Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
For me, this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago means returning to the scene of the crime. The crime certainly wasn’t anything that I perpetrated, or the demonstrators, or even, primarily, Chicago’s cops running amok in what a governmental commission later termed a “police riot.” Rather, it was the Vietnam War and what it had done—not just to the nation, much less to Vietnam itself, but, that week in Chicago, to America’s sporadic and some might say half-assed but nonetheless necessary vehicle for social democracy: the Democratic Party.
I don’t mean to exonerate Mayor Daley’s goons as such, particularly as one of them whacked me with his nightstick. This didn’t even occur during a demonstration. On the final night of the convention, a full 24 hours after the cops had cleared protesters from Grant Park, me and my ilk—the remaining staff of Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war presidential campaign—were saying goodbye to one another on the 15th floor of the Conrad Hilton, the hotel where candidate and convention staff were headquartered. (I was 18 at the time, but as I’d graduated high school in January and wasn’t starting college until September, I’d spent the intervening months working on McCarthy’s campaign.) Around 3 a.m., as we were sitting in the halls quietly singing some appropriately mournful farewell songs, fully armed cops burst out of the elevators, and claiming that someone in the hotel had dropped something near some cops on the sidewalk below, employed their batons to prod us into the elevators and thus down to the lobby. My two takes on this were: (1) they’d run out of people to beat up on the streets, making this a purely supply-side police riot, or (2) the hotel had a 3 a.m. checkout deadline that they enforced like nobody’s business.
To the degree that Chicago ’68 is remembered today, it’s chiefly for the turmoil outside the convention hall, while the proceedings inside the hall ground on, impervious to the turmoil beyond its doors—meaning, everyplace in the country where Americans were vexed by our war in Vietnam. In fact, however, the inside of the hall was just as divided and just as angry as the outside was. On Tuesday night, there was a bitter and impassioned platform fight over the party’s support for the war. The anti-war forces were led by San Francisco Rep. Phil Burton, then Congress’s most effective left-liberal, who was later to provide Nancy Pelosi with her entry into California politics.
Roughly one-third of the delegates voted for a substitute plank calling for U.S. withdrawal, which was an impressive total considering that most delegates had been selected by party bosses. The only states to hold contested primaries that year were New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon, and California. (Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee, appeared on the ballot in precisely none of them.) It was the subsequent reaction against such popularly unrepresentative conventions that led to the proliferation of primaries and caucuses just four years later.
As a sometime courier between McCarthy’s hotel headquarters and his delegates inside the hall, I can attest that the convention floor seethed with the rage that the two camps of delegates harbored for each other. That became clear to those watching on television when Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff seconded the presidential nomination of anti-war candidate George McGovern (whom Robert Kennedy’s backers supported after Kennedy’s assassination) on the convention’s third night, as television was showing split-screen images of the convention proceedings and the police riot in Grant Park. “If George McGovern was president,” Ribicoff said, “we wouldn’t have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” An inspired TV news director then cut immediately to a shot of Chicago’s Mayor Daley, seated in the delegates’ front row, shouting a very lip-readable “Fuck you!” to Ribicoff, followed by some classic antisemitic name-calling. But to appreciate just how deep and broad these divisions ran even within the party elite gathered in the hall, well, you had to be there.
The Gaza War, while hugely important to some, ranks far below the state of the economy, food and housing costs, abortion rights, immigration, crime, and the future of American democracy among the public’s concerns.
No such internal divisions will be evident at this week’s convention. Democrats are united in their relief that President Biden stood down and in unexpected joy that Vice President Harris has been thus far so compelling a candidate that she’s surged in the polling and even managed to change both the Democratic and the national zeitgeist for the better. Truly, who knew?
There’s a basis for this unity that Biden’s inability to defend his record and his correspondingly unpopularity obscured: that his policies and his party’s policies are widely popular. Affordable child care and college? Paid family and medical leave? Bolstering long-neglected domestic manufacturing, and making it green manufacturing to boot? Supporting workers and unions? Curbing price-fixing and the monopolies that underpin it? Paying for all this with higher taxes on the rich and corporations? What’s not to like?
When polled on their own, not linked to the dreaded word “Bidenomics,” these policies have been shown to be very popular with the public and command overwhelming support among Democratic elected officials and party elites—save, on selected issues, some of the party’s Wall Street and big-money donors. Happily, Harris’s ascent has unleashed a flood of contributions from small donors, reducing the need to rely on the big money men.
Happily, too, Harris’s initial speech on economic policies, delivered last Friday in North Carolina, doubled down on many of these policies, particularly on curtailing the power of market-dominating corporations that have boosted their profit margins at the expense of American consumers.
Despite the continuing outrage of Israel’s war on the Palestinians (not just in Gaza but also with growing frequency in the West Bank), the anger over the Biden administration’s continuation of military aid to Israel is no way comparable to the anger at the Johnson administration’s war in and on Vietnam. While the death toll of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza War is appalling, the war in Vietnam was on its way to take nearly 60,000 American lives and somewhere between two and three million Vietnamese. Until the war’s closing year, the draft hung over an entire generation of America’s young men, even as the war’s presumed goals became both less achievable and altogether murkier. By the time the Chicago convention rolled around, the war dominated American consciousness. The Gaza War, by contrast, while hugely important to some, has no such claim on Americans’ thoughts; in polling, it ranks far below the state of the economy, food and housing costs, abortion rights, immigration, crime, and the future of American democracy among the public’s concerns.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be angry demonstrations in Chicago this week. By any measure, Israel’s government, dominated by ultranationalist settlers and ultra-Orthodox misogynists, has waged so indiscriminate and bloody a war against Palestinians that the continued supply of offensive weapons by the Biden administration was bound to produce protest. In an age of read-only-what-you-like social media, however, it’s all too easy to go down rabbit holes, and it’s clear that some of the protesters have done just that. The list of demands put forth by the groups coordinating the protests blames the Biden administration and the Democratic Party not only for continuing to support Israel’s war and Israel’s existence, but also blames the Democrats for failing to “codify the right to abortion” (which had all-but-universal Democratic support but failed to pass Congress due to all-but-universal Republican opposition), for failing to pass the pro-union PRO Act (see preceding parenthetical), and for “giving corporations free reign [sic] to exploit their workers.”
This bill of indictments is a good deal more unhinged and flatly fictitious than anything that the protesters of 1968 were demanding, obstreperous though some of whom clearly were. Protester conduct can marginalize a protest; descending into patent falsehoods and fantasies in bills of indictments and lists of demands can marginalize a protest, too. Inside the hall this week, at least, no such furies hold sway.
The primary difference between 1968 and 2024, however, is the difference between Richard Nixon and his party on the one hand, and Donald Trump and his on the other. Nixon was resentful and occasionally paranoid, but was a pillar of sanity and restraint compared to Trump. In private, we know from the tapes, Nixon would fulminate against minorities and try to cover up a crime, but he didn’t pose the kind of threat to democracy that Trump presents. He appointed the judge who would author Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court; Trump appointed three judges who revoked it.
But in Nixon’s time, there weren’t widely popular media networks that were happy to advance Big Lies (though denying their Goebbels-esque lineage) in the cause of far-right creeds, most particularly xenophobia and white nationalism. By the time Donald Trump rolled around, a sizable share of the public was primed for a leader who would make those causes his own and inflict them on the nation, even if that required diminishing democratic laws and norms. To attack the Democrats as the main obstacle to a better world, as at least some and perhaps most of this week’s protesters seem inclined to do, makes as much sense as the German Communists’ strategy of attacking their rival left party, the Social Democrats, as the main obstacle to a better world even as the Nazis were on the verge of coming to power. In the broadest sense, this week’s protesters won’t recapitulate the errors of 1968 Chicago, but bid fair to resurrect those of 1933 Berlin.
Happily, there’s a far greater level of left and center unity now than there was in either 1968 or 1933, as the convention itself and the shifts in public polling should make clear. Let’s hope it lasts.
