As with all conflicts, the Vietnam War had groups of people that either didn’t support it or wanted it to continue. This divide between the anti-war protesters and the war propagators led to certain stereotypes emerging for both sides that were used to either benefit or destroy political constituents and parties. During the late 1960s, there were the emerging stereotypes of the “elite doves” and the “reactionary hardhats” which pitted those who had more (the elites) against those who had less (the hardhats), regardless of the fact that some on both sides had similar views (Lewis). These stereotypes were used by the Nixon administration along with George Wallace to get support for the Republican Party from the ‘silent majority’ of white Americans (Lewis). The silent majority was made up primarily of poor or economically unstable working-class white families who were, at the time, upset about the antiwar protests happening. This was because, in their eyes, the people protesting (educated whites, minorities, and a good portion of the younger generation), while agreeing with the anti-war ideas, were protesting in a way that used generalizations and lacked any real understanding of who would really being hurt by the war (Lewis). What that means is that they felt that those who were protesting were just going against the concept of the war and not who at home was fueling the war. As mentioned earlier, the Republican Party capitalized off of this anger the poor white communities had towards those they perceived as ‘elites’ as a means to bring them over to their political party rather than the democratic one (Lewis). They used the stereotypes that were around calling the anti-war protesting group hippies and elitists who didn’t care about those who fought in the war or about those who were most affected by the negative impacts of the war. All of this led to the main antagonist of the working-class whites being placed on the younger generation (college students), minorities, and generally educated people rather than the views either side had on the morality of the Vietnam War (Lewis). Due to that, there became a divide between those who were of different classes as the working-class whites couldn’t understand why those who had higher education and classes would be so careless and thoughtless about the opportunities they were given and were destroying in ‘protest’ (Lewis). Turning it into a class divide allowed the republicans the ability to persuade the working-class whites that they were on the same side and respected their views on the ‘elite doves’ compared to the democrats, who didn’t make much of an effort to try and persuade them otherwise.
I don’t think that the Democratic Party could have prevented the political realignment, since there were other factors in play at the time as well, such as the civil rights movement, feminism, and the issue of the Vietnam War. When you put all of those factors into play, the working-class whites were being shunned by the Democratic Party, in part, because they wanted the change the party was doing but disliked the methods in which they were doing it. They also felt that they weren’t being heard by the party, so when they were ‘discovered’ by the Republican Party they were more willing to listen to their ideas, which aligned more with their concept of politics. Even if those factors weren’t at play, I still think that there would have eventually been another issue that would have separated the working-class whites from the Democratic Party, as at that time the Republican Party were aligning more with the white workers’ values than those of the Democratic Party.
Will Wright 