WILL CHICAGO 2024 BE LIKE CHICAGO 1968?

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore notes that Democrats will hold their convention in Chicago this year, at a time when left-wingers are angry at the party about its involvement in a war. So will 2024 be like 1968? Kilgore says no -- but I think there's somewhat more risk than he's willing to acknowledge. Here are some of the reasons he's not worried:

Gaza isn’t Vietnam.

... There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year....

Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement.

Yes, but when I watch how people in America talk about crime, or economic conditions, I question whether it's appropriate to use objective measures to compare the past and the present, given the fact that so many Americans base their response on vibes. Crime is down, inflation is cooling, jobs are plentiful, yet Americans talk as if we have murder rates comparable to the crack years and an economic struggles comparable to 1970s double-digit inflation.

Gaza protests clearly aren't as widespread as Vietnam protests in the 1960s. But I bet the issue will draw huge crowds to Chicago. (One way I'm certain that 2024 will be like 1968 is that there's likely to be much more anger at the Democratic convention than at the Republican convention, even though the Republican nominee in both years was more hawkish than the Democrat.)

Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.

Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley ... was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.

Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson ... is a Black progressive and labor activist.... While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.

But in 2024, Johnson is more likely to be attacked for failing to be repressive than for being repressive. Footage of any violence or property damage will be endlessly looped on Fox News -- and probably on CNN and the legacy networks.

(On the other hand, the modern police tactic is to bottle up such demonstrations and keep them far from their targets. That's not great for free speech, but it might keep these demos from getting out of hand.)

The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.

The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks.... Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.

Yes, but what will "the optics of the various media outlets covering" the convention be like? Fox will be looking for chaos instigated by young pro-Palestinian protestors, many of them from elite colleges, whom it will characterize, accurately or not, as anti-Semititic -- but so will The New York Times, if its current news judgment is any indication:

I don't think there'll be as much chaos in the streets of Chicago this year as there were in 1968. I think modern crowd control tactics will limit the chaos. I think many people tune out politics altogether these days and won't notice any news from the convention. But while history probably won't repeat in Chicago, it might rhyme a little.