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.
from Schumer:
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/news/press-releases/schumer-floor-remarks-on-the-need-to-reach-a-long-term-spending-agreement
“The House of Representatives has sent the Senate a continuing resolution constructed by the Republican Speaker and passed without the consultation of House Democrats or Senate Democrats whatsoever.
The Republican Leader is now saying to us: take it or leave it.
Here’s why members from both sides of the aisle want to leave it.
We have been skating by on continuing resolution after continuing resolution for almost six months. First, we passed a 3-month CR, then a 2-week CR, then a one-month CR. Now we are offered another month-long delay of the inevitable. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road and shuffling our feet after it. In another month, we’ll be right back here, at this moment, with the same web of problems at our feet, in no better position to solve them. ”
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So not only was the government being ran week to week, month to month but this CR was constructed by Paul Ryan and passed without consulting House or Senate Democrats. How often does that happen?
And in addition to that the government had to be shutdown just to get McConnell commit to an “intention to bring an immigration bill to the floor if a deal can’t be struck before then.” All the while knowing what Democrats want support majority of American opinion and Miller and Kelly’s do not. Is there something I’m missing because that seems pretty outrageous. And who could work in that environment being treated that way.
I have a very difficult time believing that Republicans cant get on the same page. The preference for CR’s looks like deliberate stalling.
Perhaps its election year and they know how unpopular everything they want actually is. If they avoid committing to anything they can’t take responsibility for anything and then of course blame Democrat politicians and anyone who would vote for them for the results.
Or it could be no one is allowed to do their job because Republicans are busy shutting down the government in their own way, on their own schedule which seriously, I often worry it currently has to do with an upcoming military escalation. (amongst much else Pence’s Middle East tour is not encouraging)
Republicans do not control all 3 branches of gkvernment. Republicans control the executive (POTUS) and legislative (House and Senate).
I am tired of reading and hearing talking heads forget the end branches of government.
If it takes sixty votes in the Senate to get a budget passed but the Republicans have only fifty-one, then they do not really control the Senate. The people who really control the Senate are any ten Democratic Senators who can force a government shutdown by withholding their votes. The solution is either to give one party a sixty-vote majority or to abolish the sixty-vote requirement. Since Senator Reid abolished the sixty-vote requirement to confirm federal judges, the Republicans confirmed judges the Democrats did not like. Pretty soon, they will abolish the sixty-vote requirement to pass a budget, too. I can’t say whether that will be good or bad for the country but at least it will spare us this partisan game of chicken with the budget and the finger-pointing it entails.
Fussy procedural nuances don’t get it. This is a Republican shut down. They own it. McConnell could strike a reasonable compromise most Americans could live with — if he was an effective leader. As it is, he is a pretty weak majority leader, more of an inept ideologue than a bridge-builder. Republicans haven’t had a bridge-builder for majority leader since Howard Baker.
For Democrats this is one of several possible wrong issues over which to look the other way while government shuts down.
If you are going to create drama, it should be over something that affects everyone.