I-Witness: Why the 2024 Democratic Convention didn't have protester battles like in 1968

Reporting from Chicago: Too many protest no-shows, and Gaza isn’t Vietnam

Chicagoans will often tell you that they are rather proud of the police brutality of 1968. That major example of people power is locally treated as a big joke - the punchline is that hippies thought Chicago would tolerate their rights to free assembly and speech when they most certainly would not. Hippies - unlike, for example, African-Americans - are not actually people to Chicagoans and Midwesterners, though they have personhood in the West Coast and upper Northeast.

Where were the hippies at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago in 2024? I was there and I saw nary a tie-dye.

Why did the 2024 DNC - despite months of concerns that it would be a repeat of the protests of 1968 - remain such a tepid affair? There are macro-level answers to that question, but there are also on-the-ground answers which only people who were there could give to you - I reported from there and this is what happened, and why.

Chicagoans - and other Americans - simply didn’t show up

Bottom line: What the 2024 DNC needed was the arrival of 4-5 divisions of hippies - they needed another 100,000 of anybody - but people stayed at home.

On Monday, August 19, the first of the 4-day convention to sanction the undemocratic forcing in of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s candidate, the “Coalition to March on the DNC” held its main rally. Organisers would later estimate that 39,000 people showed up. The police claimed 5,000, but that’s what Western official crowd-counters do for any leftist demonstration - lie like hell. I put the number at 25,000.

Therein lies the main problem: there were simply not enough protesters to overwhelm the security services, and to then encamp at the DNC’s home - the United Center arena - and to then draw tremendous global attention and opprobrium on corrupt, warmongering US liberal democracy. This, essentially, was the best-case scenario.

It was said that all of Chicago’s 12,000 cops were told to work during the 4-day DNC. Many police were bused in from suburbs around the city; many were sent from nearby Milwaukee; I saw a huge contingent of police from Washington DC; there were also huge numbers of federal security forces, who had been involved for weeks. Just based on my own eyeballs, I estimated there were 8,000 cops at the scene of the protest, and I have seen that number before - they put that many in Paris every Saturday during the six months of the Yellow Vests. Many more cops were hidden in reserve.

Herein lies the lack of a solution: When there are only 2-3 protesters for every one cop, your average protester does not have enough confidence to burst their chains and install local citizen democracy, encampments, etc. The numbers game is a huge component of any protest which is trying to overstep the limits unfairly placed on it, and the security forces definitely won the numbers game at the DNC.

The non-battle of the broken barricade - what might have been

Bar none - and it wasn’t even close - the role of the Palestinian-Americans was the most important in the DNC 2024 protests.

This was the group which deserves the most credit for organising the protests, and everyone who understands politics knows that grassroots organisers are the real heroes who do the real, often thankless work. Chicagoland has the nation’s largest Palestinian community (perhaps 100,000 people) and for months ahead of the DNC they lobbied, protested and even sued for the right to protest at the DNC. Truly: take the Palestinians out of this equation and the DNC protests would have barely been worth mentioning.

This is what I had predicted would happen, but was ultimately proven wrong: For the past year every Saturday these Chicago Palestinians had been protesting the Gaza genocide, and often at major risk. They protested on the highway leading into the huge Chicago airport, they shut down the city’s main thoroughfare, Lake Shore Drive, they got arrested - I assumed they would choose to die on the DNC hill, or at least take some lumps.

Who was getting arrested for being the first to cross the red line? In the main it was the same type of person as the Yellow Vests who got arrested: middle-aged men.

Vesters often told me that they were generally financially stable (union jobs/decent pensions/French social safety net), and this gave them little to lose personally but everything to gain for the future of their kids and grandkids. (Of course, prison sentences are, thankfully, so far less severe in France than in the US.) EU “austerity” is making war against those types of social democratic gains, which truly give the average citizen enough stability to protest (thus the war…), but Palestinian-Americans obviously have no such safety net: these activists were often motivated by the sad fact that they had lost family in Gaza.

Therefore, I assumed that these types of grieving Palestinians would be at the crest of a protest wave which would do what the US establishment did not want at any costs: force a protest right at the United Center, in full view of the world’s establishment journalists.

The protest permit lawsuits had mainly been about how the government did not want protesters to come within sight or sound of the United Center, and the government essentially prevailed. The path of the protest was pushed about a half-kilometre from the entrance of the arena - you could only see the United Center’s marquee way in the distance. There was a park and a parking lot between the protest path and the stadium, with thousands of cops in between, behind a 3-meter-high metal barricade.

