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My name is Charles Blow. I’m a columnist at “The New York Times.” I write about politics, culture, and equality. With all of the protests on college campuses, it reminds me of the protest movement that happened in 1968 ahead of that year’s Democratic Convention in Chicago.
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The reason that it matters to look back in 1968 is that it feels, in some way, like we could very well repeat the mistake of 1968 when it comes to liberal politics. Nixon goes on to win that election, not the Democrat. And part of that is discontent in the country but also within the natural base of the Democratic Party.
1968 was a fascinating time. The country was volatile at that moment. People had just come off of watching the civil rights movement play out over years.
But they’d also watched tragedy in the country. They’d had assassinations of President Kennedy —
His brother, Robert Kennedy, also, Martin Luther King.
And the country was immersed in the Vietnam War.
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The anti-war protests in 1968 kind of began on college campuses and grew from there. But these were college students. And so semesters end. So people have to go home after the semester ends, so they were out for the summer. But this also gave them a lot of time to strategize and pour energy into a new protest that would happen later that summer at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
They are there to protest. They have said that, even if they did not get permission or permits to do so, that they would still protest. And there’s a violent clash between them and the police.
The police behaved so badly that some people described it as a police riot. The curious thing was that America was against the war in ‘68, but they were also against the protesters because they had, in some cases, behaved violently.
And so this display, even the overexercise of force by police, was not viewed sympathetically by the American public. They didn’t sympathize so much with the protesters as they did with the people who were trying to maintain order. And this eventually, in the grand scale, might have hurt Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee.
There’s so many parallels between what happened in 1968 and what is happening today. You have another protest movement that is bubbling up on college campuses. You have a whole generation that, again, is primed for protest because they grew up watching protests, from Occupy Wall Street and that movement to Black Lives Matter.
They are also protesting what they believe is a moral cause. And just like in 1968, we’re at the end of the semester at these colleges that are having protests. They will end those semesters. They will go home. But they will still have that energy, that passion. And they will be able to regroup, and they’ll be able to all descend on the convention in Chicago.
There were already demonstrations being planned for the DNC in Chicago this summer. And those people planning those protests are saying the exact same thing that people were saying in 1968, which is, regardless of whether or not we get the permits, we’re going to do it, anyway.
I think the Biden campaign is missing the mark if they believe that, somehow, miraculously, people will forget all of the horrible things that they have seen online and on their television sets about the war in Gaza if they believe that, when it gets down to the end, that people will be more scared of a Donald Trump than they are of a Biden administration.
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What these young people are expressing needs to be dealt with on a policy level. The first step is to find a way to stop the killing. If that comes in the form of a ceasefire, that is one way to deal with it. But we also have to figure out how we are going to deal with our own participation in the war in terms of funding and supplying of weapons. Biden has to articulate that to people in a way that is genuine and that they believe that he is trying to put an end to the killing.
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