The Progressive Nationalist Movement, 1969–73: South Vietnam’s Canary in the Coal Mine

The rapid rise and fall of the Progressive Nationalist Movement (PNM) provides an instructive demonstration of South Vietnam’s political deterioration. Established by a pair of professors, the PNM sought to provide “loyal opposition” to the military government, offering domestic policy critiques in a spirit of constructive cooperation.  It championed the new 1967 constitution, which attempted to win back an ambivalent public with elections and a national assembly.  Unlike Saigon-centered rival parties, the PNM also strove to establish a true national grassroots presence, building on its core support in the Mekong Delta’s provincial towns.  But the Party was crushed after President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu imposed sweeping security legislation following his blatantly rigged 1971 re-election, which effectively proscribed independent political opposition. Dedicated to embodying the spirit of the 1967 reforms, the PNM’s dubiously imposed disbandment was regarded as a particularly poignant symbol of South Vietnam’s political collapse from within, years before its 1975 capitulation.

Despite consensus that the struggle for political legitimacy in South Vietnam was critical to the outcome of the Vietnam War, there has been surprisingly little scholarship on South Vietnamese politics, especially after American escalation in 1965.  As a result, though the 1967 reforms often feature in studies sympathetic to U.S. intervention, interpretations of this period have thus far relied more on assertion than documentary evidence.  Drawing on Vietnamese-language memoirs, print media and archival material, this paper demonstrates that South Vietnamese anti-communist politics were far more vibrant, diverse and complex than conventionally assumed.  Nonetheless, the PNM’s telling fate reveals the limitations of the new constitutional order, illuminating the state’s enduring and injurious failure to achieve legitimacy even among resolutely anti-communist South Vietnamese.  Fighting a losing battle against communism, the Thiệu regime’s alienation of core constituents was no less significant than its military deficiencies in accounting for its ultimate defeat.