedy was assassinated, while there's while there's a length of time there, it was a sense that I think there had to be a sense that how is this happening again? Why, especially in particular to the Kennedys, but one after another, people are trying, people are leaders in this in the case of Jack Kennedy. You've got the president of the United States, and there's been these assassinations. And just to uh on the scale of how consequential these things are, they're they're at the top of the list. Now, this is the category that's a little more interesting uh by the comparisons of the late 1960s to what to what we're going through now, because we almost had an assassination in 2024 twice. We had two attempts on the life of uh Donald Trump, of course, former president at that time, candidate for president at that time. The the more serious one, and they were both serious, let me be clear on that. But the more serious one was in Butler, Pennsylvania. We all know the story, a bullet grazed his ear. And I just want to take a moment, okay? Just take a moment and let's think about that. Because I I can still remember that moment. It's pretty fresh in my mind. When you heard the news, I said to myself, first, I'm just glad he's alive. I'm glad he's alive. I we sure I didn't know who the shooter was. I didn't know the circumstances, I didn't know how we somebody was able to get that close with a rifle to the president of the United States. And of course, there was a lot of investigation of the Secret Service, and they did a pretty bad job, clearly. But my first thought was, I'm just glad he's alive. And I think I hope that I would say that no matter who the president was, and and if if it was a senator or anybody of you know of that that stature, I would hope that's the way I would react. But think about it this way. What if that bullet had hit Donald Trump and killed him? And we had to watch that. Some people in real time, everyone else, I'm sure, would have seen it uh, you know, throughout history. It would have been awful. It would have been terrible. And it would have been terrible for all the reasons we know. Certainly, it starts with his wife, his family, uh, you know, anyone who's a supporter of Donald Trump, but it would have been terrible for the nation. And I have little doubt that it would have created even more division and probably some political violence uh in reaction to it, even though there's no there's no clear connection that the person who shot him had any specific political ideology. It's just Donald Trump represents uh certain things to almost everyone. And if you if you like him, you probably love him. And if you don't like him, you probably hate him. I hope there's some people in the middle. I've I've certainly been a person who's had to try to temper my thoughts on him and and and some really just kind of ignore a lot of the nasty things that he says and focus more on his policies. That's helped me quite a bit. But folks, I'm telling you, I'm I'm damn glad that Bullet missed him because I don't want to live through the like 1960s. I don't want to live in a world where US presidents uh can be assassinated. I don't I don't want to know what that's like. I want I I'm okay reading about it in books, what's done is done. But that I've given some reflection to that, and uh it would have been it would have been incredibly traumatic for our nation. And I'm I'm I mean I'm super grateful that it didn't happen. And again, tying that political violence together, you know, among the things that in 1968 uh that happened was George Wallace, who is a renowned segregationist, ran for president and did better than you would want him to. He he won several southern states, and his segregationist message appealed to a certain group of people. Um, he himself would later be shot. Uh, and then in 1968, you also have the Chicago political convention where Mayor Daly's hosing people down and beating them in the streets. Like again, the political violence and the turmoil that was happening then, I think far worse than what you see now, with that one that one thought that if in a matter of inches, it could have been much more similar if Donald Trump had been assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. So the next kind of grouping here that I want to talk about is economic power. And you know, it's interesting, and I didn't touch on this earlier, I kind of meant to, but the 1960s is is a as a whole decade I do find kind of fascinating. I mean, but so you got the Beatles and all that they came with. You do have the advent of television along with the Vietnam War and along with the civil rights movement. But then one of my favorite shows to watch is Mad Men with uh John Hamm and January Jones, John Slattery. And it it's I don't know how accurate it is. I I assume they took uh great pains to try to make it accurate. But I mean, the if if you don't know the show, you you should probably at least watch an episode. Maybe if you watch more than one, you'll probably get hooked like I did. But the thing about the show is it's set on Madison Avenue, a fictitious advertising firm, and they call it Mad Men because they're ad men and the kind