What Democrats Can Learn From the Trauma of 1968
8 min read
The Democratic Party will gather in Chicago this month like a trauma victim irresistibly drawn back to the original scene of horror, returning decades after the 1968 convention to overcome its spell or else succumb to it.
Let’s first consider the ways that the Democratic convention of 2024 is nothing like that of 1968. In June of that year, the murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy took away the party’s best chance of victory in November and killed the last hopes of a generation of young people. Compared with the assassinations, riots, and other political violence of 1968, the bullet that clipped the top of Donald Trump’s right ear last month was a security failure and near catastrophe that history will likely place with other mostly forgotten attempts on the lives of American leaders: Andrew Jackson in 1835, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Harry Truman in 1950, Gerald Ford in 1975. The shot that nearly killed Trump was supposed to change him into a humbler, wiser man. At the end of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the escaped convict says of the vain and garrulous grandmother who experiences a moment of grace just before he kills her: “She would’ve been a good woman if it were someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.” The better Trump didn’t outlast his convention acceptance speech.
In 1968, the single bloodiest year of the Vietnam War, half a million American troops were fighting in Southeast Asia. In 2024, Americans are not fighting and dying in Gaza, Ukraine, or any other foreign war. The hundreds of thousands of protesters against the conflict in Gaza remain smaller in numbers and political power than the anti-war demonstrators of the late ’60s; this spring’s campus upheavals were less disruptive. Vietnam tore the Democratic Party apart in 1968. When Senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary in March, the president couldn’t muster 50 percent of the vote, leading Kennedy to jump into the race, Johnson to withdraw, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey to take his place. This year’s political crisis was not a stalemated war but a declining brain. Old age was President Joe Biden’s Vietnam, the June debate his Tet Offensive. Once again, the credibility gap was fatal.
If 1968 was a series of violent seizures, ending with the Democratic Party exhausted, broken, but still alive, throughout the first half of 2024 the party was paralyzed, numbly waiting for a massive heart attack to kill it and the country. Then came Biden’s withdrawal announcement in July—months later than Johnson’s—and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Humphrey, carrying the burden of the administration’s war policy, was bitterly opposed in the run-up to Chicago, in the city’s streets, and on the convention floor. This year the party’s recovery from Biden’s candidacy has been swift and dramatic. But the same forced unity that gave Biden the primaries despite his obvious infirmity will give Harris the nomination despite her well-known weaknesses. Four years ago, in her failed presidential campaign, she was widely suspected of being an empty vessel. Now Democrats are filling it to the brim with all their desperate hopes.
The winners in Chicago in 1968 were the party’s enemies: the anti-war left and Richard Nixon. The convention probably cost the Democrats the presidency in two ways. One was the disaffection of anti-war Democrats. Norman Mailer ends Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his narrative of the conventions of 1968, by announcing that he planned to stay home on Election Day, or else cast his vote for Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader and candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. “The antiwar Democrats might have made the difference” in electing Nixon, Todd Gitlin writes in his authoritative history, The Sixties. Even more damaging, the scenes of chaos in Chicago turned many middle-of-the-road voters away from Humphrey. An academic study published two years later concluded that Democrats and independents who defected to Nixon because of their disapproval of the protesters “appear to have cost Hubert Humphrey the election.” His defeat was more consequential than anyone anticipated: 1968 was one of those years that turned the wheel of history. It ended an era of liberal ascendancy and began a conservative reaction that continued for decades and in some ways never ceased.
Perhaps the most important event of the 1968 convention—the one that most directly connects it to this year’s—received almost no notice at the time (Mailer never mentions it) and remains obscure. On the second night, Tuesday, August 27, amid the bedlam of arguments over the platform’s Vietnam plank, delegates approved a harmless-sounding proposal to set up a commission that would reform the process by which Democrats would choose delegates to nominate their presidential candidates going forward. It was a sop to furious McCarthy and Kennedy partisans who were seeing the party establishment—the “bosses” in control of most of the delegates—force Humphrey, who had entered no primaries, on the convention. “Few of the delegates who voted on either side had understood what they were doing,” wrote the historian Theodore H. White. “But in their innocence or inattention they had voted for the most fundamental change in the party’s long history.”
