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.
Okay, let us have that “intra-progressive” debate then.
I’ll start. My fear is that the way this legislation is shaping up, it is going to turn out to be every bit as disastrous to individuals in need of health care as The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — an abominable piece of legislation that turned out to be a gift to the credit card companies and a disaster, a complete disaster, for people who are burdened with massive unmanageable debt due to medical expenses, unemployment, or other unavoidable or avoidable losses. Remember Ted Kennedy offering amendment after amendment after amendment as he stood alone on the floor of the Senate attempting to mitigate the impending disaster this abomination visited upon ordinary Americans. The legislation turned out to be so disastrous for consumers that even the credit card and mortgage banking industries decided it was too much of a good thing.
Two things: have you actually done the math with respect to premiums and co-pays and how they would impact an individual’s actual take-home pay? I have, and I invite you to do it too. My math tells me that for someone earning in the neighborhood of $65,000 to $75,000 per year, with a chronic disease that needs consistent medical care, out-of-pocket expenses look to be in the neighborhood of $20-25,000 per year with the current Senate bill. Already Medicaid share-of-cost can be prohibitive in high-cost areas of the country. You think that is going to make people, i.e. voters, happy about health care reform?
Secondly, you can look to the experience in Massachusetts for how the current proposed model of HCR is going to work, and it isn’t very encouraging. Trudy Lieberman over at CJR has an exceptional series on HCR that explores the impact of the Massachusetts experiment here: Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part VII : CJR. I encourage you and your readers to read the whole series.
Let’s look at your priorities:
1) “covering most of the uninsured” — in my view, any program that will (affordably) cover most of the uninsured is the whole point. Of course, a public health insurance option is the best way of doing that; we cover most seniors with Medicare; we cover most poor children and pregnant women with medicaid, SCHIP covers most children of working families who earn less than 250% FPL. Fine, but the experiment in Massachusetts shows that even with a mandate, the private insurance industry cannot affordably cover “most” of the uninsured. Instead, they opt to pay the fine for not buying it.
2) “more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable” — amusing that you use the term “practically affordable” — like in hand grenades, eh? Let me ask you, why do you think that high levels of subsidies to the private health insurance industry is more acceptable — or a better deal — than a competing public insurance program? The public insurance program is CHEAPER for individuals and in the aggregate than high levels of subsidies. Is the point to save the private health insurance industry? We’d be better off dumping pallets of cash in their lobbies, as we did for the banks. Please look at the Healthy Families program in California for a successful public health insurance program that works.
3) “more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices” — if there is anything in the bill to support, it is this, of course. This kind of regulation is badly needed, let’s do it. Let’s do it as a health insurance regulatory bill, then. It would be easier to pass standing alone, wouldn’t it?
4) “more important than how and when health reform is phased in” — I suspect this is just a throw-in, this isn’t really an issue but just nuts and bolts. Do you really think that this particular issue should take priority over the actual nature of health care reform itself? To me, it is almost irrelevant as a substantive issue, and certainly should not take precedence as a priority over the actual reform. Please explain why you think that “how and when health reform is phased in” is more important than the issue of whether there is an alternative publicly funded health insurance program available for consumers of health care.
One additional point: Please give public option advocates credit for good will. I find it patently offensive that the “pass anything” crowd dismisses us as unthinking my-way-or-the-highway rigid ideologues. If you really want to have a debate, it helps to treat the other side as if their opinions are worthy of debate. We can surely disagree on the merits of this legislation without your side being so dismissively arrogant, I would hope.
Cheers.
The intra-progessive debate that needs to begin is about formulating a strategy to reduce the super-majority requirement in the Senate, just as that was the necessary condition for the Civil Rights era. The current 60 vote requirement for passage of anything important is a relic of the incomplete job done in the early 60s to pass civil rights legislation — before that the requirement was 66 votes! But as a nation, we really didn’t want Jim Crow forever.
Similarly, we don’t want the prejudices of 12 percent of the people in rural states to determine the direction of a rich, modern country, but that’s what the current 60 vote filibuster does.
How do we move to end this without destroying all checks on short term majority enthusiasms?