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 partyâs 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 antiâVietnam 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 Clintonâs successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israelâs lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israelâs 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 Chicagoâs 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 â68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Hereâs 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 membersâ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service Systemâs 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 wasnât common to call what was happening âgenocide,â but thereâs 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 âpeace plankâ was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing âWe Shall Overcome.â 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. Thatâs 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 departmentâs confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to âgestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,â 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, âBossâ 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 Daleyâs 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 cityâs 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 heâs 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, âThe whole world is watching,â which wasnât much of an exaggeration. Todayâs 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.
Since Professor Pollkatz has been on leave, I thought we needed sone historical graphs:
Bush historical approval ratings, all major polls–
http://www.pop.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm
Comparison of the approval of W. and H.W.–
http://www.pop.umn.edu/~ruggles/W_and_HW.htm
I have bad news. People don’t respond to polls with the truth–they give what they think the right answer should be.
Chris Rock joked that people say they’ll vote for a black president, but won’t actually do it.
I used to work for an environmental company, and we’d get great data about people saying they were willing to pay a tiny bit more for environmentally friendly products, but when most people go to the store, they buy what’s cheapest.
Polls that say Americans favor investment over tax cuts show that Americans know what’s better for the country. But when we have to pick between our present and our future, a lot of people go for instant gratification.
Perhaps national elections are not about class consciousness. Perhaps they are cultural rituals about the vision of community identity the different parties/politicians offer. Thus, members of the middle class who feel alienated from the vision offered by one party will vote for the other, regardless of the economic and fiscal consequences. (Or, maybe the problem is that economists can’t quantify and thus can’t measure the value a citizen puts on his/her sense of belonging to and sharing in a communal identity. If they could, we wouldn’t talk about voting against economic interests.)
There are individuals who will surely never vote for Democrats because democratic ideology shapes the vision the party offers in a fundamental way. I am a citizen who would rarely vote for a Republican because of this limiting effect ideology has on a general social vision. There are, however, a significant number of people (indeed the majority) who would prefer not walk off Mr. Bush’s cliff and who are not yellow dog Democrats.
Democrats need to articulate a social vision (consistent with their ideological principles) that is attractive to those whose economic interests would be best served by a Democratic administration.
Social programs, schmocial programs.
The first step for Democrats who want to get right on this issue is to see the world squarely as it is:
The regime of “Free trade” now defines as legitimate the importation of people to perform jobs at a lower wage rate than those currently doing the job. So even if your job cannot be moved to India, they may be able to bring in someone from overseas to perform it at a lower wage than you earn. “Jobs Americans don’t want” is in many instances a cover for “Jobs Americans don’t want at the rates we want to pay.” I’m not anti-immigration per se. There are some jobs that Americans don’t want. There are sometimes real labor shortages. But what we’re seeing now is the enshrining of a regime to lower American wages that dares in fact to trumpet this as a good thing – regardless of unemployment levels – while enriching the regime itself beyond its former wildest dreams.
Until you see through this self-serving bullshit, for which the high-tech and other corporations importing labor have a large PR budget, you will be lapping around the edges of the problem, not solving it.
Now, you may say, “the middle class needs to fall off their high perch, they still have too many SUV’s and wide-screen TVs, etc.” Perhaps so. Perhaps the leveling of world-wide wages is ultimately a good thing. But Democrats should not be talking this kind of talk while the multinational corporate elite is enriching themselves on the backs of the poor and middle class. One day, the leaner, meaner Indian managerial elite will eat their American cousins for lunch. If American salaries really must fall, shared sacrifice should be the order of the day.
Over and over we see people with no skills other than the ability to look at a balance sheet putting x’s through the names of the high-salary employees, firing them, and then seeing how the company will run. This is mindlessness, not savvy business. All too often the corporation winds up hiring the same people back as consultants.
Democrats who want to call the middle class stupid for not seeing the realities should look first at the blinders they’re wearing.
First, thank you Steve and Eldon for the compliments. I’m just a political obsessive, and armchair strategist, but if the DNC wants to pay me to do this I won’t object. Here’s another idea, no doubt much more controversial than the first three, but worth mulling I think.