The new commission ended the rule of the bosses and opened the selection of delegates to voters in state primaries and caucuses. No longer would a mayor like Chicago’s Richard Daley control an entire state delegation. In the spirit of equal representation, the reforms also established quotas for Black, female, and young delegates in proportion to their numbers in the party—placing identity at the core of Democratic politics. The commission was chaired by Senator George McGovern, who, not coincidentally, in 1972 became the next Democratic nominee, losing in a landslide to President Nixon. The changes put the party machinery in the hands of college-educated activists, more affluent and more progressive than their predecessors; moved by issues such as war, the environment, abortion, corruption, and the rights of the marginalized. The reforms disempowered less educated Democrats more concerned with bread-and-butter issues. The bosses spoke for real voters, too.
So the party began its long journey from the New Deal to the New Politics, from the working class to the professional class, from Truman and Johnson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, from Humphrey to Harris. The post-1968 reforms, a necessary response to the injustice of a convention rigged by the establishment rather than determined by the voters, gave birth to the Democratic Party that most of us grew up with—the one that listens to its movie stars and holds “White Women for Kamala,” “Black Women for Kamala,” and “White Dudes for Kamala” Zoom fundraisers. The party that will meet in Chicago this month. The convention will nominate a quintessential product of the post-1968 establishment: the daughter of activists and academics, a California success story whose selection as vice president in 2020 was determined by the demands of identity politics and equal representation.
Politics is more cyclical than linear. The answer to a problem creates a new one; democratization leads to a different concentration of power, sclerosis, and the need for another transformation. The Democratic Party of 2024 suffers from two of the same weaknesses as the party of 1968: unaccountable elites and irresponsible rebels. The elites are no longer the big-city mayors and state chairs and union chiefs who controlled delegates in 1968. The elites of 2024 are a celebrity class of former presidents, top elected officials, extremely rich donors, and presidential family members. They are insular and self-interested; for much of this year they’ve acted as if their loyalty to one another matters more than their duty to the party and its voters. Meanwhile, the great middle structure that allows a party’s leaders to hear the voices of its rank and file has hollowed out. In this sense, Biden and Harris resemble Johnson and Humphrey: candidates most ordinary Democrats didn’t want but the bosses imposed. It makes sense that, instead of the polarizing eruptions of 1968, we have the consolidating delusions of 2024—Vietnam divided the party, but Trump unites it.
This year’s rebels are pro-Palestinian demonstrators, third-party defectors, the young and alienated. Whatever their political views, their disaffection is so great that many of them would welcome the defeat of the Democratic Party and could decide the outcome in a few key states, such as Michigan. In 1968, the anti-war leader Tom Hayden declared that the candidate who would best serve his goals was George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama, on the Leninist theory of “the worse, the better.” This year’s revolutionary dreams lie on the right, with Trump hinting that he would end democratic elections, and authoritarians such as Steve Bannon and the minds behind Project 2025 plotting to dismantle every structure of government that could check his power in a second term. The rebels on the left don’t have fantasies of taking power. Their impulses are entirely negative—directed, as in 1968, not at the far enemy, the Republicans, but at the near one.
When pro-Palestinian activists vow to bring tens of thousands of demonstrators to Chicago—one organizer gave the unlikely figure of 100,000—to surround the United Center, where the convention will be held, their intent is not persuasion, or even protest, but disruption that will weaken the Democratic nominee. In 1968, the Chicago police and 10,000 protesters—no more than several hundred of them looking for a fight—turned the convention into a hellscape. This time the cops, led by a progressive mayor, will be less prone to violent tactics than Daley’s force, but it’s not hard to create chaos in a large crowd, and a few disturbing images could convince enough middle-of-the-road voters that Trump is right—that Democrats bring disorder and he’s the only alternative—to swing the results in one or two crucial states. Even if that isn’t every protester’s goal, it’s hard to imagine that many would feel much regret. The day after the 1968 election, the anti-war leader Todd Gitlin—who hadn’t voted—attended a rally for ethnic studies and the Black Panthers at San Francisco State University, where President-elect Nixon wasn’t even mentioned. The rebels will leave it to the rest of us to deal with a reelected Trump.
The clannishness of the elites and the alienation of the rebels reinforce each other. Both are signs of a political party that has lost its connection to the people who go door-to-door and make phone calls and serve as precinct captains and turn out the vote. Against most predictions, Harris’s arrival seems to be galvanizing voters not because of her personal identity and establishment credentials but in spite of them—because of the hunger for change. It would be a satisfying irony of history if Chicago once again becomes the scene of the party’s transformation—this time with the nomination of a candidate who is so thoroughly a creature of the party’s expectations that she is able to defy them.