of the lives they lead. And their lives are, I gotta tell you, their lives are not what I would want to lead. Uh so they drink all day. They drink, they have alcohol in their offices, they smoke all day. It at the early part of the of the series, they represent tobacco companies, they cheat on their wives. I mean, it it's it's a very bad time period from that standpoint, but the decade kind of shows the change in how women in the office become more prevalent, more recognized, but still hit glass ceilings and that sort of thing. So it's a fact, it I love the 60s from our historical perspective because of all the changes that our country went through. One of the things when we're comparing 2024, 2025, and by the way, I think we're probably airing on New Year's Eve, this particular episode. So we may as well start talking about 2026. I think from an economic standpoint, we're in a more difficult time period now than we were in the late 1960s. And to use a couple stats with that, uh just looking at the national debt, which of course dollars get inflated and that sort of thing. So you got to have a relative comparison. Basically, the national debt in the United States was about 35% of our gross domestic product in the late 1960s. It was very manageable from that standpoint. America was still a creditor nation. You know, we we were people Came to us looking to borrow money. It we we had the dollar was really king. It was backed by global confidence. And this is before the, I believe it was 1971, where the gold shock hits, or we go off the gold standard. But America economically was very strong. And I think so. It was going through all this turmoil with, as I've stated, with the civil rights movement, with the political violence, Vietnam being a massive issue, and people trying to, you know, nobody wanted to be drafted. People wanted to go to young people were trying to get college deferments. Some people were going to Canada. I think that's where most of the protests were really coming from. Not as much about the war itself, but the fact that that, you know, American uh American kids were being asked to fight it. That was, I think, the real issue. But be that as it may, if you look at our economy now, we're much weaker. I mean, let's just be clear. We're just a much weaker economy uh it in modern day than we were in uh the late 1960s. In fact, I think to me that the signs show that we're very likely, in my opinion, to suffer an economic depression, not just a recession, but a depression within the next five to 10 years. And that'll definitely be an episode for the future. But I've I've heard you've heard me say$38 trillion debt. If you've been listening to my show, we're over that. But the bigger stat that I want to uh point out to you is we're somewhere between 100 and 120% of GDP is debt, depending upon what you're going to include. So even if you go with the lower percentage there, 100% of our GDP is debt equivalent. Whereas basically at least a third of that, 35%, is what you had in the late 1960s. So economically, we were much stronger. And it would, in a sense, it was much less difficult economically. And I think that one of the things that's going on in our politics uh today is that people feel that economic dread, that that sense that, you know, there's a lot of statistics to show that your children are likely uh not going to have as good a life economically as what you had. Um that was not the case in the 1960s. The economy was very much on a roll. It probably, in fact, so much that probably so that it overheated, and then you go into the 1970s and you do have uh stagflation and all that. But in the 1960s, the American economic engine was roaring, and I would say right now, not so much. And and again, I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade if they're saying, you know, that the economy's really great or anything like that. I'm just trying to use math. If you just look at debt, how much debt that we're carrying, it's a far heavier lift than what was happening, you know, 55 years ago. I mean, interest costs alone crowd out a lot of our policy options and make think programs that you would want to enact and things that were enacted in the 1960s, like the war on poverty was enacted under uh L LBJ, those things are really not possible. We don't have we don't have the money unless we just print it, which leads to more to leads to more inflation. And so I would say that that is the one big area where you can look at the 1960s and say that this is a more stressful moment. So I I I went through the categories there and and just to review them, I would say that when you're talking about wars, I think the Vietnam Vietnam's a lot worse than Ukraine and Gaza. So just keep, in my opinion, so keep that in mind. Political violence, it's not good. And I in one of my recent episodes, I talked about the tragedy of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and there's there's been other types of political violence. And I do think political violence is generally on the rise. So I don't want to diminish it at all, but but compared to a different time period of the late 1960s, it was just worse then. I mean, I didn't