A Pig for President?
Yippies and Zippies Are Considering Options
Is President Joe Biden’s last minute effort to get the Left on his side working? The relaunch of the Yippie movement suggests it is not.
The Youth International Party (YIP) emerged on the nation’s political stage in 1967, when young Americans began demonstrating against the Vietnam War. The party staged demonstrations across the country, including protests at Democratic and Republican national conventions and at presidential inaugurations. In 1968, in a mockery of the U.S. democratic system, it nominated a pig for president. In the early 2000s, the Yippies began to turn their focus to the legalization of marijuana and opposition to gentrification.
Political pundits have said Biden’s slow response to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which has resulted in a reported 35,000 deaths and protests at college campuses across America, has damaged his standing among younger voters and older ones on the Left. It’s obvious that he is aware of that, given his efforts in recent weeks to engage two self-proclaimed democratic socialists — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) Last month Biden had two events with Sanders and invited Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to join him on an Air Force One flight to a climate change event. Other moves by Biden that appeal to voters on Left are his recently announced cancellation of $7.4 million in student debt, his criticism of Donald Trump’s stand on abortion and his administration’s plan to make sure that by 2032 most vehicles will be electric or hybrid. Yet polls show he still has relatively low support from younger voters, with many of them in February’s Democratic primary election in Michigan voting “undecided.”
The early Yippies were members of the Boomer generation. Younger voters on the Left today are said to be embracing the label Zippie, which actually was used in 1968 when some Yippies withdrew from the YIP when it endorsed Sen. George McGovern for president. That name might be especially relevant for those who are members of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012)
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Zippies were somewhat controversial for staging demonstrations at which they publicly smoked marijuana (“smoke ins”) and for their nude sunbathing in Miami’s Flamingo Park as part of their protest against the Vietnam War in 1972 during the Republican National Convention.
Whether Yippie or Zippie, the challenge will be getting a candidate on the ballot. Thus far into the 2024 election year, it’s highly unlikely that a Zippie or Yippie candidate will qualify for the ballot in any state. Voters can write in a candidate on the ballot, but many states do not count such candidates.
And will the Yippies or Zippies bring forward a pig as president? In 1968 the Youth International Party nominated a 145-pound pig named Pigasus as its candidate in a demonstration outside the soon-to-open Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Chicago police arrested seven YIP members and seized the pig. Despite that, the Yippies staged an “in-HOG-uration” ceremony on the day Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president. The Montreal Gazette reported that he Yippies said the pig was the right candidate because “he was born in the slums of a pig-sty, he is many colors and he is going to be slaughtered.” One person at the nomination ceremony said: “If we can’t have him in the White House, we can have him for breakfast.”
With the evolution of the sense of identity over the years (he/she/they/other), there has been an emergence of homo sapiens who don’t identify as humans. That is especially evident in the gay culture, which includes “pups” (men who dress as dogs). So it might be possible for the Yippies/Zippies to find a candidate whose homo sapien identity on a birth certificate qualifies him, her or they for office, but whose identity as a pig would justify an “in-HOG-uration” ceremony in January 2025.
