Chicago’s DNC chaos in 1968 isn’t just haunting the 2024 election. In many ways, that chaos never stopped

Andrew Preston is a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge.

Chicago. It had to be Chicago.

The last time the Democrats forced an incumbent to abandon his re-election bid was in 1968, when they also held their convention in Chicago.

Facing primary challenges from senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson used a prime time address from the White House to declare, at the end of a long speech about the war in Vietnam, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” LBJ dropped his bombshell in March, and the Democratic National Convention opened five months later.

Johnson may not have been there, but Vietnam followed the Democrats to Chicago. McCarthy had challenged Johnson over the war, and Kennedy was also a critic. But McCarthy’s campaign made little headway, Kennedy was assassinated in June, and there was little to stop the party establishment from anointing LBJ’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey.

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Angered by LBJ’s conduct of the war, thousands of students and other radical youth descended on Chicago to confront the Democratic grandees.

Protests soon turned violent, and the DNC of August, 1968, became notorious as one of the worst episodes of violence in what was an exceptionally violent period in American history. Student protesters chanted “The whole world is watching!” and the Democrats never regained their footing.

Despite the trouble in Chicago, the election was close, and Republican challenger Richard Nixon won by only a half-million votes, or 0.7 per cent of those cast. Even so, the result was clear, with Nixon carrying 32 states and marking a turning point toward an era of GOP dominance.

Until Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, for the next four decades only two Democrats, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were able to capture the White House. Not coincidentally, both were centrists with a strong Southern drawl who could appeal not just to liberals but to moderates and independents. Rather than challenging the Republican status quo, Mr. Carter and Mr. Clinton illustrated its power.

It’s easy to draw analogies between 1968 and today, with Joe Biden as LBJ, Donald Trump as Nixon, and – unlikely as it appears – Kamala Harris as Hubert Humphrey. Yet while these straight-line legacies resonate, they’re not especially revealing. The ghosts of Chicago 68 continue to haunt American politics, but we have to look more closely to see where they lie.

People remember Chicago 68 for violent protest and student radicals running amok. But while it’s true that anti-war youth battled police on city streets and in Grant Park, it was in fact the police who were the troublemakers instigating violence.

The Chicago Police Department’s rank-and-file were full of white working-class men. Many had been in the military, and many more had friends and relatives serving in Vietnam. Their support for Johnson’s war was solid not because they grasped the strategic nuance of deterrence or worried that the domino theory would topple anti-communist governments in Thailand and Indonesia and threaten the security of South Korea and Japan. Their support for LBJ was more instinctive than that. They were vehemently anti-communist, but, even more, they automatically supported their country in a time of war.

The cops’ anger at privileged college students protesting the war and refusing to fight was visceral. Working-class kids didn’t question the war, but even if they did they couldn’t use college deferments to get out of going to Vietnam. For good reason, historians have dubbed Vietnam the “working-class war.” The demonstrators in Chicago were mostly peaceful and unarmed, but the CPD attacked them as if a riot was already in full swing. A riot did in fact ensue, but it was a police riot. The anti-war protesters claimed they would “bring the war home,” and the Chicago police were all too happy to oblige. They would teach these children of privilege a lesson.

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But the police represented something even more than the “real” America. They were in the vanguard of a redefinition of class, one in which social hierarchy – what divided “the people” from “the elite” – was no longer determined by material wealth but more by cultural attitudes.

Before the 1960s, what separated the people from the elite was simple – money, and all the power that came with it – but the nature of class changed in the sixties. The children of the elite were able to avoid the hard work of being patriotic American citizens – fighting the nation’s wars, policing its streets, doing its hard, physical jobs. While college kids used their education and connections to avoid going to Vietnam and instead protest national traditions on the status of minorities and women, the white working class loyally continued doing the nation’s dirty work as soldiers, cops, construction workers and so on.

The educated liberal elite now became defined by their attitudes toward America – by their patriotism – rather than solely by their wealth, and “the people” now defined their status not by their modest means, but because they loved America. They had an unshaken belief that America was the greatest country in the world. They loved America first. And they, and not the Marx-quoting, Mao-reading students, were the “real” Americans.

A story in Time magazine captured the moment perfectly. During the violence at the DNC in Chicago, a college student shouted out, while being beaten senseless, “Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat!” The cop raised his club and, just before delivering the knockout blow, yelled back, “I am the proletariat.” A new kind of class war had begun.

Populism isn’t inherently right-wing or left-wing – it can be both – but all populist movements are waged by the people against the elite. By their very nature, populists are angry – a happy populist is a very rare breed – because they believe that elites are sabotaging the nation. This is why the populist vernacular relies on words like “treason,” “traitor” and “betrayal.” It’s also why populists seek to “defend,” “rescue” or “save” their country from elites who want to change it. And because the nation is the embodiment of the people, a betrayal of the country is a betrayal of the people.

