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.
Thank you for the welcome. I actually converted back in 2000, when the bush campaign demonstrated that the impeachment nonsense was not a mere anomoly.
As the republicans have abandoned fiscal ‘conservatism’ and the Democrats have openly embraced fiscal responsibility, I think there may be yet more converts on the way soon.
As to the social aspect or ‘conservatism’ – I couldn’t care less about what people do in their personal lives or their bedrooms.
– A ‘somewhat’ liberal who believes in fiscal responsibility.
I find it incomprehensible that anyone who claims to be a Democrat, let alone seven percent, can actually intend to vote for Bush! Actually I can not understand anyone who is not rich having ever done so, or intending to do so.
rt,
Just a quick followup on your first point. I agree that Kerry has profited by the implicit comparison to Dean’s anger and criticism, which clearly struck most voters, even Dems, as just too much.
What’s striking about Kerry’s criticisms of Bush is that they are, word for word, probably every bit as harsh as Dean’s ever were, yet they do not have the effect of turning voters off.
Here’s the near paradox: the very thing most criticized in Kerry, his too measured, too unemotional, manner and speech, here work as his greatest advantage: he can utter the most severe of criticisms WITHOUT seeming in any way out-of-control or over the top. This is a pretty remarkable quality, and can be used to great effect — as indeed Kerry already has.
A take on frankly0’s well-taken point:
It’s helped Kerry that:
*Dean took a lot of arrows for being the angriest Dem of them all. Kerry has come off as controlled in contrast.
*his last surviving challenger’s “attacks” on him were indirect and extremely mild by campaign standards. At the same time Edwards offered praise for Kerry which was remarkable by campaign standards. On balance, the combination of Edwards’ negative and positive comments on Kerry may well have helped Kerry more than hurt him. In the LA debate I thought Edwards at times looked at Kerry like an admiring and aspiring younger brother.
*The Republicans have been demoralized after an awful last 8 weeks or so that has seen them uncharacteristically passive in the face of the daily drubbing they’ve been taking from the Dem candidates and precipitous drops in their approval ratings. Even one R governor said Bush looks overwhelmed these days.
*It can’t help them that the gay marriage issue from the standpoint of their base demanded dramatic action at a time when Bush’s numbers among independents are abysmal. The gay marriage amendment has not been well received by independents and may make him look opportunistic, reactive, divisive, backwards, chained to his base, and all manner of other bad things just at a point where they are beginning to engage the campaign.
*They’re just now starting to crank up the attack machine. It won’t be long before we get a better sense of how much success they’re going to have driving Kerry’s negatives up.
I say let’s keep them on the mat.
I think Kerry is smart to be reaching out to responsible, moderate Republicans the way he seems to be. I think about 10% of Republicans are Americans first, Party dittohead zombies second.
Closet Liberals, i love it
Here in Califas, we saw millions of SF 49er fans come out of the closet in 1981, and the gays just keep popping out. maybe the hidden liberals can now stand up and be proud
Hi, my name is _____, and i care about my fellow man, i’ve been a closet liberal for my entire life. i can’t help myself, i just get this sudden urge to be a decent human being. i am glad to find a place where people like myself are not ridiculed for their belief in compassion and concern for their brothers
One point about Kerry that I haven’t seen noted is that his negatives, at this stage, are quite low. This is remarkable, because he has been criticizing Bush harshly and relentlessly as the most basic staple of his stump speech. (“George Bush has run the most reckless, inept, arrogant, and ideological foreign policy in modern history” is one pleasing example).
It has been regarded as a truism that negative campaigning, particularly coming out of the mouth of the candidate himself, will push up the negatives of the attacker as well his opponent. And yet there is precisely NO evidence that Kerry’s criticisms have had this effect.
I conclude from this that most of the public thinks that these criticisms, and this level of negativity coming from Kerry, are quite fair under the circumstances. Otherwise, I’d certainly think that the public would punish Kerry with some pretty high unfavorables.
And among other things, it would also suggest that Kerry will do himself no harm to remain very negative on Bush — though he must certainly also provide a positive vision to provide voters with a reason to feel hope under a Kerry Presidency.
Can you please analyze (and hopefully obliterate) the latest AP/IPSOS poll showing Nader with 6%.
Getting nervous here. Thanks.
Psalm 133
A song of ascents. Of David.
1 How good and pleasant it is
when brothers live together in unity!
2 It is like precious oil poured on the head,
running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
down upon the collar of his robes.
3 It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the LORD bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore