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.
An intelligent comment I read at the New Republic website suggests a particular line of attack: describe the Republican Party as “the bridge to nowhere.” That would work for Palin and McCain.
What follows is the entire post:
“Look, it is time, and it is necessary, to get over the surprise at the tactics of
the Republican party. Republicans believe in NOTHING. The Republican party is a
giant criminal organization devoted to one thing, no two: theft and ostentatious
displays of power. Other than the fact that we don’t live in a society where
extreme brutality is necessary to remain in power, there is very little that
separates Saddam Hussein from the modern Republican party. Their gassy patriotism
is bullshit. Their economic theology is bullshit. Their purported concern for the
little guy is absolutely laughable.
Given that the Republican party has no interest in governing the country, only in
stealing from the country, they have no more scruple about what they say and do than
the mafia would. Would anyone express shock at the “cynicism” of mafiosi telling
lies? Of course not. That would be ridiculous because we already understand that
they are criminals. The Republicans are criminals, one and all, including John
McCain. They will say and do anything, absolutely anything, that they think will
have the desired political impact. They do not even pause for a moment to think
about whether what they are saying is true because it is completely irrelevant from
their point of view. And they understand that, when you are caught lying, you just
repeat the lie louder and with a great display of outrage at being called a liar.
Time for the Democrats and Obama, at the least since there is not much hope that the
press will awake from its stupor in the face of these vicious tactics, the see the
enemy for what it is — THE ENEMY of our country — and be prepared to do what it
takes.
It is not necessary for the Democrats to lie. It is only necessary for them
relentlessly and singlemindedly to smear John McCain with all of the shit that he
has left in his wake during his political career. Display him lying and ask why a
man who claims honor is the most important think stoops to such blatant lying
tactics. Hang him over and over and over again with Phil Gramm sneering at
Americans as “whiners.” Hang him with his incestuous relationship to Washington
lobbyists and corruption. You don’t talk about Republican hypocrisy, you display
it, and since the Republicans contradict themselves at every turn without batting an
eye — like all good Stalinists — you SHOW them contradicting themselves and you
impugn their honesty, their competence, and their devotion to duty, country, or
anything but pocketing as many millions as they can for bridges to nowhere. The
Republican party IS the bridge to nowhere. That’s a good theme. “The Republican
party didn’t just try to build the bridge to nowhere at a cost of hundreds of
millions of dollars, the Republican party is the bridge to nowhere. It cannot
protect us from our enemies. It cannot protect us from falling behind in global
competition. It cannot protect us from the storms and natural disasters the result
from climate change. It is not just the party of the past, it is the party of no
place, no program, no values.”
It is time for the Democrats to recognize that they cannot win a dirty war and
expect to be clean. You cannot win an actual war without killing people, innocent
people. Any decent human being should feel soiled by that and recoil at the
necessity. But it is a necessity. Kicking out the disgusting, predatory Republican
party requires getting down in the muck where it lives and defeating it there. We
will not feel clean when we have done so, but our civic responsibility is to kick
these bums out, NOW, before our the economic, military, and moral decline of our
beautiful country goes any further.”
roidubouloi
Agreed. The oratory of Obama is one of those surface shiny things Dems can actually use, and use effectively, to get the attention of the lazy voters. It has that bad side to it, but unlike most of our stuff, there is another edge to this sword. We should carpet bomb that kind of stuff.
Same with the debates. The MSM is a huge problem, but if they right small things are said, someone will catch on to it, because it’s easy to cover.
He must dumb down from the debates in the primary..as they have proven election after election, the voters are neither sophisticated nor intelligent creatures. Keep them busy.