even mention um Malcolm X because I believe he was killed in 1965, but that whole time period, political violence and massive protests and that sort of thing were very common in a way that we do have now. We have we had the George Floyd protests, but they're we just don't have them quite as often with quite as much intensity as we did before. And so I think, you know, one as kind of trying to think of how to summarize a lot of this stuff. In 1968, the US was arguing about who we were and what we stood for. But we weren't really questioning whether or not we could afford to function. And today, economic limits are kind of shaping our political choices. And I know I haven't mentioned January 6th, and it's it's not to diminish that at all either. It's it's just a little further back, uh, you know, at this point, I guess. Oh, let's see, you're talking um, you know, it's a couple uh January 5th, I've I've forgotten already, January 6th of 2021, when President Trump's on his way out. So, you know, it'll be about five years uh go. I'm not trying to diminish that at all. That that was definitely brings the scales closer in terms of you know, talk the talk about democracy and whether or not we can we can have that. And we still have it, by the way. And and and I'm I'm a optimist enough to believe that that our uh institutions are gonna stand. But as I kind of last couple minutes here, as I draw things to a conclusion, I want to say that, you know, one of the th the challenges that I think we have now is if you have a thought in your head, everybody can know it within seconds. In the 1960s, a lot of this stuff was filtered. Um, and while it was shocking, it wasn't nearly as shocking as it would be if we had had Twitter and these sorts of things. It was still curated to some standpoint. That was good in some ways, it was bad in mostly others because we didn't find out as fast what was really going on. And I would say that uh among the things that have happened in our country over the last couple of decades, I think to get us where we are, is there's really been a loss of trust, a loss of trust uh in institutions. Um I can think of, you know, like the Pentagon Papers is something that that came out, you know, in in regard to the Vietnam War to show that the government was not being honest about how things were going. You could talk about the Catholic Church. I'm I'm Catholic, and the Catholic Church and all the scandals that they've had over the last couple of decades have really diminished um the trust in the in that institution, and I think in a lot of ways in religion in general. And and going back to January 6th, the fact that that that a large group of people was questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, that is bad. And having said that, if you go back to the 1960s, particularly 1960, there's no question that in Chicago that that that precincts were there were fraudulent precincts which helped John F. Kennedy win the presidency. That's that's a that's a fact. I don't think anything like that occurs these days. And so I'm just absolutely don't believe any of the if somebody tells you that the 2020 election was fraudulent, it it's I don't never seen any evidence of that. And there was probably 60 lawsuits, and the people who said there was fraud were not able to win their case in any of those 60 lawsuits. But it just goes back to the idea that um we've got different challenges today, is what I would say. I think that in the late 1960s, you know, the the violence was real, the deaths were real, the trauma was immediate. Now it's different. It's not like a it's not like a single rupture. We're facing slow institutional erosion and economic constraints and loss of, I think in a lot of ways, loss of shared meaning. And history can remind us uh that societies don't only collapse from explosions, sometimes they just go quietly for lack of of vigor and passion and enough people believing that they needed to continue to exist. So I I hope that you got something out of uh this week's podcast. Uh I go back to what I said in the beginning, historical perspective is is fundamental to to being a radical moderate. And and so when you think, hey, we're going through a really bad thing here, and COVID, which I didn't even really get into, was very bad. But for a few minutes there, you know, we were together on COVID until we weren't. And then we were divided again. And I think that that has become our defining feature is we probably need something to bring us back together. And I I hope it we don't have to wait for an economic depression. I fear that that might be the thing that does. But whatever it is, it's still not quite as bad, in my opinion. That's where I land today. The 1960s were a really rough time in our history. I hope they taught us a lot. There's there's times where I'm I'm not super optimistic about where we are as a country right now, but we've been here before, and I think it's been worse before. So I think we I think we need to to find those pathways of of how we move forward at those times and inform of how we can move forward now. I appreciate you guys listening. And for this week's episode, that's the POV of P.O.B.