It’s none too soon, it seems to us, to wonder whether President Biden’s coronation at the Democratic National Convention at Chicago this summer will make the 1968 Vietnam protests look like a game of Tiddlywinks. The unease arises from the Democrats’ inability to rein in their anti-Israel faction, which has repaid the administration’s capitulation to its demands with an increasing desire for confrontation. That could crest at the convention.

Even before the grass roots of Mr. Biden’s party declared for Hamas, the convention looked to be a site of worry for the president. His age and infirmity have led many to hope for an open convention, where the old man would, like Cincinnatus, head for home rather than, in Mr. Biden’s case, bumble through. Then there is Chicago’s earned reputation as a hotbed of drugs, guns, crime, and Marxist misgovernance. Mayor Johnson is weak on crime.

We’ve observed that in choosing Chicago, Democrats selected the  “premier showcase of failed Democratic policies” and a city that hosted not only the free for all of 1968 but also the 1896 iteration, where William Jennings Bryan declared he would not be crucified on a cross of gold and then bow his head as the crowd as one chanted “Down with the hook-nosed Shylocks of Wall Street! Down with the Christ-killing gold bugs.”   

Now Gaza looms over the Democratic jamboree set for the Windy City.* The protests are not just persistent. They are shot through with a lawlessness that could mar the whole nominating convention. The Times relates how in December “a congressman’s holiday party devolved into chaos and a broken nose.” Even Mr. Biden, the Times allows, has been “heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.” 

The convention in 1968 set a high bar for disaster. The journalist Hodding Carter wrote that the convention spotlighted “a party that had lost its mind.” The founder of the Youth International Party, known as “Yippies,” Jerry Rubin, described his followers as “dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hellbent and leather-jacketed. We were a public display of filth.” The Gaza crowd could make them look like Athenian democrats.

The potential for provocation is an open secret in Democratic circles. The pollster James Zogby, a well-connected partisan of the Palestinian Arabs, reckons that “we could very well get a replay of ’68 in Chicago, which is not going to be pretty.” He calls it a “dangerous environment.” Not the least because the “uncommitted” faction — those Democrats who refused to vote for Mr. Biden on account of Gaza — will control at least 25 delegates. 

It would be one thing if Mr. Biden had set himself against the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment and could credibly present himself as a bulwark against it. Instead something like the opposite has happened. Mr. Biden has been rewarding its excesses — and, so far, at the expense of Israel. A convention that becomes an infomercial for intifada is unlikely to help the incumbent, whom the pro-Hamas faction calls “Genocide Joe.”

If a convention is a party’s self-portrait, Mr. Biden could discover that his recent appeasement of pro-Hamas Democrats will likely beget nothing but more trouble, as anti-Israel zealots escalate their demands on policy. Mr. Biden’s desperation for the Dearborn vote has only heightened his political risks. For a Democratic Party profile in courage, the president is left to look to his home state of Pennsylvania, to Senator Fetterman.

Wouldn’t he make a keynote speaker for the party of Harry Truman. He put the Democrats in the van of support for Israel during its crucial early independence. Yet all the potential Truman-type stalwarts — Senator Schumer most abjectly — have fallen away. Mr. Fetterman has been left to pick up the pro-Israel standard. Will he get a moment in the limelight? Or will Democrats fear a riot if Mr. Fetterman gets a part on the podium?

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* So named by an editor of The New York Sun.