A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:
When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.
Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).
Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.
By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.
Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.
Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
Here’s the problem as I see it. I believe impeachment is doable although by no means a sure bet. It would no doubt be an almost completely partisan vote with defections on both sides but I think at the end, the “yeas” would prevail.
However, as many others have already pointed out, conviction in the Senate is another matter. Even if every single Democrat plus the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats were to vote to convict, unless they get some Republican votes, it’s not going to happen. I don’t know that the people clamoring loudest for impeachment understand that. I’m afraid they’ll see it as just another “DLC Repug-lite” cowardly sell-out even if all the Democrats (plus Leiberman and Sanders) vote for conviction.
I agree that from the partisan perspective of aggregating and holding power, impeachment may not be the best strategy. Undoubtedly, Rove is holding the revenge card up his sleeve that he’ll use in the media to brand Democrats petty children who are simply finding their opportunity to repay the GOP for their impeachment of Clinton. The MSM also undoubtedly would be gleeful in their punditry, ascribing all the motivations and reactions Gitlin outlines. But, isn’t such a partisan strategy just another aspect of the political cynicism by which voters are so repulsed?
However, impeachment should not and need not be about vengeance–whether as tit-for-tat vis-a-vis WJC, or for the actual victims of the crimes of the Bush White House. Rather, as John Nichols illuminates in The Nation (8/13/07) and echoing the sentiments of Bill Moyers panelists, “…the point of impeachment is not the transitory crimes of small men but the long-term definition of great offices. …the Founders intended impeachment less as a punishment for office-holders than as a protection against the dangerous expansion of executive authority. If abuse of the system of checks and balances, lies about war, approval of illegal spying and torture, signing statements that improperly arrogate legislative powers to the executive branch, schemes to punish political foes and refusals to cooperate with Congressional inquiries are not judged as high crimes, the next President, no matter from which party, will assume the authority to exercise some or all of these ilegitimate powers.” Indeed, the partisan temptation to do so will be great, even if just as a matter of righting the wrongs done by a previous administration.
So, the Congress has a solemn, non-partisan duty to our Constitution to execute an impeachment not only against Bush and Cheney, but also against any scoundrel, tyrant or demagogue that so abuses the powers of their offices and damages our Democracy. That the Democrats make up the majority of the Congress right now, it falls to them to muster the necessary support for those articles. But, it also falls to all MOGs to weigh the facts of these matters objectively and to acquit their Constitutional duty. To do otherwise–whether as a matter of winning elections or as a matter of partisan solidarity–is merely to succumb to political cynicism. Such may be considered complicity in the same crimes as those accused, since it is a withholding of the last instrument necessary in preserving our system of checks and balances–and in spite of Justice.
Perhaps, then, a national civics lesson is in order, a Prophylactic for the People against the inevitable slings and arrows of the MSM, screeching of vengeance and pettiness and disloyalty in “war time” like a chorus of so many howler monkeys, a cacophony of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Perhaps also, for this one action, all Democrats and any Republicans of conscience who would join them, should declare themselves Independents, making it clear to the People that this is an action of Our supreme legislative body performing its Constitutional duty.
Nichols concludes, “No matter how unsucessful we may think [Bush’s] tenure has been, it will leave a mark on the Republic. If that mark is of a presidency without limit or accountability, Bush and Cheney will have changed the country far more fundamentally than any of their predecessors.”
Here one is reminded of the legacy of Julius Caesar in the course of the Roman state. While the “noblest” Romans assassinated and buried Caesar, the fundamental mutation to tyranny that he wrought persevered. Republic became Empire. But, the Pax was a pox upon all houses. The brutality necessary for imperial rule spread from the reaches of empire back to mother Rome, where fear and poverty and oppression prevailed until the Fall.
Are we not already seeing these same signs as we enter upon a new era of imperial executive? Are our armies not already waging an unwinnable, unending war against a shadowy enemy of ideology? Are we not already refitting our society for the paranoia of an all-seeing eye? Have we not already succumbed to a politics of effete consent?
So, it is not enough to punish these mere men for their transgressions, though justice demands it and impeachment will accomplish it. Such ad hominem penalty is merely cutting a head from the hydra of imperialism, for another will grow back in its place. No, that imperial dragon must be slain. But it will take more than a partisan Brutus. It will take a People expressing their Will for the persistence of democratic self-governance through the only vehicle We have: the Congress. That vehicle is so much bigger in its Constitutional sense and its Democratic import than any political party. And ultimately, the members thereof must act in accordance with the Will of the People to restore balance and integrity to our great Nation.