When Monday’s protest marched past this park everyone grasped that this was the weakest link, and thus was the most fortified. Some protesters scrambled across the park and confronted the police - one barricade panel was even removed, somehow. This was the chance to flood in and get closer to the arena!

However, the protest leaders did not direct the marchers to this breakthrough - in fact, they explicitly said on loudspeakers to not cross the park and go to the barricades, but to remain on the approved protest path.

Some protesters who took the initiative were arrested; the barricade was soon fixed; I witnessed a huge phalanx of reserve police marching in lock-step to further fortify the scene; an opportunity was indeed there, but the will was not.

Why was the will not there? Don’t blame the Palestinian-Americans

In talking to local Palestinian organisers about this later they told me they were proud of the “discipline” they had showed in not confronting the police.

Their logic is certainly fair: they had been protesting weekly for 10 months, and they knew that one protest - no matter how embarrassing to the US establishment - was not about to successfully get Washington to change their policy on Israel and Zionism. They were not there to fight - their resistance and energy had already been and would continue to be meted out on an intelligent, politically-sensible schedule. The political experience and intelligence of the Palestinian-Americans is certainly quite high, while the organising capabilities of the Chicago group were not in question - I expected them to be the tip of the protest spear, but I did not realise I was also asking: was it up to them to do everything?

Activist Palestinian-Americans are, we can fairly say, rather one-issue voters. But the chaotic problems of the US and the antipathy towards the DNC are not about just one issue, and certainly not only about Gaza. Many pro-Democratic Party Americans are enraged at the Party, yet don’t care about Palestine. Where were they? More on that later, but let’s start with the fact that Gaza is not Vietnam, from the point of view of the average American - the hippies in 1968 were facing the draft, after all.

Look at the security tally between 2024 and 1968 and you’ll find that they actually weren’t very different. Back then there were 11,900 Chicago police, 7,500 Army troops, 7,500 Illinois National Guardsmen and 1,000 Secret Service agents over 5 days. The reports say 10,000 protesters in 1968, but let’s assume - from experience - the usual undercounting. It’s clear the rapport between the forces of order and the forces of citizen’s rights were quite similar, and maybe even worse for the protesters in 1968.

Without numbers what’s needed is the single-most important factor in any war - morale.

In 1968 protester morale was high because of the immediate threat to their bodies - getting drafted to go to Vietnam, which did not exist regarding Gaza - but also the immediate threat to their basic bourgeois-era rights, which are now human rights: in 1968 protest permits were not granted at all.

In 1968 the main violence occurred when police forced protesters to disperse, and then when protesters tried to march to the convention site. Neither happened in 2024 - protesters were allowed to gather, and they did not try to march on the convention site.

Bourgeois-era rights are very ingrained in Westerners - when they are denied their morale goes up, and I have seen this instinct turn into disobedient action time and again at French protests. Apparently the US establishment realised this between 1968 and 2024, and they granted just enough of the human right to free assembly to reduce the morale needed to charge the barricades.

With no Vietnam as a threat and with the right to protest nominally respected, the only way barricades would have been breached would have been in the confidence which overwhelming numbers inspires in protesters. In short, there were simply not enough protesters to burst through that broken barricade, or to be more accurate - not enough non-Palestinian protesters to turn 2024 into 1968.

No hippies? What about the unions? Where was Antifa?

In talking with American political activists from around the country about the DNC many expressed satisfaction that there wasn’t a repeat of 1968, but I think they’re wrong: Chicago, August, 2024, was a tremendous political opportunity to really put leftism on the board in the United States; to draw attention to the undemocratic installation of Harris as a candidate; to discredit Western liberal democracy; to promote socialist democracy.

I’m certain it’s true because I have seen it so many times in France over so many years: protesters need to outnumber police far more than the DNC’s two-to-one ratio. If 100,000 people had protested alongside that park next to the United Center parking lot they would have had the numbers to overwhelm the police and get to the actual site of the DNC. This would have been  done with minimal damage and brutality - or at least it’s minimal enough that I saw this type of thing every spring and fall in France from 2009 until Covid, so it clearly isn’t so exceptionally awful.

(Of course, tear gas is a common thing in France and even a badge of honor - tear gas in the US is a tragedy which provokes teary platitudes. January 6th was the world’s worst affront to bourgeois democracy - protests of the intensity of January 6ths happen regularly in France.)