Almost a year to the day after his victory in November, 1968, responding to the largest anti-war demonstrations to date, Nixon expressed this populist sentiment by calling on the “silent majority” of Americans to back him against the anti-war movement.

But another figure from the epochal 1968 presidential election looms even larger than Nixon in the rise of right-wing populism: George Wallace. Launched to the governorship of Alabama in 1963 on a fiercely anti-civil rights platform, Wallace became a national figure when he opposed the desegregation of the state university by physically blocking the entrance to the campus for Black students in what became known as “the stand in the schoolhouse door.”

Yet, there was more to Wallace’s politics than racism. The ultimate political opportunist, pivoting from an agnostic stand on civil rights early in his career to fire-eating segregationism at the height of the civil-rights revolution in the 1960s, he also became a self-styled defender of the common man, a class warrior who championed the cause of the white working class and attacked civil rights as an infringement of local culture, custom and tradition by a distant liberal elite.

In 1968, Wallace ran for president as a third-party candidate challenging the status quo of the two-party system. Borrowing from earlier generations of populists such as William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long, Wallace’s platform was a highly combustible populism that combined the Democratic approach to economics with Republican attitudes to cultural and social issues. While endorsing an activist government role for social security and job creation, he also broadened his opposition to civil rights to include hostility to the era’s other rights revolutions and sexual liberations.

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This was in fact Wallace’s attempt to rescue the New Deal order first created by Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the 1930s to the 60s, FDR’s Democrats ruled national politics by promising economic equality but mostly ignoring pleas for racial justice. This generated economic prosperity and social stability for whites of all classes, and so long as the Democrats were the party of the New Deal a liberal consensus reigned in American politics. But when LBJ launched his Great Society, and sought to make the Democrats the party of African-American civil rights, the liberal consensus began to fracture. With the failure of the war in Vietnam and the rise of the anti-war movement, that initial fracture cracked wide open. Whites, especially but not only in the South, fled the party in droves.

But where would they go? Guided by former-Dixiecrats-turned-Republicans such as Strom Thurmond, Nixon wooed working-class whites with dog-whistle messaging about “states’ rights” and “law and order.” Yet disaffected working-class whites didn’t all turn to Nixon. Many instead looked to Wallace, who siphoned off enough votes from both Humphrey and Nixon – across the Sun Belt of the South and Southwest but also in the deindustrializing Rust Belt cities of the Northeast and Midwest – to carry five states in the electoral college and win 13.5 per cent of the popular vote.

On stage, Wallace was a showman, and his brash talk and lack of a rhetorical filter could entertain crowds in ways that Nixon and Humphrey could only dream of. But Wallace wasn’t just a carnival barker – his message bristled with anti-elite resentment, an overall tone that his biographer Dan T. Carter has aptly called “the politics of rage.” That proletarian, baton-wielding cop in Chicago could well have been a Wallace supporter; today, he’d probably be a MAGA stalwart and all-in with J.D. Vance.

Wallace’s anger didn’t send him to the White House, but it did help change U.S. politics. One of the reasons Donald Trump’s populism has resonated so deeply is that he’s not only tapped into Wallace’s politics of rage, he’s deliberately echoing the other right-wing populists who followed in the Alabama governor’s wake.

During his first campaign and presidency, Mr. Trump drew on deep-running, fast-flowing currents of resentment in American politics, including Nixon’s “silent majority.” From Reagan Democrats to Ross Perot’s anti-free trade “giant sucking sound” to Patrick Buchanan’s crusade of “peasants with pitchforks,” conservatives down to Mr. Trump have consciously appealed to the white working class. Wallace promised to “Stand Up For America.” Mr. Trump, plagiarizing Ronald Reagan’s signature campaign slogan from 1980, wants to “Make America Great Again.”

This does not necessarily mean Mr. Trump will win in November. Pure populism has rarely been a vote-winner. With the exceptions of Nixon and Mr. Reagan, all of Mr. Trump’s political role models, including Wallace, ran insurgent campaigns that were doomed to fail, and Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 was a statistically improbable fluke made possible by a combination of Hillary Clinton’s strategic ineptitude and the quirks of the electoral college. Nixon and especially Mr. Reagan won because they knew how to temper the politics of rage with the promise of hope. Despite the political gods giving him one opportunity after another to appeal to the better angels of America’s nature, Mr. Trump doesn’t seem able to stray from the dark side of “American carnage.”

Yes, Mr. Trump could still win: Despite Ms. Harris’s strong start and Mr. Biden’s support for her (a key difference from 1968, when LBJ made Humphrey’s life as difficult as possible), Mr. Trump might still prevail. But even if he loses, Americans will still be living in a long-divided country defined by the restructuring of class relations in the sixties. That fracture won’t heal any time soon. It’s where the appeal of Trumpism comes from, and in this sense the United States is still contesting the election of 1968. And the Democrats are once again returning to Chicago.

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