On top of the stairs of Chicago’s elevated Green Line yesterday, I had a fine view of the 13-acre Union Park. I squinted, looking for the promised cauldron of Democratic National Convention protesters, the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” masses ready to rumble at what was billed by the Democratic Socialists of America on social media as the “event of the season.”
I spotted a clump of protesters around a soundstage. I saw a line snaking toward the porta-potties, and, under distant oak trees, I could see four dozen cops chatting with one another, bicycles at their side. I saw great piles of protest signs upbraiding Genocide Joe Biden waiting to be picked up by as-yet-unseen protesters. I saw a lot of empty green space.
The Chicago Police Department had tried to kneecap the rally. They’d initially refused permits for a soundstage and, strangest of all, for porta-potties, arguing that ill-intentioned sorts might try to store weapons in the porta-potties. It had gradually dawned on police brass that absent porta-potties, thousands of protesters would have to otherwise avail themselves of the few bushes in the park. They’d relented.
Liberals and left supporters of Kamala Harris had worried that these protests might fire a destructive fury and hurt her candidacy. They’d summoned memories of the anti–Vietnam War protests at the Democrats’ Chicago convention in 1968, when Mayor Richard Daley’s cops wielded billy clubs and thumped skulls, leaving an indelible mark on the national consciousness.
But the Crashing the Party protest was to the protests of Chicago 1968 as a scouting squad was to an army. Several newspapers referred to “thousands of protesters,” but that was reportorial sleight of hand. Organizers had forecast 50,000 protesters, and even more. Later on this day, an organizer would tell me that the number was 15,000, but I could tell that her heart was not in it. I’d start the bidding at 2,000 and top out at a probably overly generous 5,000 people.
The New York Times initially described the rally as “a coalition of more than 200 groups, which represented a range of liberal causes.” The newspaper later changed “liberal causes” to “progressive causes,” and thank God for that. Most of the protesters would have been despondent at being described as liberal.
There were the National Students for Justice in Palestine, whose website refers to living in “occupied Turtle Island,” an obscure reference to the cosmology of several Native American tribes. There were varieties of socialists, Trotskyites, the Revolutionary Communists of America (“We are the Communist generation,” its website proclaims), and the Denver Communists, which—who knew?—comprise their own ideological grouping. Two groups sided with the government of North Korea. Two bands of anarchists, swathed head to toe in stylish black, with masks and helmets and the occasional shield, marched through. Two young men carried a yellow People’s Defense Units flag, the standard of Kurdish anarchists.
A man, neck wrapped in a keffiyeh, carried a sign that caught the tenor of the day: Decolonize everywhere now!
I appreciated the possible feint at humor. I yearned for the Dada spirit of the Yippies, who in 1968 called a Chicago press conference to nominate a pig—by the name of Pigasus—as their candidate for president.
Too much of the rhetoric yesterday was heavy on “the masses” rising and the “war criminals” at the DNC getting evicted. It underlined what is self-marginalizing about this movement. The anxious many in liberal and left-leaning households hope Harris and the Democrats can pull off their last-minute switch, yet here, speakers drew cheers denouncing “Killer Kamala” and “Genocide Joe.”
Don Rose, now 95, has been a left-liberal activist and political consultant for seven decades, and experienced the 1968 fury up close. He told me about academic research showing that most Americans ended up blaming the protesters, not the police riot. Hubert Humphrey was defeated, and Richard Nixon extended the Vietnam War another five years.
“Do you threaten to abandon the party, and put the cause above the election?” he said. “That’s what gave us Nixon.”
Protesters I interviewed said that such arguments gave them no pause. (More than a few of the organizers wore N95 masks for reasons obscure to me—the protest was outdoors on a breezy day.) If Donald Trump triumphs, so be it. The left’s agenda, the justice of the Palestinian cause, cannot be held hostage to war criminals in the Democratic Party. Andy Thayer, a left and gay activist, wrote a column in the Chicago Tribune arguing: “The most important question isn’t ‘who are you voting for?’ Instead, it’s ‘how do we make massive social change?’”
It was impressively daft.
Some protesters, of course, were there because they have a personal connection to the conflict, because they have family living in Gaza and worry daily for their safety and mourn those who have died. Some, a minority, acknowledged too the horrors of the slaughter perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 of last year. “I wish the Israelis had not taken the bait as we did after 9/11,” Keith Plum, who teaches English in a Chicago public high school, told me. Many of Plum’s students came to the United States with their families from war-torn nations.
My conversation with another fellow, Samer Abueid, went in a different direction. He was a Chicago native of Palestinian descent, and spoke of growing up on the South Side with friends of all sorts, Jews too. Our conversation went along pleasantly until I said, Look, after Hamas attacked and slaughtered kibbutz residents, many of whom were leftists favorable to Palestinians, what was Israel to do?
Abueid put his hand on his broad chest. “I believe to the bottom of my heart it was an inside job,” he replied. Huh? I replied. “Hamas,” he said, “had nothing to do with it.” Then he spoke of the Rothschilds and conspiracies, and I moved on.
In the end, the protesters lined up. On the far corner, an end-of-days Christian preacher promised protesters that Christ “would vomit you out his mouth.” Fortified by that image, the protesters, several of whom held large papier-mâché heads depicting Harris and Biden with bloody vampire teeth, paraded off toward the convention, as one group chanted: “We will not be useful idiots.”