What’s the major difference between the two countries? The lack of union political engagement in the US. In France the unions can get hundreds of thousands of people on the street nationwide - contrarily, there was no union presence whatsoever at the 2024 DNC.

Unions in the US are not on the side of the Democratic Party, as many think, or on the side of the people/nation, or even on the side of their members: they are on the side of the establishment. A reminder of this was recently given when the huge Teamsters union announced they would not endorse a candidate.The reason? Their polling showed their members will vote for Trump over Harris by a 2-to-1 margin. With such a democratic sanction against her union leadership couldn’t openly endorse Harris, so they did what the Democratic Party effectively did when they forced Biden out and Harris in: they ignored the rules and the votes. The episode shows that American unions cannot be counted on politically - not even by their own members.

I also can report that over the four days of protest there was also absolutely no Antifa or Black Bloc present. That was even though this was by far the biggest political protest of 2024 - in France they wouldn’t have missed such an event for the world, but I guess they only come out in the US for anti-Trump rallies?

My long experience with Antifa was detailed in a 2017 column titled, “What is Antifa? A decade of reporting from in between them and the cops”. The US had just been introduced to them via the far-right protests in Charlottesville and I gave a balanced account of the good and bad with Antifa:

“But Antifa has zero-tolerance for right-wing injustice: they’d fit in great in communist-inspired places like Cuba, Iran and China. As far as the US…I remember watching video of a recent demonstration in Chicago that was brought to a halt by two bicycle cops. Sheesh, that was disheartening…Antifa wouldn’t have stopped marching for cops in shorts, at least.

Antifa has very excellent, honorable ideas in the main, but I denigrate the worst of them as “leftist-fascists”, even though some disagree with that term. But I know exactly what Trump meant when he said ‘violence on both sides’ because I’ve seen it over and over firsthand.

Like any force or tool, it’s mainly a question of how Antifa can be best applied in order to promote leftist change.

[…]

There are radical times when Antifa does need to be at the front, and they have actually come bursting through the arbitrary, provocative and anti-democratic lines of authoritarian dominance. When it happens it is thrilling and necessary.”

Chicago, August 2024, was one of those radical times - yet where was Antifa?

It’s amusing to consider: is Antifa as politically-coopted as unions in the US? An Antifa which protects the Democratic Party cannot be called Antifa (anti-fascist), of course! As my article relates, what often appears like Antifa and Black Bloc is often just an undercover cop in a black mask - at the DNC apparently the cops didn’t feel the need for masks?

The Palestinians were likely happy about the absence of Antifa, but the DNC wasn’t only about Palestine. Certainly, Gaza was on every marchers lips and truly the unifying subject of the protest, but the DNC is responsible for many other problems besides Gaza….

As they have previously been the catalyst for political change in the US, it’s worth mentioning that African-Americans were present at the protest in lower numbers than in the overall national population, and certainly in the population of Chicago. If Black Lives Matter was present at the DNC protests it was not as an organised group which I noticed over the four days - I’m nearly certain they had a speaker on the 1st day. There certainly was no lack of opportunity: the United Center is located in a largely-poor African-American area and the marches (effectively the same path every time) wen through lower middle-class African-American neighborhoods. The locals played good hosts (while I can’t say that every single one of my journalist colleagues were proper guests) but they did not join in.

What would victory have looked like?

I do not believe that the US security forces would have opened fire on the protesters - this was not the opinion of all those at the protest.

Some may believe I’m totally ignorant regarding the 2-3 people a day US cops kill, but you’re talking about overarmed cops in mostly solo, tense situations versus a scene of huge public protest involving rights which Americans (at least nominally) hold dear: the two are not remotely comparable. Just as French police have never opened fire with live bullets on even the Yellow Vests - whom they totally despised - US police would have not opened fire on the DNC protesters.

What about the fact that there were a lot of Muslims at this protest? A completely underreported phenomenon in the US is how 25% of US police now are former veterans, and that means 25% of US police have spent time shooting at/getting shot at by Muslims - the anti-Muslim prejudice by US police is undeniable. When Muslim US citizens say that police do not care about them - just as Blacks say about cops - you should definitely believe them. Given the reality of the US wars of imperialism of the 21st century, plus the domestic Islamophobia war - how could it be otherwise? However, even though US police are used to abusing Muslim-Americans I don’t think that would have been enough to provoke them to have opened fire - many non-Muslims were there, after all.

