The Chicago Convention Riot of 2024?

“So stupid, speculative and provocative” is our editorial on the prospect of violence at the Democratic convention set for August at Chicago that, the scribe Russ Smith writes, “it took me aback, a rarity in today’s political culture.” He also called the editorial’s headline “silly” and its text “preposterous.” We took the liberty of sending him a note saying it was nice to see him on the case. We attached our editorial on the recent movie about the Chicago Seven.The headline that gave Mr. Smith the fantods asked whether Mr. Biden’s convention at Chicago could become “1968 All Over Again?” The text that Mr. Smith calls preposterous suggested that, with the protests over the Middle East wars, it’s none too soon to wonder whether President Biden’s “coronation at the Democratic Convention at Chicago this summer will make the 1968 Vietnam protests look like a game of Tiddlywinks.”The Wall Street Journal had issued an editorial on this head on April 4. It interested us. We’d been at Chicago in 1968, in Grant Park and in the hall where the presidential dreams of the anti-war Senators, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, came to an end. Vice President Humphrey, a magnificent liberal, was given the nod. He would go down in defeat to Richard Nixon. Did the riots taking place in Grant Park cost — or help cost — the Democrats the election?Mr. Smith reckons that today’s “energetic, but relatively small, number of super-duper-left-wing pro-Hamas protesters” are unlikely to induce in Chicago “what happened in 1968,” which he calls “a cataclysmic political event.” That’s because, he suggests, the issue roiling America then was “the draft.” Protests over Vietnam “were large and noisy,” energized by the fact that “young men” at the time “didn’t want to be seen, in caskets, on the evening news.”Well, we hope Mr. Smith is right. It turns out, though, that we aren’t the only one’s wondering what’s in store in the Windy City this summer. No sooner was our editorial issued on April 9 than the Wall Street Journal’s “Main Street” columnist, William McGurn (a.k.a. The Great McGurn), fetched up with a column on the “Obnoxious ‘Genocide Joe’ Protesters.” Mr. Biden, TGM predicted, “may be in for a rerun of 1968, with a ruinous Democratic Chicago convention.”Then, over the weekend, the Times came out with a piece that ran under the headline “How the Israel-Gaza Protests Could Hurt the Democratic Party.” The Times called it “a nightmare scenario for Democrats: Protesters disrupt their convention this summer; they clash with the police; chaos seems to take hold.” The Times reckons the nightmare “may not be imaginary.” For “activists are preparing” to be in Chicago this summer for the Democratic convention.We like the way Mr. McGurn ended his column. He writes that, like Mr. Biden on Israel, Humphrey “was split on Vietnam, having defended the war as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president even though his inclination ran the other way. The result was that Humphrey was perceived as the candidate of more war, leaving Republican Richard Nixon free to run as the man who would bring it to ‘an honorable end.’” Mr. McGurn’s question is: “Sound familiar?”

The Chicago Convention Riot of 2024?

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