On the morning after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, it feels like Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech and the tidal wave of support she received from delegates has left us in uncharted waters in American political history.
I sat down today to write a column comparing this moment to the 1968 Chicago convention in search of historical comparisons, but the truth is there are not too many that hold up. This much we know: It has been a wild ride in this election from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month, to the dramatic decision by President Biden to step aside; the sudden emergence of Harris as the candidate; and her resounding speech last night accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination to be the next president of the United States – the first Black, South Asian woman in history to receive this honor.
The eruption of popular support, and what she would call “joy,” as the signature word of her campaign, leaves us in a place we have just never been before. As Harris said with the crowd responding in unison: “We are not going back!” The refrain works on many levels.
It is almost impossible to capture the enormity of the moment, but a graduate of our Report for America program was on the ground in Chicago at the convention, doing his level best to bring home the images of this extraordinary moment.
Anthony Vazquez, a Marine Corps veteran who served two deployments in Afghanistan, covered Chicago’s south and west sides for the Chicago Sun-Times during his time as a corps member. After graduation, he remained with the newspaper and is now a visual journalist covering everything from migration to the environment, and of course, the convention. You can see a gallery of his images below and in them, you will see someone who clearly understands the hope and joy that the delegates were feeling in Chicago and who is in touch with what it means for the predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods that have been his beat for the Sun-Times.
Certainly, this year will be remembered for a very long time for its drama, its political violence and the dramatic turn of an unpopular incumbent in stepping down and the sudden thrust forward of a new nominee. But at the end of the day, it seems 1968 is just not the right framing to understand the moment we are in, despite what many of us, myself included, thought was an obvious comparison just a few weeks ago.
There are some superficial similarities. Then and now we are bound by the same deep division, a feeling that the country is polarized in a way that brings a menacing threat to democracy that permeates the air like teargas. Both were marked by political violence, although the violence of 1968 with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and then Robert F. Kennedy remains unparalleled in history.
In both 1968 and 2024, an incumbent Democrat unpopular within his own party was struggling in the polls to reclaim the presidency. Lyndon Johnson, the 36th president, shocked the nation when he dropped out of the race as the Democratic nominee, and Biden stepped aside as well as he was unable to shake questions around his age and capacity to lead. Biden, the 46th president, put it in his speech to the convention this way: “I love this job, but I love my country more.”
Then and now a candidate named Robert F. Kennedy, then the father and now his son, RFK Jr., entered the race after the incumbent withdrew, and raised the specter of being a spoiler. But through tragedy and violence, in the case of RFK, and through absurdity and farce, as many observers see in the case of RFK Jr., neither of these Kennedys made the journey to be on the ballot in the general election. Independent candidate RFK Jr. was in Arizona yesterday making a rambling speech with more of his signature conspiratorial rhetoric against the political establishment of the Democratic Party. He announced he would suspend his campaign, offering confusing and vague support for Donald Trump.
It is worth noting that the drop in public support for the incumbent Democrat – then and now – centered around a foreign war. This time it is two wars, the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Trump and Kennedy have shared their criticism of Biden for his support of Ukraine in its defense against the unprovoked invasion by Russia, calling it a “forever war.” Polls have shown that Biden’s unquestioning support for Israel as it indiscriminately bombs Gaza, killing more than 40,000 people has prompted young voters in particular to turn against him. For LBJ, it was his escalation of the war in Vietnam and the draft of more than 500,000 young Americans with nightly news footage of the barbarity of the war and images of caskets draped in American flags.
It’s a difficult puzzle to piece together how to constructively explore the history of 1968 to help us better understand 2024. In the early Spring, I shared my conversations with my friend Geoff Cowan, 82, a key figure in 1968, and I decided to go back to him once again.
Cowan was a leader of a political reform movement in Chicago in 1968 and was back in Chicago this week staying at the same Hilton Hotel he stayed in back then as a leader of the political reform movement which took shape in 1968 and sought to transform the political process away from decisions being made in smoke-filled back rooms and to try to create a more inclusive process.
Cowan is once again at the center of the action, watching it all unfold around him.
“This year I am in the same hotel, and that was by design. I wanted to see what it was like to be back here in this hotel, back in the meeting rooms. This was the place where the reform movement took place, and where I could maybe reflect a continuation of that work. This was the place where we helped to reform the party, and I feel like what we are doing now is exciting,” he said.
“So far, Chicago 2024 is filled with joy, hope and unity whereas Chicago 1968, while filled with a great deal of creativity and even courage, was marked by anger and dissent,” said Cowan, who is organizing a seminar for students from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School where he heads up the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
He added, “The demonstrations outside were a different world back then. And there was an anger and maybe even a hatred in the voices back then. Back then, American kids were being killed. There was so much on the line with the war in Vietnam,” he explained.
“It feels different now, it feels more positive. I have not been in the middle of the protests against the war in Gaza, and there are important voices of dissent on the streets here. And I do not want to minimize them, but they are not of the same magnitude and they do not have the same level of anger. We were living in a world in which MLK and RFK had been assassinated and the war was raging with US troops and US bombs being dropped. There was unrest in cities about civil rights and racial discrimination was rampant. Voter intimidation was a part of life in the South,” he said.
He added, “Now the voter participation in the Black community is much larger. Still not good enough, but just in a completely different place. The candidate herself is Black, not something you could really even imagine in 1968.”
This week in Chicago what we saw was an illustration of a political party and its supporters trying to march forward and trying in their own choreographed way to make the country a more perfect union. It showed that the Democratic Party and the delegates who assembled in Chicago were intent on living by the words that echoed inside the convention hall last night: “We’re not going back.”
The post ‘Not going back’; Kamala Harris pushes forward in Chicago appeared first on The GroundTruth Project.
from The GroundTruth Project https://ift.tt/d1SjUcK
https://ift.tt/Pz0IE8Y
No comments:
Post a Comment