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: