Where were you when Democrats battled in the streets of Chicago in 1968?
By Matt Bai
The truth is that probably no Democrat under 65 knows anything about that week that he or she didn’t read in a book or watch in an Aaron Sorkin film. And yet my news feed is full of stories about the eerie similarities of that convention to this one, about the ghostly memories that Democrats must now confront.
It’s not like Democrats haven’t been back to Chicago since that bloodbath 56 years ago. They gathered there in 1996, when Bill Clinton (who will speak Wednesday night) was nominated for a second term. They made more poignant history there in 2008, when Barack Obama stood in Grant Park and thanked the country for making him its first African American president.
But 1968 provokes a special kind of nostalgia in the party, beyond the drama of a brokered convention and violence in the streets. It is, in a sense, the origin story of the modern Democratic Party.
It was the turning point at which all-powerful party bosses, all of them White and male, began to lose their grip on the party. It was the moment when younger reformers crashed the gate of Democratic politics, leading to an entirely new way of picking presidents.
After 1968, caucuses and primaries would come to dominate the selection process (they were a much smaller part of it before then), with activists and ordinary voters supplanting rural and urban Democratic machines. Rules were devised to diversify delegates, giving women and racial minorities seats at the table. A new generation of idealistic Democrats streamed into Washington as legislators and aides. The influence of social movements — Black, antiwar, feminist — eclipsed union chiefs and local patronage.
All of which made possible the rise of a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, and then the triumph of Clintonism and the ascension of Obama. But all that time, as the boomers were remaking Democratic Washington, something else was happening, too. The outsiders became the insiders. The reformers became wealthy and entrenched.
The party’s new guard eventually devised its own arcane system — known as superdelegates — for repressing reform movements that might threaten the new status quo. The young idealists shaped by 1968 pioneered the fields of polling, direct mail and lobbying, building huge firms on K Street and vacation homes on the Delaware shore, while the tenor of our politics grew dark and divisive. The vibrant social and labor movements of the 1960s became empires of their own, existing as much to perpetuate their power as to enact legislation.
And when the time came, years ago, for that ’60s generation to hand off power to younger Democrats, much as they had demanded of their elders in 1968, they flat out refused. The Democrats who fought for democratization in 1968 fought just as hard to hoard their power a half-century later, when the party somehow remained firmly in the grip of octogenarians.
I don’t want to speak too broadly here, because some powerful Democrats who go back to 1968 are close friends who have taught me a ton about politics over the years. I admire a lot of what they’ve achieved. But the truth is that if that long-ago convention still has relevance in Democratic politics, it’s because the party’s oldest insiders, the people inspired by that moment, largely failed to honor their promise. They did not reform our politics any more than they corrupted it. They did not diffuse power any more than they clung to it — and cling to it still, to the point where a nearly 60-year-old nominee somehow feels like the cool breeze of youth.
Believe me, this week’s convention will bear little if any resemblance to 1968; protests over the Middle East will seem genteel by comparison, and the speeches inside the hall will be depressingly choreographed. But the ghosts of that moment will float across the stage in the personages of Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, the Clintons and the Bidens, whichever interchangeable Kennedys happen to show up this time. In these honorable yet unyielding elders, the legacy of the 1960s will be well on display.
Yet when Harris finally takes the stage Thursday night, she has an opportunity to banish those ghosts once and for all, by making clear that her idea of reform isn’t rooted in the forgotten traumas of 1968, but rather in the idea that every generation has the right to remake the party — and the country — for its own moment.
If she does that, then Democrats can pack up the hall and leave Chicago behind, this time for good.
