Did you know? The Patriot Post is funded 100% by its readers. Help us stay front and center in the fight for Liberty and support the 2024 Year-End Campaign.

August 28, 2018

The Spirit of 1968

The Battle of Michigan Avenue is finally over, and it was won by the protesters.

The Battle of Michigan Avenue is finally over, and it was won by the protesters.

The lopsided fight between anti-war demonstrators and the brutish police force of Chicago’s Democratic mayor Richard Daley the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the Democratic convention, was a debacle for the left.

The protests didn’t stop the Vietnam War or the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, the sitting vice president who was much too establishment for the radicals.

The event, broadcast on TV — indeed, unfolding right in front of the hotel where reporters were staying — rent the Democratic Party asunder and effectively threw away any chance of beating Richard Nixon that year.

The New Left subsequently fell apart, and splintered several times over, until a faction resorted to lunatic violence (a return to Chicago in 1969 for a “Days of Rage” rampage through the streets was the prelude to more serious criminality).

Beginning in 1968, the Republicans won five of six presidential elections, and the man who put a stop to the run, Bill Clinton, was a Southern moderate who did everything he reasonably could to disassociate himself from any radicalism.

It’s hard to think of a direct action that more directly backfired than the Chicago protests. But the passage of several decades tends to alter judgments. So it is that, 50 years later, the Spirit of 1968 is in the ascendancy on the left and in the Democratic Party, which is moving toward a more open embrace of democratic socialism than perhaps could have been imagined by the protesters during those fevered summer nights in 1968.

Chicago was a war within the Democratic Party; there’s a reason the protesters didn’t show up at the Republican convention in Miami earlier that summer. Mayor Daley, and especially his cops, hated the demonstrators and showed it with the appallingly free use of their billy clubs. Now, much of the Democratic Party — certainly its rising figures — wants to cater to and capture the energy of the activists of the left rather than resist them.

There is still an establishment of the Democratic Party. The center of gravity has shifted, though, as labor institutions that once were culturally conservative and staunchly anti-communist have faded in significance, and true machine politicians like Mayor Daley have all but disappeared. This doesn’t mean that antifa — a fringe comparable to the Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s — is about to take over the party, but there’s very little check on its leftward movement, accelerated every day by the reaction against Donald Trump.

The radical critique of America emanating from the streets in 1968, as fundamentally racist, oppressive and corrupt, has more traction in the Democratic mainstream than ever before. Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Cuomo, considering running for president in 2020, have to embrace it.

The obsessions of the New Left with race and gender, which came to define life on college campuses in the decades after the ferment of the late 1960s, have now been fully absorbed into Democratic thinking and argot.

The Democratic superdelegates, who arose in the 1980s and were a last vestige of direct establishment control over the party’s nomination (Hubert Humphrey didn’t have to win any primaries at all to get the nod in 1968), have just been sidelined.

The primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old democratic socialist, over Rep. Joe Crowley, a 19-year incumbent and Irish-American pol who is a recognizable figure from William Daley’s party, crystallized the change that is afoot.

In 1968, the Democratic convention hall was fortified against the radicals by a steel fence topped with barbed wire, and guarded by thousands of cops and National Guardsmen. In 2020, presumably no such exertions will be necessary. The left will own the place lock, stock and barrel — because the protesters who got tear-gassed, beaten and bloodied on Michigan Avenue that notorious August night, in the fullness of time, prevailed.

© 2018 by King Features Syndicate

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.