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By Éric Lutz
Dick Simpson was there. It was 1968 and he was Eugene McCarthy’s campaign manager in Illinois, whose advocacy for peace had endeared him to young Vietnam War protesters. Simpson found himself participating in protests outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where the Democratic Party conference is located. at the time, as well as marches to the International Amphitheater, the demolished venue of the 1968 conference, which is synonymous with the gigantic protests it sparked and the chaotic police riots it inspired.
That violence “is not very likely to be repeated,” Simpson told me, as Chicago prepares to host another Democratic conference — scheduled for the week of Aug. 19 — amid civil unrest. Still, the former alderman, political adviser and retired Chicago political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago sees parallels between the protests in Vietnam in which he participated and the protests that have rocked school campuses in recent weeks. The protests across the country remind me of the protests against the Vietnam War,” Simpson told me recently. “Especially in the 1960s, when I was a student. “
Democrats bristled at the comparison, which has appeared abundantly in the political press lately. Instead, the party says the 2024 conference will resemble the one held in Chicago in 1996, which passed without incident. And that prediction would possibly come true: For one thing, Mayor Brandon Johnson, who rode a wave of progressive activism to City Hall’s fifth lot, is not the old Daley, and Supt. Chicago police leader Larry Snelling vowed to let protesters’ voices be heard. But more generally, the social unrest of this existing, intense cycle has nothing to do with what was experienced 56 years ago, when the conference took a stand against a backdrop of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. . Unlike the Vietnam War, the war in Gaza is being fought through Israel with the help of the United States, but not with American troops. And for all the heated divisions within the coalition that elected Joe Biden four years ago, Democrats see their party as much more united around their candidate than their Republican counterpart is around Donald Trump.
“When the country turns to Chicago in August,” Matt Hill, a spokesman for the Democratic National Convention, told Vanity Fair, “the unity and enthusiasm of the Democrats will stand in stark contrast to the chaos and extremism simmering within the Republican Party. “”.
But even if 2024 isn’t a repeat of 1968, it can at least be a close rhyme. Anger over Biden’s “unwavering” aid to Israel amid its bombardment of Gaza, which reportedly killed at least 35,000 Palestinians, spread to the country’s universities. , which at times prompted harsh responses from the police and calls for the National Guard to be sent in. The president himself resisted this latest solution, but denounced the disorder of the protests and hinted that they had not replaced his view of the war, which even Senator Bernie Sanders, who helped Biden’s crusade, advised that perhaps it is his Vietnam. It’s conceivable that anything will replace between now and August, when national Democrats travel to Chicago to reappoint Biden. But if things don’t replace, Simpson told me, the city could simply be “kind of a powder keg. “
What exactly does this mean, and what aspect of the Democratic flaw do you stand in?
On the one hand, one can view predictions of chaos at conventions in the same way one sees the nightmare of alarming polls showing Biden Trump — a concern, of course, but overblown. “I don’t think it’s wonderful to automatically add to an old analogy, just because it was the same city,” said Tom Bowen, a Democratic strategist in Chicago who has worked on the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and former mayors Rahm Emanuel. and Lori Lightfoot. Es radically. ” another time. “Just because there are high-profile protests doesn’t mean they “reflect the spirit of the party as a whole. “
“It’s just spilling out to the electorate in the way that I think people, especially on the protest side, are telling people,” Bowen added.
Of course, those “on the protest side” see things differently: Although each and every conference is accompanied by demonstrations, this year’s “will be unprecedented, it will be bigger than anything we’ve ever worked on,” Hatem Abudayyeh said. Executive Director of the Arab Organization. American Action Network in Chicago and leader of the Coalition for the March at the Democratic National Convention. “They need a conference that runs smoothly,” Abudayyeh said of the Democrats, whose polls show they are deeply divided over how Biden handles Israel. But he and other activists, he said, “need to disrupt. “
It is important to see if they will be able to do it. The protest coalition needs to march “within sight and sound” of the United Center, the main conference venue, and McCormick Place, the lakefront conference center where party business will be conducted. But Chicago rejected protesters’ permits, prompting legal challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union, which warned that the city was unprepared to address the scale of protests it could see this summer. “Despite advice from some Chicago officials that the city is in a position to participate in the Democratic National Convention, we are here today because they are not,” Ed Yohnka, communications director for the ACLU of Illinois, told reporters. journalists earlier this month, after The organization filed a lawsuit on behalf of an LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights organization that was denied permission to walk along the Magnificent Mile, located in downtown Chicago. It’s unclear what will result from the legal battle, but Abudayyeh warned that it didn’t matter: He and other protesters would “march with or without permission,” he said.
In other words, this year’s congress will be plagued by chaos. An official familiar with the plans told Vanity Fair that he is confident in the preparations for the August convention.
The 1968 convention, by contrast, was a typhoon at its best: a convergence of social tumult and an out-of-control police force that was there, as Mayor Richard J. put it. Daley made a notorious mistake at the time, “to keep the mess. But there would possibly be an explanation for concern: Trump will pounce on any trace of unrest, just as he has done with the pro-Palestinian camps. “It’s Biden’s fault,” Trump said last month, addressing the university. protests. ” What is happening is an embarrassment to our country. “In fact, like Richard Nixon in 1968, the former president “fomented civil unrest as a political strategy,” as one Biden crusade adviser told me, adding that this strategy “repeatedly failed to be effective. “
This article has been updated.
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