Nationalize or heavily tax all natural resouce extraction on public lands, whether we’re talking about oil and natural gas, mining, timber, whatever (all of these are heavily Republican interests, by the way). As it stands now, you and I are in many cases *SUBSIDIZING* corporations to plunder our public lands. At the very least, they should be paying us for the oppurtunity, and perhaps we should consider socializing it altogether, but in either case the American people would enjoy billions in revenues every year as a result, which could be used to for health care, education, or (along the lines of the Alaska model) a check (perhaps several hundred dollars or more) mailed out to every American taxpayer. Nationalization of any industry where there is a strong creative and qualitative dimension (read: consumer goods) is usually a bad idea, because there is little incentive for innovation, but oil is oil and timber is timber, so there’s really no need for innovation. I can think of nothing that would make the GOP more ballistic than this idea, which is reason enough to consider it, but Americans only object to socialism when it doesn’t benefit them. Who would object to receiving a nice little check from the government every year? “Libertarian” Alaskans certainly don’t.
I refuse to believe that stupidity is the cause of Bush’s 50%. It’s the cause of his 25% percent, of course, but no more.
Saying that people are stupid is spreading hopelessness and defeatism, as well as just plain giving people an excuse to sit on the couch when we should be volunteering.
The reason that we only have 50% is indeed our own stupid fault, and we should be coming up with solutions. Someday I’ll make a full list of the stupidest things done by liberals, but here’s a small off the top of my head:
1. Handing over religion to the republicans
2. Handing over nationalism to the enemy
3. Attacking each other (Yes, I’m guilty of this)
4. Defeatism
5. Spectating and talking to each other as if we’re in some cafe, rather than a battlefield
Talking about #5, Kerry isn’t reading us so let’s not give him advice, let’s think of ways we, the activists, can be more effective.
Things aren’t bad enough yet for the middle class. As long as they get their big-screen TVs, MP3 players, SUVs they don’t pay attention enough to realize what Bush is doing to them. On every issue. If they did, it is hard to see how Bush would have a 10% approval.
Instead, they are primed for the crap that Fox News shoves at them — and particularly when it comes at them from sources other than Fox News.
55% STILL think Saddam had WMDs and provided substantial support to 9/11 terrorists? Until you can explain that all your polls about Bush’s approval or elect numbers are meaningless.
Or could it be that when people are asked about support for “social programs” they know they are “supposed” to support them, otherwise they are evil, vicious, mean-spirited, fascistic… dare we say, Republicans; but when they see their tax bill and what the government manages to provide even under conditions of budget surplus… well, it just doesn’t seem like fair exchange? Nope, couldn’t be that. đ
Part of any program to help the middle class has to include increased aid to state and local governments for police, fire and, most importantly, education. The middle class is being hammered at the local level, where their taxes are going up and they are having to cut basic services, taking police off the beat, firemen off of shifts and teachers out of classrooms. I am a town meeting member in an affluent suburb (i.e. full of swing voters), and we are being forced to do all of this. All this while W.’s only foray into this area is the unfunded No Billionaire Left Behind Act. If Kerry can start to articulate this problem and tie it into Bush’s tax cuts, his message will resound with the middle class.
I too, will take my hat off to Ken.
Most of the middle class people I interact with who are independents, neither Democrats, nor Republicans, generally think that neither party represents them. They think the Republicans represent the superrich and the corporations and the Democrats represent the poor. No one, they think, represents them.
And you know something? In an economic sense, they’re right. As a 51-year old computer programmer hanging onto employment by the slenderest thread, it’s pretty clear that the corporations are taking aim at the middle class. Outsourcing is the sexy issue now, but just as bad if not worse is the importation of people from lower wage countries to do our jobs for less, something they haven’t tried (at least not yet) in unionized industries. One recent report mentions not only the computer professions but also nursing and teaching. The Republicans accept this wholeheartedly and the Democrats are still too tied to corporate campaign contributions to offer any but the weakest remedies. Job training won’t cut it. Futzing with the tax code is nipping around the edges. Corporations always find a way to evade taxes.
So the only appeals the Dems can make to the middle class are on social issues or foreign policy issues. On the economic front they’re fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
Let’s face it folks. The reason Bush has 50% support is because there are a lot of STUPID people in America. They vote on racial resentments,think they are going to be rich so that they identify with people who are trying to hurt them. They believe that people who are rich must be better people than they are. They think all rich people worked hard for their money instead of using crony connections to make it. The sooner we realize this the better we can understand why a certified incompetent is President of the U.S.
Ken, who are you? You should immediately take the place of much-too-long-in-place Terry McAuliffe, Mr. anti-bold himself.
I know this is my third post on this thread, but now I feel as though I have some sort of responsibility to suggest how Kerry might err on the side of vision, rather than caution.
1)Portable, basic health insurance for all, to be paid for in part with massive cuts in the federal bureacracy. A least a part of the reason jobs are moving offshore, and not being created at the rate they ought to be, is the onerous burden of providing health care coverage for employees here in the US. There’s a great deal to say about this issue that has already been said more eloquently elsewhere, but the point is that Kerry should aim for a home run on this one, selling it as a “jobs creation” issue, and promising that there will be huge cuts in the federal government to help pay for it, cuts which I might add are extremely popular. Tony Blair has promised to cut 50k jobs in Whitehall, and the Lib Dems (despite being the true liberal party in Britian) have talked about going even further, eliminating whole ministries. There are many, many thousands of unecessary workers in the federal government, and the American people know it. Kerry should be so bold as to take on both of these issues simultaneously. He’s probably too in bed with the unions to take the risk, but it would demonstrate enormous political courage, would be extremely, and make great economic sense.
2) A Manhattan Project on alternative energies, and energy independence. Kerry has proposed significant increases for funding of R&D in this area, but the American people understand the geopolitical relationship between our dependence on oil and the mess in the Middle East, and are ready to see their taxes increased to pay for energy independence by (say) the year 2012. The technologies we develop will be (at least for a time) proprietary, leased to other countries, and the initiative will ultimately pay for itself.
3)Significant research in funding for basic science and technology. This will not wholly compensate for the loss of high-wage, high-skill tech jobs overseas, but it will help to provide the basis for the next generation of good paying technology jobs. The fact is (as a NY Times story pointed out yesterday) America is falling behind in both basic science, and technological development, and industry doesn’t have the cash or the will to do the kind of bold, risky science that needs to be done in order for us to move ahead again. Kerry should point out Bush’s gross neglect in this area, and his relentless politicization of science, and propose largescale increases in funding.
I have other ideas, but these strike me as a pretty darn good place to start.
I would add to my last comment that I have sympathy for Kerry and Kerry’s people. The economic situation is so opaque, and the fiscal situation so smells of impending doom, I suspect it seems best to them to err on the side of caution in terms of advancing any major proposals. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to help bring anxious, struggling middle class people on board the good ship Kerry. Perhaps it’s time for Kerry to err on the side of vision, rather than caution, even if that vision turns out to be the wrong won (that strategy seems to be working out quite well for Bush).
It’s not that they don’t know that Bush co’s policies are adversely affecting their own household bottom line, but rather that Democrats have yet to offer a compelling, realistic alternative. Middle class Americans *are* concerned about seeing their jobs offshored, for instance, but they recognize all the blather about “retraining” to be mostly just that, blather. What exactly do you tell the 55yo software developer with an MS from MIT to retrain for, nursing? What do Democrats *really* intend to do about the spiraling inflation in health care and education costs without hitting the middle class with huge tax increases? What do Democrats intend to do about the spiraling cost of housing, particularly on the two coasts? Middle class people have little trouble with the idea of rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, but they’re generally smart enough to recognize that it will hardly begin to pay down the debt, let alone pay for any ambitious new initiatives. It’s not so much a lack of outrage but a lack of clear alternatives, and that’s not their fault.
In partial answer to the question, I’d say Bush is getting 50% because Kerry has not hammered him on this issue. And he should. I have a simple slogan for Mr. Kerry — Restore Tax Fairness. The simple rhetorical trick of putting himself on the side of fairness and working families will make the Republicans apoplectic.
Then why is Bush still getting 50%?