I certainly hope so

from seattle to chicago — don’t forget to bring american flags to burn

Will the 2024 Chicago Democratic Convention Be a Repeat of 1968?

Late August in Chicago was brutally hot and humid, adding to the discomfort of convention goers. The 15,000 young people protesting in the streets added a surreal patina to the whole picture, with angry delegates on the inside of the International Amphitheater screaming at each other and angry protesters on the outside of the venue screaming at police. 

"The whole world is watching," screamed the protesters. The world didn't matter as much as American voters who were watching. And they got an eyeful.

Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland, speaking at an event at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism to mark the Chicago '68 anniversary, cited an NBC news producer who thought the footage he had produced was “a crystalline theatre of moral witness, evil being visited upon innocents”.

But not all saw it like that – a Gallup poll showed 56% of Americans backed the police actions against the demonstrators.

Charles Kaiser, the author of 1968 in America, said: “The biggest impact was on the older generation because they were so completely freaked out by it, this spectacle of anarchy was really terrifying.

This time, the protagonists will be Arabs and pro-Palestinian protesters who, if recent protests are any indication, are going to be aggressive and violent. They will hope for a 1968 repeat. They will do everything possible to provoke that kind of police response.

And there may be as many as 20,000 protesters in the streets to get it done.

“The whole Republican message is, ‘The world is out of control and Biden is not in command,’” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and adviser to former President Barack Obama. “They will exploit any images of disorder to abet and support it.”

If what the pro-Palestinian lobby is promising comes to pass, the Trump campaign may have a lot of images to exploit.