Many commentators comparing the 1968 and 2024 Chicago conventions have breathlessly feared that 2024 will see chaos and violence.
Lost in the hype is the one scenario that really does link the two conventions — the violence of America’s wars, specifically the U.S. war on Vietnam and today’s U.S. proxy war on Palestinians. These wars accentuated mass youth disaffection from traditional institutions.
Just as in 1968, today it’s become commonplace among liberals to decry how alienated young people are from the major parties, legacy media and conventional religion, conveniently ignoring that much of the damage is self-inflicted.
Just as in 1968, young people today are watching raw footage of what they see as genocide unfolding in real time funded by a Democratic president. As a result, today as then, the Democrats’ claim to represent something substantially better than the awful alternative rings false.
In the run-up to the 1968 convention, many youth activists held illusions in the Democratic Party possibly being turned into an anti-war party. They got “clean for Gene” McCarthy and went door to door campaigning for him. Many others believed Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-war rhetoric, even though his late brother had dramatically escalated the war.
Those activists got their illusions in the Democratic Party literally beaten out of their heads by Mayor Richard J. Daley’s cops.
It led to a revolution in consciousness.
Substantial change, they now saw, wouldn’t come from the established institutions of the day — it had to come from “the people” themselves. They saw the press, both major parties and the Washington establishment as almost universally bankrupt, encapsulated in the slogan: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
Sound familiar. “Hey, boomer”?
They hear Biden’s pro-peace rhetoric made hollow by the carnage fueled by continuing arms shipments to Israel. Today’s youths may also be getting a more jaundiced view of today’s versions of Kennedy and McCarthy, the so-called “squad,” given that the latter hung tough to the very end in support of a Biden reelection campaign.
Then-President Lyndon B. Johnson was forced out of the 1968 race by the tanking of support for the U.S. war on Vietnam. Biden’s support among youths was collapsing well before his debate debacle. Kamala Harris will face many of the same problems that Vice President Hubert Humphrey faced in 1968. Both were closely identified with their administrations on all major issues, making a possible Harris rebranding as an anti-genocide candidate nearly impossible.
While saying they support social progress, centrist commentators decry periods such as our own when both major parties and other major institutions are widely held in contempt.
But it’s precisely in periods like this — when millions of people reject existing institutions and build their own — that we have seen the most rapid social progress in U.S. history: the pre-Civil War abolitionist and feminist movements, the Great Depression-era union movement, the late 1960s anti-war, Black Power, women’s and gay liberation movements.
For those truly wanting social progress, periods of mass disaffection from both parties hold great promise for rapid change on long-delayed reforms. Of course, they’re also periods of great danger, as reactionary forces try to fill the political vacuum with their own brutal alternatives, as fascists in all economically advanced countries did during the Great Depression.
Moderates who insist on staying the course for incremental reform are sticking to a half-century-old strategy that has only fueled the right to grow ever bolder and more vicious with each decade. Democrats appear to dither while the far right promises “action.”
To those who predict irrevocable disaster if Donald Trump wins, I point to how a previous generation of young people responded to Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory. They gave up on hoping that the politicians would make the fundamental changes that they demanded. They instead decided that they — not elites — had to make the changes they wanted.
In contrast, for several years, few in either major party raised the alarm about Nixon’s and J. Edgar Hoover’s serial lawbreaking — murdering Black Panthers, perpetrating widespread torture in Vietnam under the infamous Phoenix Program, infiltrating and doing their best to destroy organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected activities. Only when Nixon orchestrated a “third-rate burglary” against the other major party, the Watergate break-in, did they act.
Young people of that earlier era worked in alliance with anti-war forces around the world and within the military, forcing Nixon to wind down the U.S. war. The Black Power movement forced the avowed racist in the White House to embark on the most expansive affirmative action program the country has seen before or since and, mimicking the Black Panther survival programs, instituted free medical programs and quintupled the food stamp program.
In the face of Nixon’s court packing, a reinvigorated women’s movement fought for and won abortion as a constitutional right. LGBTQ+ people won unprecedented gains in mass social acceptance by depending on our own forces rather than appealing for pity from medical, psychiatric or political elites.
All of this would have been impossible without mass disaffection from both political parties and mass mobilizations outside of them. Without that discontent, one or the other party invariably would have absorbed the energy of the protests, neutering them and at best delivering on a pale reflection of the movement’s demands.
Yes, a Trump revenge presidency would be a dire threat to many. But a half century of a sleepwalking center that made bold promises to working people and then discarded them upon reaching office has led us to this sorry juncture. Its repeated attempts to placate the right has only emboldened the vicious wing of the Republican Party to the point where it did a wholesale takeover.
In 2024, the most important question isn’t “who are you voting for?” Instead, it’s “how do we make massive social change?” Change that will not only give working-class people what they need and deserve, but also silence the siren calls of fear and bigotry that the right uses to win power.
Andy Thayer is an organizer with Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws, a newly formed feminist, pro-LGBTQ, pro-Palestine coalition.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.