Activism, Uncensored: At DNC Protests, the Unseen Flip Side of Joy

In Chicago last week, Democrats reversed the legacy of 1968 by smothering protest and restoring the smoke-filled room. This time, the whole world wasn't watching - it couldn't

“For a while, I couldn’t find a single protester outside the convention, much less a Chicago seven.” — Dana Milbank, Washington Post, “DNC protests devolve into farce.”

“They made me shit my pants!” — unnamed man at DNC protests, shown above

In the runup to last week’s Democratic National Convention, media outlets pondered parallels between the infamous 1968 street slugfest that etched names like Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, and Richard J. Daley in the pages of history. Then as now riled to fury by bloody images sent home from an unpopular overseas war, left-leaning protesters gathered in Chicago in huge numbers to oppose the nomination of a candidate who hadn’t participated in primaries and campaigned not on issues, but “the politics of joy.”

The chaos of the ensuing street battles in 1968 changed the face of American politics. That convention resulted in an iconic trial of the “Chicago 7” protest leaders that saw creative uses of incitement and conspiracy laws, and in many ways marked the end of sixties activism. That convention also inspired reforms ostensibly designed to put voters back in charge of nomination processes. New party rules were designed to prevent a repeat of the 1968 fiasco in which Democratic Party insiders installed Hubert Humphrey as a candidate over actual primary participants like Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern, who took over the campaign of murdered Robert F. Kennedy.

Would protests inspire similar changes this time around? As Ford Fischer’s News2Share crew chronicles in the above 26-minute “Activism, Uncensored” mini-documentary, only a Washington Post reporter like Dana Milbank could have had trouble finding a “single protester” at the 2024 version of the “Days of Rage.” However, marches didn’t have earth-shaking consequences, either. In fact, they barely penetrated the public consciousness domestically, for a variety of reasons that may take years to sort through:

Though journalists are sometimes over-enthusiastic in recollections of their independent spirit in the sixties, it’s also true that news networks in 1968 had not yet been fully fused into messaging platforms for political parties and/or the government generally. TV coverage of the Vietnam War showed violent images of both American and Vietnamese deaths, and there was not yet such a thing as an “embedded” reporter system or bans on photos of soldier coffins. Networks like CBS had also not yet been told that they must only cover the inside of events like the DNC, and not the streets outside. As a result, Americans saw extended melees through convention week, and when police laid out antiwar demonstrators in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel, networks cut to the action in time to capture crowds shouting, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

These images filled American TV screens all week, inspiring a variety of reactions. Some conservative voters were appalled that news commentators betrayed sympathy with protesters (Politico Magazine even published a piece recently blaming the convention for birthing the “Fake News” phenomenon). Others were disgusted by police tactics. Either way, the country saw it all. Newspapers similarly had not yet been instructed to simply black out news of domestic protest:

When the coronation of Humphrey finally arrived, it had a queer feel as a news event, landing somewhere between anti-climactic, deceptive, and ironic. It didn’t help that apparatchiks on the floor shoved Dan Rather to the ground just before Humphrey’s victory vote.

“This is the kind of thing that’s been going on outside of the hall, it’s the first time we’ve seen it inside,” Rather quipped, as Walter Cronkite seethed: “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.” The crowning moment was ushered in with boos and chants of “No, No!” The party also failed to recognize an objection by McCarthy campaign coordinator Richard Goodwin in order to create a phony “unanimous” nomination, news of which Cronkite reported with as much disgusted sarcasm as he could muster:

That 1968 ticket of Hubert Humphrey and Maine’s Ed Muskie was a near-perfect preview of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz concoction sold to the public last week. Like Harris, Humphrey joined after the unpopular incumbent LBJ dropped out in the face of declining support. “Hube” conspicuously entered when it was too late to gain ballot access to run in primaries. He too was vacuousness incarnate, avoiding any talk of key issues in his announcement speech, saying he represented “common sense,” “maturity,” “responsibility,” and “strength,” while pledging to make his presidency a “time for public happiness in our nation.” He also pointedly promised “unity” and “peace over politics.”