It’s not as if police vote Democrat, of course, and that’s another indication in favor of not being overly concerned about violent reprisals, as so many protesters were. Again, tear gas in France is normal - tear gas in the US is terrible because of the days and weeks of teary “why can’t we all get along” platitudes.

Police do care about their image, but a 100-150,000 force would have overwhelmed them, and then the protesters could have done what they merely wanted to do all this time: protest right next to the DNC. That’s it! Just like in 1968.

They did not want to run riot in the United Center, taking Nancy Pelosi hostage, stealing Michael Jordan jerseys and defecating in the office of the owner of the Chicago Bulls.

What would have happened is merely this, and I have seen France’s tested CRS riot police defeated many a time in France: a mass of protesters, enraged at the limitation on their dearly-held bourgeois democratic rights of free assembly and speech, push past the cops and merely go protest a few hundred feet closer than where they were.

That is merely what we wanted at the 2024 DNC, but the numbers were not there: Chicagoans stayed at home, and not enough outsiders thought the DNC protest was worth making a trek to.

So why didn’t Americans show up?

Two main reasons, the first far more important: Joe Biden stood down as the Democratic candidate, and that drastically lowered the temperature across the US. If Biden had still been running for re-election the DNC would have attracted far more angry Americans, and things would have been very different.

It’s unfortunate that the oligarchy pushed out Biden - Biden is terrible, but imagine how very discredited Western liberal democracy would be right now if Biden was still the candidate? It’s a shame.

Secondly, it’s worth keeping in mind that Trump had just been shot only a month before to the DNC. The United States - prior to Trump’s arrival in 2016 - had gone almost 50 years being completely politically apathetic. With the low turnout at the 2024 DNC it’s fair to now say that the American protest renaissance of 2016-2020 was entirely due to Trump - i.e. it was an anomaly. The first major assassination attempt in over 40 years probably made many people - in this politically-apathetic nation - even more wary of attending a possibly violent protest.

Yes, the pre-DNC mainstream media coverage was full of scaremongering about violent protesters, as a way to scare the average citizen away from joining protests - this is normal from Western mainstream media. The Yellow Vests were labelled as “wreckers” or “berserkers” (“casseurs”) and, repeated ad infinitum, it stuck, and it helped to scare the average Frenchman away… only after six months of vast police and judicial repression, let’s keep in mind.

However, the idea of a major, violent protest was not the expression of some subconscious fear - it is entirely logical, and a violent spontaneous gathering is still openly expected in this extremely divided, Civil War II-fearing, going-backwards nation.

Security preparations which paralleled 1968, but with far greater capacity for gun violence and technological surveillance; Palestinians who have become the most organised and disciplined protest movement in the nation, but who are limited in their overall numbers; Biden’s standing down; the (first) Trump assassination attempt putting a nation already on political edge even more of an edge; a national media - high on phony joy for Kamala Harris and working so hard to infect you with the same blissful ignorance, especially in the weeks following Trump’s undoubtedly courageous response to getting shot - which completely downplayed and ignored the protests (foreign media was far more interested and present at the protests); a national Antifa/Black Bloc which apparently sees Trump as more morally repugnant than slaughtered Gazans - all this made 2024 unlike 1968 despite similar levels of cultural chaos.

The famous slogan from Chicago 1968, “The whole world is watching”, does reflect typical American egotism, but listen to it chanted here in the introduction of this song by the famous rock band Chicago: they added in audio from the the 1968 DNC protests - a lot of people were willing to go to jail.

Someday August 29, 1968 - Chicago

Nobody in 2024 was talking openly about going to jail. The Palestinians were talking about stopping a war, however, and if it wasn’t for them the DNC protests may have never happened. The world certainly does ask a lot from Palestinians….

Were the 2024 DNC protests a success? In my eyes - not at all.

Certainly, 2024 has not been at all like 2020 - we can increasingly chalk up that period of intense US political activism as an anomaly provoked by the unusual Covid lockdowns. A Trump re-election is just as close now as it was in 2020 - not only did we not get 1968, but we didn’t even get 2020.

Lastly, rest in peace, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. History will remember him as the most effective leader of his region and time, behind only Iran’s Khamenei.

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, South Korea, Switzerland, Tunisia and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of these articles is approved and appreciated. He tweets at @RaminMazaheri2 and writes at substack.com/@raminmazaheri