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.
During the first month after the election, we were all seemingly in agreement that despite having lost, we’d managed to stay united as a party, and avoid the traditional Democratic circular firing squad. Times were gonna be rocky ahead, but we were going to face the enemy as one.
Then Beinart had to aim his guns at Moore and MoveOn, and Al From had to go on the attack against everyone who wasn’t as conservative as him without actually being a Republican.
These guys are a cancer on our party; they’ve got to go. I’m willing to debate ideas with whoever. But when the GOP puts Coburn and DeMint in the U.S. Senate, and worships at the feet of Limbaugh, Norquist, and Pat Robertson, anyone of *either* party has got a lot of damned gall to say our problem is that we tolerate extremists. Compared to the wingnuts I’ve just mentioned, Michael Moore is a freakin’ moderate. And, FWIW, he’s an honest-to-God patriot. If they try to kick him out of the party, I go too. Fercryinoutloud, we didn’t even kick GodZella out when he decided to campaign for Bush.
From: Gone. Beinart: Gone. (His ideas are actually good. But the penalty for starting a circular firing squad should be that you’re the first one shot. Then the rest of us all get to live.) Zell: gone. DLC: Gone. Being a conservative Dem is fine; being a traitor to the party isn’t.
You are very eloquent Aaron….but you are wrong. The Democratic Party MUST go back to its roots. If they don’t they will remain in the wilderness. I for one will not put my efforts into another election that dosen’t embrace a National Healtcare System again, (and again and again until we get it for ALL the American people), withdrawl from Iraq, investment in other energies, stem cell research (government sponsored), Choice and common sense.
If the DLC ignore Howard Dean for DNC Chair, millions will look for another leader in another party. Then the Democratic Party will be finished.
Beluumregio, you have profoundly misread Marshall. As the Dems adjust to the defeat and gather the reins to battle on, there will be much talk of restructuring the army.
But I don’t see any major commentator, certainly not Marshall, Black, etc. who will tolerate the sins of the Rupublican administration, much less endorse them. If you think Marshall supports Bush’s prosecution of Iraq, I’d suggest nothing else shows how badly you’ve misunderstood him.
I disagree with Jason Bradfield. There should be no purge and there will not be one. We cannot become Deaniacs until we have more PR infrastructure. Mr Rove has already made it clear that a sharp distinction between the parties is desirable. Since Republicans control the national imagination through their coordinated communications and public relations campaigns and have strong brand identity we would loose. We should (and must) do the hard thing by addressing the conservative issues in a liberal manner (as Marshall prescribes) and invest the public discourse with issues (and strategies) that put Republicans in a corner (which Marshall does not prescribe). The DLC is helpful but it should not be the Democratic brain trust.
I used to be a conservative Republican activist and I used to think the DLC was great because they forced the debate into a conservative frame of reference.
Now that I am a liberal I shocked that any Democrats, even centrists, take the DLC seriously. They are not centrists, they are conervatives. Every single one of their ideas puts the political debate on turf conservatives can win on.
The purge that is needed in the Democratic party is a purge of conservatives, just as the GOP successfully purged its Rockefeller Republican moderates.
The more a party can stay on message the better party discipline is. With DLC types running around the American public gets easily confused trying to figure out what Democrats stand for.
The sad truth is that, even if the public is not well enough educated, we don’t get to vote them out and elect new people. We work with the only Americans there are, or we lose elections.
The DLC would have us adjust our party platform to get to where the voters seem to be politically. The progressive alternative is to BE LEADERS and to make an effective case for our vision–such that the voters come around to our view. The Republicans have taken the leadership role, and brought the voting public where they want them to be, while the progressive Democrats have not led; they have instead insulted those voters who were following the GOP, calling them sheep, and focusing on attacking the GOP agenda rather than articulating a better alternative.
Our job as progressives is to give the voters an attractive vision of why what we want to do is best for them. If we do that effectively, then they will vote for us. If we’re not willing to do it, then the DLC is right and the only remaining way to win is to offer the people what they believe they want now, at the expense of our beliefs to the contrary.
I’m one of those rare believers in both the Beinart thesis (Democrats lost this election on national security grounds, and need to make Arab democracy the centerpiece of their foreign policy) and that the DLC is almost wholly irrelevant on domestic issues.
With a few notable exceptions, the DLC red state strategy has been a certifiable failure. Five out of six decent corporatist DLCish red state senate candidates went down in flames last month, and in at least two of those cases to complete lunatics. The only red states this strategy works in have large Democratic bases, and large quantities of white, professional, moderate, suburban swing voters (as in Colorado and New Hampshire.) This doesn’t describe most red states today.
Democrats need to recover their losses with the white working class if they want to have any hope of becoming a majority party again in the next thirty years, and economic populism is their best shot at that end. Combined with a program of democracy promotion abroad and you have not only a winning formula for the next generation, but you have again the party of FDR and Truman.
When I think of the DLC, I think of the smarmy, smug Evan Bayh who is a prominent member.
I think about how as a Democrat in the state of Indiana, one needs to go about being elected it’s US Senator. My best guess would be to position yourself just to the right of Joe Lieberman, and just close enough to Zell Miller without being laughed out of the party.
There is a reason why during our annual summer confrontation with hate groups here in the Chicago area, we had to bus them in from Indiana.
I disagree with the last poster Joe, as he is under the wrong assumption that the Democratic Party has been actively turning away or purging those of ‘faith and conscience’, which is exactly what the Republicans have been doing to gays and pro-choice members.
We are dealing with an American electorate where still today, 44% percent think that a ‘stable democracy’ is possible in Iraq.
There is nothing wrong with our message or our messengers. The problem is the truth does not translate well into the language of fear, intolerance and hate.
“The DLC is full of smart people who have many good and useful ideas about the road forward for Democrats.”
Perhaps they could work for Democratic institutions then? There’s more than a few on the rise, and they actually believe Dems should be… Dems.
Seriously though, I think MoveOn’s response was, while blunt, accurate. The DLC came up because they were successful at raising money via large corporate donations. Dean, MoveOn, TrueMajority, and Kerry in their wake showed that we can reach financial parity with the right with “trickle up” fundraising, and none of those efforts involved foresaking Democratic values to curry favor with big business. How thrilling was it, amongst the grief on Nov. 3rd, to see and hear all the responses of “Okay, I’m ready to keep fighting, where do I send the check and when do the ’06 campaigns get under way?”
I wouldn’t worry about all the truly smart and skilled people at the DLC. There is an upsurge of Democratic institutions afoot, there will be plenty of room for the good ones to get in and contribute, and hopefully working for those institutions won’t entail wincing when the bosses decide to berate the grassroots in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Worse things could happen than to have From and Reed fade into obscurity.
John Kerry lost to George Bush because the latter was successful in scaring the hell out of the American people and the former was not convincing enough that he could protect them as well as the guy who proved he couldn’t on 9/11.
Go figure.
The Dems don’t need to move to the center. Kerry did and he outscored Bush among independents and still lost. We turned out more voters for the Democratic party than any previous winner from either party ever got and still lost.
The Democratic party simply needs to open itself to people of conscience and faith while still voicing a progressive theme on economics, health care etc. and forget gun control, abortion rights and other social issues that Repubs use to bolster their base through identity politics.
Bush won because Rove grew the Republican base. The Dems will win when they field a candidate who grows their base and caters to it.
hmmm…
I’m not sure that the DLC and Clinton didn’t lead the Democrats down the garden path to near-oblivion. Clinton is a political genius, but with the republican party lurching off to the ideological gamma quadrant, the Democrats need to keep their distance from them, now more than ever.
The Republican party is simply crazy now, but the Democrats don’t win because they are still playing Clinton’s games.