Will Chicago ’24 be Chicago ‘68?
A sitting Democratic President announced that he would not stand for a second term.
His Vice President was officially nominated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August.
Protesters, mostly young, vowed they would take to the streets in Chicago during the convention.
The media coverage of the Chicago convention was more about the rioting in the streets than what was going on inside, as is our memory of it.
The year was 1968, the President was Lyndon Johnson and the Vice President who became the Democratic nominee was Hubert Humphrey.
“History repeats itself,” said Karl Marx, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
In 2024, the President who stepped aside was Joe Biden, the Vice President is Kamala Harris, and the protesters, who have vowed to descend upon Chicago are the same students who a few months ago shut down campuses across the country and dominated the media with their protests over Gaza.
If they come, and they promise to, the media will inexorably be drawn to the protests in the streets as opposed to what Kamala and Walz have to say. (Ironically, both Tim Walz and Hubert Humphrey were from Minnesota). What will resonate with the public will be chaos in the streets of Chicago. Today, no one remembers what Humphrey said in Chicago, but the street riots left an indelible impact on American history.
This will give Trump exactly what he has been looking for — a viable argument with which to attack Harris and Walz — the inability of Democrats to maintain order in their cities.
Ironically, this fits right into Trump’s plans for urban centers run by Democrats. “We’ll take over the horribly run capital of our nation, Washington, DC,” Trump said before the NRA a few months ago. Project 2025 clearly outlines plans for taking control of cities run by Democratic officials. Trump recently called Atlanta “a record setting Murder and Violent Crime War Zone.”
The irony (or perhaps the farce) is that these protest marches often achieve exactly the opposite of what they hope to achieve. In the case of the DNC and 1968, the anti war protesters succeeded in putting Richard Nixon in the White House. Nixon and Kissinger would prolong the war for another four years, killing thousands in the process.
In the case of Kamala and the Palestinian protesters, they may be enough to put Trump back in the White House — the best friend of Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu would like to see Trump back in the Oval Office — maybe so much so that he’ll do all he can to send US college students to Chicago with their flags and banners. We’ll have to see.
Here’s a note for those who might be tempted to take to the streets in Chicago later this month: Political theater is a lot of fun — until it isn’t.