However, you’d never know there were any similarities, from recent media coverage. According to the New York Times, “the turmoil and tension leading into the 1968 convention in Chicago were far different from this year’s, which is now characterized by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign of optimism.” The Times didn’t mention Humphrey’s “Politics of Joy” schtick. NBC ran an article quoting Anne Caprara, Chief of Staff for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who said, “We finally excised the ghosts of 1968.” Then as now, NBC said, the whole world was watching, but this time, it was “wowed” by what it saw:

No cops clubbing protesters. No convention floor fist fights. No sprawling encampments taking over Grant Park…

Of course, as Ford shows above, that was in part because police didn’t allow “sprawling encampments.” As for the fact that Harris, like Humphrey, is saddled with responsibility for a war loathed by her party’s base — one Bernie Sanders said may be “Biden’s Vietnam” — that was no matter either, since none of the networks cut away to any of the demonstrations during convention coverage, or fixated on the lack of, well, votes for the nominee.

None of these things were visible issues. And instead of CBS featuring a floor reporter out of breath because he’d been rabbit-punched by security, 2024 CBS featured one whose breathlessness came from noting that in addition to “joy,” the Harris convention was also, “I’ve been hearing,” about “hope.” Fin Gomez contrasted this “high road strategy” with the “more darker” approach of Donald Trump (he said “more darker” twice):

From control over dissemination of images to the failure of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders to bring up complaints about the Biden-Harris Israel policy in speeches to the complete absorption of the corporate press into the party structure, the 2024 convention was ultimately sold as an exorcism of 1968 despite the images you see above in Ford’s reporting. “Chicago’s convention puts to bed the ugly baggage of 1968,” is how Politico put it.

As you see from the News2Share video, “unity” was hardly the theme outside the convention hall. Protests were sizable. Anger was real (it’s hard to imagine 1968 America outpaced 2024 in quantities of “Fuck you!” moments). I’ll leave judgment about whether or not Milbank was right about the “farce” factor to observers who were there, but I imagine those with memories of the 1968 convention will be able to sniff out some differences just from the above video. A generation ago, protesters of a certain age were more likely to talk about shitting themselves under fire in overseas jungles or at receipt of their draft numbers than after a tussle with Chicago police. Here, instead of “The whole world is watching,” the whole world wasn’t watching a protester comment, “They made me shit my pants! Good fucking job!”

There will be readers who’ll roll their eyes at the ubiquitous hammer-and-sickle signage and other protest tactics shown above, but the crucial fact is that there was a significant protest presence, and it was simply cleaved out of the national discussion. Note also that the Democrats successfully tamed critics like Sanders and booted others like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to another party, splintering its intramural opposition in advance of what might otherwise have been a far more contentious week.

The 2024 DNC may be remembered not just as a moment when the party conquered the problem of visual protest, but also for the party’s successful restoration of the “smoke-filled room” method of selecting nominees.

Post-1968 reforms temporarily restored power to voters, and for decades this was mostly seen as a positive, although McGovern’s blowout loss to Richard Nixon in 1972 was often cited as an example of the dangers of allowing voters too much say. However, when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, the Washington Post ran an editorial blaming those post-1968 reforms for letting instability through the door.

By this year, Politico ran a piece openly accusing the activists who changed the nomination process after 1968 of being “responsible… for the success of former President Donald Trump and other far-right extremists in American politics.” This time, the undemocratic nature of the primary process was re-christened a right-wing talking point and pundits and politicians alike decided they would arrange things so “The Politics of Joy” could be sold without interruption. As NBC put it:

Professional Democrats, including convention delegates, can still feel the scar tissue of the 1968 Chicago convention. And they delivered a different outcome this year when, once again, the president dropped out of the race and tried to hand the nomination to his vice president: instant unity, no arguments, no punches thrown. Lesson learned. 

Lesson learned, indeed. But was it a good lesson?

As always, props to Ford (who was literally squeezed between sides on this assignment) and his crew for their efforts at documenting this week of protests. They will never produce an Aaron Sorkin movie like The Trial of the Chicago 7, for the simple reason that the Aaron Sorkins of the world were busy directing the actual convention. Now the whole world is watching that show, and it doesn’t have much of a choice.