It's 1968, Redux

A po tential political bloodbath at this summer’s Democratic presidential convention, along with Bernie Sanders supporters’ “establishment versus Bernie” campaign motif, shouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers 1968. Back then, like today, the Democrats faced a showdown between their left and center wings—and that confrontation led to violence in Chicago, site of the Democratic Convention, where anti-Vietnam War protestors fought with police in the streets. Inside the convention hall, New Left activists focused their ire not on Republican candidate Richard Nixon but on Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the eventual Democratic nominee. Ironically, Bernie Sanders is old enough to have been part of that movement. Today, he inspires a movement that echoes it.

In the winter of 1967, the New Left, its ranks swelling since the founding of the radical Students for a Democratic Society five years earlier, found its Sanders-style hero in Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who had taken a bold stand against the war in Vietnam. McCarthy’s supporters stayed “Clean for Gene”—a reference to cutting one’s hippie-inspired long hair—and the candidate, thanks to a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary in early 1968, convinced President Lyndon Johnson not to pursue a second term. But as winter turned to spring and then summer, the Left’s more radical impulses began to surface, culminating in the unrest in Chicago that helped elect Nixon, who campaigned on “law and order.” Read Full Article »