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.
I have nothing important to add except this:
In January 1942, Winston Churchill met with Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard an American battleship in the Atlantic. The topic was allied unity. Churchill agreed to expand Britain’s war against Japan if Roosevelt agreed that the defeat of Germany would be first. Both men agreed that, even though each side had to make some sacrifices, it served both their interests to work together. Therefore, each agreed to the others demands.
Later when a reporter asked Churchill how the meeting with Roosevelt went, he held up the V sign with his fingers.
“What does that mean?” The reporter asked.
“Victory,” Churchill replied.
Apparently, Kerry has settled on a campaign theme: ‘Let America be America again’.
What’s really interesting about the theme is that it is conservative in the true sense of the word. And it so aptly fits our current circumstance, in which a radical administration has taken a dull chainsaw to the carefully built edifice of American institutions and values.
on a topic closely related to ideological coherence and democratic party commonality, check out Mark Schmitt’s article from the American Prospect:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7765
The best quote of which:
“Liberalism is different from conservatism, not its mirror. Liberalism thrives when it has an opportunity to experiment, to debate, to test ideas. And when, in a time of futility, we also cut ourselves off from the historical roots of our ideas, we lose the benefit of the experience and experimentation that has gone before.”
I’m w/ paleo on this. bush has got to go and I’m willing to strike almost any bargain w/i the democratic party to ensure that.
but I wonder if what divides dyed-in-the-wool liberals from the DLC is the very reason dems have been on the shit end of the electoral stick for the last 15 years: namely, an utter absence of ideological cohesion.
true, dems need to entertain differing viewpoints but I think there’s ample evidence that the democratic party is more accurately described as a coalition of interests; the existence of southern democrats argues for that nomenclature.
I’m not convinced the party can ever meaningfully bridge its own internecine gulf. and maybe for the next 6 months we don’t need to. but after november, particularly if kerry loses, this divide—-however paper-overed it may have temporarily been—will need to be acknowledged, addressed, and redressed in some lasting way. otherwise, it’s deja vu all over again for the often hapless democratic party.
I’ve got great respect for Dionne, so I’m anxious to read his suggestions.
Coincidentally to the subject of this thread, Bob Novak has published the following article on Republican DIS-unity:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/printrn20040520.shtml
As to our democratic discussion, I will just say (after Lincoln):
“If we do not hang together, we will all hang, seperately.”
Whatever the divide is and which wing wins is irrrelvant. Let’s have the debate from the cat-bird seat. Let’s have some accomplishments without ideal goals rather than no accomplishments with ideal goals. Let us make it our agenda which will be implemented and we can debate which aspect to focus when in the process of implementing. Ariana Huffington says it well, “when you house is on fire, now is not the time to discuss remodeling.”
Coach, I don’t agree. I think the Republican party is far more united. When it comes to foreign policy and economic policy, little division. Only when it comes to the social issues is there a split, but they’ve managed to (1) reduce the emphasis of those issues within the party and (2) social liberals represented a smaller and smaller slice of the party.
While Democrats have general agreement on the social issues, they are far more split on the other two. When it comes to foreign policy, they are split over Iraq and interventionism in general. And a new split is emerging under the surface over the party’s continuing lockstep march with Israel. When it comes to economic policy, the division between the balanced budget/”free trade” wing and the greater spending/fair trade wing is more like a chasm. Should the Democrats get back in power, those divisions will reassert themselves with a vengeance.
There are serious differences in emphasis between the two wings, and these can lead to serious confilt, because one group might get their way while another does not.
For instance, the DLC is serious about courting investors and the business community. For them, Fiscal sanity is much more important than tax reform that denefits the middle class and working class. For Liberals, who are primarily interested in social justice for the working class and middle class, tax reform that benefits these groups is more important than a return to fiscal sanity.
Now both groups can agree they want both these things, but they actually are somewhat contradictory (not necessarily, but it would be easier to achieve either one if you didn’t achieve the other). Now, the Liberals have to worry that, because of a Republican House (and probable Republican Senate), the DLC will get what it wants most, a return to fiscal sanity, but the Liberals won’t get what they want most, tax reform benefiting the middle class and working class.
IF we actually realize the agenda in the article, it would be a huge success, in light of the Republicans desire to stop us from achieving any of it. My fear is that we will have a return of the Clinton years, where the centrists and DLC achieved so many more of their goals than the Liberals. While Clinton was much better than Bush, he was in many ways NOT ideal, and I think in some ways helped laid the groundwork for 2000.
But paleo, the fundamental differences are strategic or can be resolved empirically. These kinds of debates are healthy in general, if they are thought of that way, and both sides look for ways to productively make their case.
The goals, though, are very much the same.
I do not think the same can be said for the splits in the Republican party ( more of a theocracy, more of a libertarian govt.)
Party unity is always a good thing. I think it will be vital to the presidential election. Now we need to get the Nadar people on board.
But the “papering over” is the whole point of the piece. If Dems can make nice and stop quarreling long enough to regain the White House (and maybe the Senate), they can resume their internecine quibbles AFTERWARDS. The problem now is: What to do about Ralph Nader, with his long history of undercutting Democratic presidential candidates and a proven (2000) ability to pull aways crucial votes from the party?
Sorry. But there are fundamental differences between Progressive and DLC Democrats. They might be papered over in an election year. But afterwards, win or lose, they will reemerge. Kuttner’s and Marshall’s fuzzy and lowest common denominator article notwithstanding.