Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
Detail of signage displayed at a rally outside the White House in Washington, February 10, 2024, to protest the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza
One year ago this month, when the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of this summer’s quadrennial national convention, the last thing they probably had in mind was the possibility of a replay of the disastrous convention the Democrats held in Chicago in 1968.
Today, unless the Biden administration stops its unconditional military aid that enables Israel to destroy Gaza, that may be just what the Democrats get.
The divisions within the Democrats’ political universe are by no means as fundamental as those that wracked the party (and the nation) over the Vietnam War, of course. But they are now reaching a level where the possibility of a convention catastrophe cannot be dismissed.
To be sure, the Vietnam War directly affected Americans in a way that Israel’s war in Gaza has not. More than half a million young Americans were sent to fight that war; hundreds of thousands of them were draftees. Some 56,000 of them were killed in the fighting.
But the war now and the war then have had some similar effects on American politics, particularly within the Democratic Party. To begin, the rationales for U.S. policy in both cases have failed over time to convince American liberals of their merits. That’s partly because the bloody havoc that both the Vietnam and Gaza wars have inflicted on civilian populations have been visible to all: on television in Vietnam, on television and social media in Gaza.
In both instances, it’s been the Democratic base that turned against the policies. In 1968, only a handful of states chose their convention delegates through primaries or caucuses; most delegates were simply appointed by governors or the remnants of political machines. But in 1968, it took only two primaries—in New Hampshire and Wisconsin—to convince Lyndon Johnson that he’d lost the support of the party’s rank and file, which led him to announce he wouldn’t seek re-election. (That announcement came two days before Wisconsin voted, but the reports he’d received convinced him he’d be clobbered by anti-war Democratic candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy, which he was, by a 2-to-1 margin.)
And despite the fact that the vast majority of the delegates who came to Chicago later that year were not elected by rank-and-file Democrats and were answerable only to party machines, more than one-third of the delegates voted for a “peace plank” demanding a cessation of the mass aerial bombardment of Vietnam and the withdrawal of our troops. Most of those delegates also voted to nominate Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, as that year’s standard-bearer, but a nontrivial number of them had already made clear that even they thought the administration’s war policy (from which Humphrey declined to deviate until mid-October, which proved to be too late for him to defeat Richard Nixon) was a loser.
Biden’s Gaza policy is rejected by a wide margin among younger voters, whose support Biden desperately needs if he’s to prevail in November.
In 2024 as in 1968, it’s the Democratic mainstream, not just the left, that is increasingly appalled by the administration’s war policy—in this case, of unconditional military aid to Israel. Last Thursday night, organizations that embody the mainstream of the party establishment, including the Center for American Progress, the SEIU, and the National Education Association, joined such more overtly progressive groups as the Working Families Party and Move On in a letter to President Biden calling on him to stop military aid to any nation that denies humanitarian assistance to, in this case, the starving civilian population of Gaza. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who is nobody’s idea of a leftist, is circulating a letter calling on Biden to stop the incremental transfer of arms to Israel. And last week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signed a similar letter to Biden, along with 37 of her House colleagues.
That’s called losing the center of your party. (The 1968 convention floor fight over the “peace plank” amendment to the party’s platform, by the way, was led by Pelosi’s predecessor congressmember from San Francisco, Phil Burton, who also was the person who got her started in California politics.)
And what about the left? In 1968, despite countless anti-war demonstrations and the primary victories of both McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, whose assassination ended whatever prospect there was of actually nominating an anti-war candidate, the war raged on with no discernible prospect of an American withdrawal. That brought thousands of demonstrators to Chicago during the party’s convention, whose frustration and anger was palpable and required no explanation. Some but by no means all of those demonstrators had a flair for revolutionary rhetoric and theatrics, which was enough to trigger a violent, club-swinging reaction from the Chicago police, confident that Mayor Richard Daley, every bit as pissed as they that his beautiful city’s convention was being defaced by the presence of these punks, had their back.
The “police riot” (as a governmental commission later termed it), which the TV networks periodically documented as they cut away from the presidential nominating speeches, therefore resonated within the hall as well as without. In nominating Sen. George McGovern (who’d stepped up as a standard-bearer for the delegates who’d been elected to support the late Robert Kennedy), Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff said that if McGovern was president, “we wouldn’t have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” At that point, the TV cameras turned to Mayor Daley himself, sitting in the convention hall’s front row, whose response, clearly visible to lip-readers, was “Fuck you, you motherfucking Jew!”
Well. Chicago today has a progressive mayor who not only would never make such an utterance but would not have his police officers’ backs if they ran as fully amok as they did in ’68. But are Chicago’s current cops really all that different from their forebears? And if we’re still providing unconditional aid to an Israel laying waste to what’s left of Gaza, will the demonstrators who do show up be any less frustrated and angry than those of yesteryear?
To be sure, the parties have put in place safeguards to make sure there is never a 1968 again—not by moderating their war policies, but by forcing protesters further and further away from delegates and cameras. Already, protesters who have sought permits to march in Chicago have been given locations that are nearly four miles away from the United Center, the convention site. Protesters were similarly marginalized at the 1996 Chicago DNC, and pretty much every convention thereafter. Groups have called on Mayor Johnson to intervene and ensure a more prominent presence for them.
But the protest location provided, in a bit of symmetry, is Grant Park, where the police riot took place all those years ago. Surely some reporters with cameras, and protesters and passers-by with cellphones, will find their way out there, and document whatever happens.
Moreover, could the convention delegates themselves fight over a peace plank, as they did in ’68? Given their fear of weakening Biden’s prospects in the race against Donald Trump, that probably won’t happen. But if the Gaza war continues as is, and if our aid to Bibi’s legions continues as is, a fight inside the convention hall can’t be ruled out, either.
As they staggered away from their convention in Chicago, the Democrats of ’68 found themselves in a deep political hole. Nominee Humphrey trailed Republican Richard Nixon by double digits; tens of thousands of would-be Democratic precinct walkers were determined to stay home; and for many, the loathing that the two camps of the Democrats felt for their rivals overwhelmed any fear of losing the November election. It was not until Humphrey bestirred himself in mid-October to say he would stop the bombing of Vietnam that he began to close the gap with Nixon, in the end losing the popular vote by just one percentage point.
Today, polls tell us that Biden’s Gaza policy is rejected by a wide margin among younger voters, whose support Biden desperately needs if he’s to prevail in November. If the dynamics in and around the 2024 party convention bear any resemblance to those that were there in 1968, whatever rifts are weakening Biden’s prospects now will only be magnified.
If Biden is serious about defeating Donald Trump—and he is—he needs to realize that he places his efforts at great risk if he continues his policy of unconditional aid to Bibi’s war machine. Right now, he’s inviting a replay of Chicago ’68. That would be a catastrophe, for Biden, the nation, and the world.
