The DNC’s Chicago convention won’t look like 1968
When I told my partner-in-blog I’d been elected a North Carolina delegate to the 2024 DNC convention in Chicago, her advice was to bring a flak jacket. The thought had occurred to me. Those of a certain age remember too well what happened in Chicago at the 1968 convention. It is another reason a 2016 Bernie Sanders delegate insisted I run after Ezra Klein’s reverie about an open convention. Plus, anything might happen between April and August. He wanted me there in case things go off the rails. As things have in Chicago.
David Frum writes in The Atlantic why, security-wise, the kind of disruptions Chicago saw in 1968 are unlikely to happen again. Even as American campus protests over the Israeli prosecution of a war in the Gaza Strip draw headlines, 2024 is not 1968. Protesters presuming to replicate 1968 (as some will) are deluding themselves, Frum explains:
From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.
National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.
Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.
Campuses are lightly controlled and lightly policed, Frum adds. “Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.”
Disruptions like blocking bridges and protests inside the Cannon Office Building on Capitol Hill involve “old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.”
National Special Security Events are different animals. Security at the 2012 convention in Charlotte was tight. (I attended on a press pass.) No one gets past the security perimeter without credentials approved by the party host committee. Protests outside the 2016 Philadelphia convention by a few N.C. Bernie delegates from my district amounted to (in my friend’s reporting) mostly face-painting and fierce crying.
With Jan. 6 informing planning, and with subsequent prosecutions as a point of reference, it is less likely any hopes of disrupting the DNC convention will remain hopes. Frum concludes:
Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.
Guess I’ll leave the flak jacket at home.
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