The novelist William Faulkner said: "The past is not dead. It is not even past." The past 72 hours of burning US cities triggered parallels with 1968 - a year of urban white flight that ended with the election of Mr Richard Nixon.
He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety. Mr Donald Trump does not deal in implicit language. In response to protests in Minneapolis after the police suffocation last week of Mr George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, Mr Trump tweeted: "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."
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