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Dick Simpson was there. It was 1968, and he was serving as the Illinois campaign manager for Eugene McCarthy, whose peace advocacy had endeared him to the young protesters of the Vietnam War. Simpson found himself participating in the demonstrations outside the Conrad Hilton hotel, the site of the Democratic Party’s convention headquarters at the time, as well as in marches to the International Amphitheatre, the since-demolished home of the 1968 convention, which has become synonymous with the large protests it drew and the chaotic police riot it inspired.
Such violence is “not likely to be repeated,” Simpson told me, with Chicago preparing to host another Democratic convention—slated for the week of August 19—against a backdrop of civil unrest. Still, the former Chicago alderman, political adviser, and retired University of Illinois Chicago political science professor sees parallels between the Vietnam protests he participated in and the protests that have roiled college campuses in recent weeks. “The demonstrations across the country—they do remind me of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War,” Simpson told me recently. “Particularly during the 1960s when I was a student.”
Democrats have bristled at the comparison, which has been abundant in the political press lately. The party instead argues that the 2024 convention will look like the one Chicago hosted in 1996, which was held without incident. And that prediction could bear out: For one, Mayor Brandon Johnson, who rode a wave of progressive activism to the fifth floor of City Hall, is not Old Man Daley, and Chicago Police Department superintendent Larry Snelling has vowed to allow demonstrators to have their voices heard. But more broadly, the social turmoil of this current cycle, while intense, is nothing like what was experienced 56 years ago, when the convention played out against the backdrop of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Unlike the Vietnam War, the war in Gaza is being fought by Israel with US support—but not American troops. And for all the heated divisions within the coalition that elected Joe Biden four years ago, Democrats regard their party as far more united around its candidate than its Republican counterpart is around Donald Trump.
“When the country looks to Chicago this August,” Democratic National Convention spokesperson Matt Hill told Vanity Fair in a statement, “the unity and excitement of Democrats will stand in stark contrast to the chaos and extremism stewing in the GOP.”
But even if 2024 doesn’t end up a repeat of 1968, it could at least be a close rhyme. Anger over Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel amid its bombardment of Gaza—which has reportedly left at least 35,000 Palestinians dead—has boiled over at universities across the country, often drawing harsh responses from police and calls to send in the National Guard. The president himself has resisted the latter, but has decried the disorder of the demonstrations and suggested they haven’t changed his view on the war, which even Senator Bernie Sanders—who has endorsed Biden’s campaign—has suggested could be his Vietnam. It’s possible that something could change between now and August, when national Democrats head to Chicago to renominate Biden. But if things don’t change, Simpson told me, the city could be “something of a tinderbox.”
Exactly what that means depends on which side of the Democratic fault line you stand on.
From one side, you might regard the forecasts of convention chaos the same way you regard the scourge of scary polls showing Biden trailing Trump: a concern, of course, but blown out of proportion. “I don’t think it’s great to sort of go automatically to a historical analogy, just because it was the same city,” said Tom Bowen, a Democratic strategist in Chicago who worked on campaigns for former president Barack Obama and former mayors Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot. “It’s a dramatically different time.” Just because there are high-profile protests, he said, “it doesn’t indicate that it’s captured the zeitgeist of the whole party.”
“It’s just not coursing through the electorate the way I think folks, especially on the protest side, are telling people,” Bowen added.
Of course, those “on the protest side” see things differently: While every convention comes with demonstrations, this year’s are “going to be unprecedented, bigger than anything we’ve ever worked on,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and a leader of the Coalition to March on the Democratic National Convention. “They want a convention that goes off without a hitch,” Abudayyeh said of Democrats, whom polls show to be deeply divided over Biden’s handling of Israel. But he and other activists, he said, “want to disrupt.”
Whether they’ll be able to do that remains to be seen. The protest coalition wants to march within “sight and sound” of the United Center, the main convention site, and McCormick Place, the lakeshore convention center where party business will be conducted. But Chicago has rejected protesters’ permits, drawing legal challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union, which has suggested the city is not ready for the scale of the demonstrations it could see this summer. “Despite suggestions by some Chicago officials that the city is prepared for the Democratic National Convention, we are here today because they are not,” ACLU of Illinois communications director Ed Yohnka told reporters earlier this month, after the group filed a lawsuit on behalf of an LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights group that was denied a permit to march a route on the Magnificent Mile, located in the heart of downtown Chicago. It’s unclear what will come of the legal battle, but Abudayyeh has suggested it doesn’t matter: He and other demonstrators will be “marching with or without permits,” he has said.
That’s not to say that this year’s convention will be beset by chaos. An official familiar with the planning expressed to Vanity Fair that they were confident in the preparations for the August convention.
The 1968 convention, by contrast, was a perfect storm—a convergence of societal tumult and an out-of-control police force that was there, as Mayor Richard J. Daley said in an infamous gaffe at the time, “to preserve disorder.” But the Biden camp does have one concern: that Trump will pounce on any hint of upheaval, just as he already has with pro-Palestinian encampments. “It’s really on Biden,” Trump said last month, addressing the college demonstrations. “What’s going on is a disgrace to our country.” Indeed, just like Richard Nixon in ’68, the former president has “encouraged civil unrest as a political strategy,” as one Biden campaign adviser told me, and will likely continue to do so.
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