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.
Color me unsurprised by the midterm results, given the extensive and treacherous crosscurrents in politics today.
Without a doubt, the unaddressed gerrymandering in North Carolina and Wisconsin not only affected the outrageous partisan skew in their state legislatures but it also suppressed turnout, contributing to the narrow Republican Senate victories. Gerrymandering has a little appreciated suppressive effect on statewide races. When your vote has no chance of affecting the outcome in a congressional district or local judicial and legislative races, you’re less likely to think voting is worth the bother and this drags on statewide contests where there is less truth to that despair. That’s gotta be worth at least the 1.5% margins in these two Senate races. Wherever this gerrymandering ended in 2022, like Michigan, Democrats had clear breakthroughs. I suspect if Texas weren’t so badly gerrymandered, it would already be quite clearly competitive. The gross gerrymander in Florida also exaggerated the Republican sweep there.
Even more important factors in the 2022 results, however, have been overlooked. A week later and the talking heads still miss the most important demographic stories of the pandemic crisis: 1) Covid mortality and 2) the great pandemic migration. A year ago, I realized that the survival rates of the vaccinated combined with the partisan differences in vaccination rates would lead to approximately a net loss of fifty thousand Republican voters for every one hundred thousand Covid deaths. Since the vaccines appeared, at least a million people have died from Covid – and that skew in partisan death rates preceded the vaccines when red counties started prematurely lifting mask mandates and closures.
Frankly, 1.5 million dead is just the death rate measured in patients one month after contracting Covid. The earlier Covid variants killed up to 20% more between month two and six but these are often passed off as heart failure, diabetes and stroke – despite the known fact Covid causes and aggravates all of these conditions, which you can see in the spiking “excess death” rates, the vast bulk of which constitute cardiovascular and cancer deaths. These aren’t due to putting off checkups. The evidence suggests that the supposedly “non-Covid” excess death rates are in fact caused directly by Covid because A) Covid drives these types of problems (through TLR4 signaling, if you must know) and B) the excess deaths perfectly track Covid case counts, rising and falling with them.
Most of these short Covid deaths would be older men who tend to vote Republican anyway, even if vaccination rates weren’t skewed by partisanship. (I’ll leave off a psychological explanation as to why crypto-segregationists would flip out so self-destructively at the thought of being caught on the wrong side of cordons and quarantines they had built up for social “undesirables” over the centuries. “We’re not like *those* people,” seems to be the underlying excuse for dismissing Covid’s seriousness, as if wearing a mask was a confession to the world that they doubted the state of their own grace.)
Though devastating, this analysis doesn’t even take into account how long Covid affected the electorate. Though vaccines are less protective against long Covid than short Covid death, there are still ten to thirty million long Covid cases now – some quite serious and involving dementia, stroke and organ failure, none of which is conducive to enthusiasm in life, for voting or anything else. Though long Covid falls more on women, that partisan skew in vaccination still creates a heavy social burden that the corporate press refuses to acknowledge.
Neither the pandemic movements or the deaths and disability have been caught in the census statistics and therefore none of this data is in any polling or likely voter models. Inflationary currents may have shifted some wavering souls against the Democrats, but the lack of red county investments in education and health care took their toll. The 2022 results weren’t due just to young voters turning out who couldn’t be easily polled, but it was also older voters failing to show up because after they rejected reality, reality rejected them.
That problem won’t go away with Trump. Donald Trump isn’t the fever; he’s the thermometer. Segregationists need an ice bath before their brain (Fox News?) explodes from the self-mutilating cognitive dissonance.
In addition to Covid rejecting its deniers, American civilization is also about to get rejected by global warming, financial looting, rent-seeking, uncompetitive cartel control of markets, sickcare and an ever-giving cornucopia of other delusions flowing out of our “big lies.” We’ll need more than grievance conspiracy theories to rescue us from the very real damage.
But if grievance is all you care about, Donald Trump will make a perfect House Speaker. All the incoming “Freedom” caucus wants to do is sabotage Biden and Trump is the best qualified for the job – attacking, offending, making noise and accomplishing nothing. Plus, the job will be a poisoned chalice, suiting most Republicans behind the scenes just fine.