the liberal conservative Norman Mailer: "...the nihilistic maw of a national disorder..."

Read this next sentence (by Hitch) closely. It's astute: To touch on another comparison with today’s politics, Mailer noticed in Miami that Nixon had won the nomination in such a way as to also win the election: in other words, without splitting or embittering his party. These and similar reflections are of interest and value in a year when the Democratic nominee is, in one of his many protean incarnations, a Chicago South Side operator with a wife whose father was a Daley precinct captain, while the Republican candidate is a repository of something in which almost nobody in 1968 would ever have believed: America’s residual pride about its own valor in Vietnam.