Eric Adams 2024 Channels Richard Daley 1968
I was already a left-winger when I saw 14, thanks to my socialist grandfather who had come to the U.S. from what is now Ukraine, then part off the virulently anti-Semitic Russian Empire. By the time of the 1968 campus occupations I had already been arrested in an anti-war protest in Manhattan, fancied myself a street fighting man (banned by Chicago radio stations) and dove head-first into the campus protests, including negotiating with the school Administration, galling for President Toll and his stooges since they hated my guts and would appear to blow a gasket when I called him “John.”
Unlike Charlie Watts, Charlie Sykes was just 14 in 1968, and not yet a right-winger— in fact a Democrat, albeit a self-proclaimed anti-Choice one by the time he got to college— but he wasn’t part of any campus protests. By the ’70s he felt that the anti-war movement was “too violent” and that he was in the wrong party. I think it’s what made him cross over to the Dark Side. Yesterday, he wrote about the electoral impact of the campus protests— The 1968 Hangover. They may have forced the U.S. to end the war but they brought us Richard Nixon, who made his big political comeback in 1968, winning a plurality of votes among 3 pro-war candidates:
Richard Nixon- 31,783,783 (43.4%)- 301 electoral votes
Hubert Humphrey- 31,271,839 (42.7%)- 191 electoral votes
George Wallace- 9,901,118 (13.5)- 46 electoral votes
Although Wallace predictably carried 5 KKK states, Humphrey carried Texas and West Virginia and Nixon carried California and Vermont. Different world! I decided to leave the country. But that was after the campus “violence” that drove Charlie Sykes into the arms of the extreme right wing of the GOP. (As you know, he’s recently recovered.) His dad was a Wisconsin Gene McCarthy delegate to the Democratic National Convention— the infamous one in Chicago where the police rioted and beat people bloody— and Charlie was a 13 year old page there and recalls what happened as “police assaulting rioters in the streets.” Not police assaulting protesters? All those years as a Republican…
He described “the indelible images from Chicago were scenes of police brutality, and of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley screaming at a Jewish senator from Connecticut, Abe Ribicoff, after Ribicoff took to the convention podium to denounce what he called the ‘gestapo’ tactics of the police attacking anti–Vietnam War protesters.” See, that wasn’t that hard, was it?
Democrats will be back in Chicago and counting on a more peaceful convention. Police are still largely uncontrollable savage animals who live for inflicting pain and violence on protesters so… we’ll have to see. Sykes sees that “the parallels between 2024 and 1968 are ominous, especially as protests spread across university campuses like they did back then. The turmoil of ’68 not only helped propel Richard Nixon to victory in November but also marked the long-term transformation of national politics. The images of disorder on campuses and in the streets helped break the New Deal coalition apart and drive conservative and centrist voters away from the Democratic Party; they hastened the realignment of much of the American electorate. Republicans would hold the White House for 16 of the next 20 years. Indeed, the politics of the past six decades have been shaped by the divisions that sharpened that year. In 2024, we are still suffering from the hangover of 1968. And a particular risk has emerged from the campus chaos of today: Even as the nation faces the clear and present danger of right-wing illiberalism, the next few months could be dominated by the far less existential threat of left-wing activists cosplaying their version of 1968. Tuesday night’s dramatic police action to clear an administration building at Columbia University that had been seized by anti-Israel activists took place 56 years to the day from one of the most violent clashes between police and protesters on that same campus. In 1968, activists occupied half a dozen university buildings during protests against the university’s affiliation with military research and its plans to build a segregated gym in a predominantly Black neighborhood. That occupation ended violently after New York police officers clashed with protesters and cleared the buildings. Hundreds of students were arrested, dozens injured, and an NYPD officer was left permanently disabled.”
How about re-phrasing that a little: New York police officers crashed into protesters with the idea that they are also judge, jury and executioner? Because the media is getting it wrong again and the police (and conservative politicians who enable them— whether Trump or Eric Adams) are as vicious today as they were in 1968. But, like I said earlier, all those years as a far right polemicist have left a residue on ole Charlie Sykes as hard as he tries to overcome it:
A “fact-finding commission” headed by the future Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox found that “the revolt enjoyed both wide and deep support among the students and junior faculty.” But the protests generated a backlash from the American public. The political fallout from 1968— a year that saw riots in cities, assassinations, campus upheavals, and the DNC riots— was immensely consequential. In 1968, both Nixon and Alabama Governor George Wallace (who was running as a third-party candidate) made the disorder in the streets and on campuses the centerpiece of their campaigns. In November, the two men received a combined 56.2 percent of the popular vote— just four years after Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic landslide over Barry Goldwater.
But many campus activists, who were beginning the decades-long project of romanticizing 1968, felt emboldened. In 1970, after the killing of four anti-war student demonstrators by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, protesters across the country tried to shut down universities, including the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where my father taught journalism. Despite his opposition to the Vietnam War— and his role supporting McCarthy’s insurgent anti-war candidacy— he was appalled by the tactics of the protesters who occupied the university library, leading to its closure, which my father regarded as “a new version of book burning,” according to his unpublished manuscript. A Jewish World War II veteran, he refused to shut down his classes, and when he ordered occupiers to leave the office of the student newspaper, he wrote, he was denounced as a “fascist pig.”
Two years later, in 1972, despite the brewing Watergate scandal, Nixon won reelection with 60.7 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes.
And here we are again. Now, George Packer wrote in The Atlantic, elite colleges are reaping what they have been sowing for decades. This month’s turmoil on campuses like Columbia’s “brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students.”
Donald Trump obviously hopes that history will repeat itself, and that the left-wing theatrics of the anti-Israel protests, on college campuses and beyond, will have an outsize effect on the 2024 election. Like Nixon and Wallace before him, Trump (and the congressional GOP) will seize on the protests’ methodology and rhetoric— this time to further polarize an already deeply polarized electorate. The irony, of course, is rich: Even as Trump stands trial for multiple felonies, he is trying to cast himself as the candidate of law and order. Even as he lashes out about the campus protesters, he is pledging pardons for the rioters who attacked the Capitol.
But Trump would be right to think that every banner calling for “intifada,” every chant of “From the river to the sea,” every random protester who shouts “Death to America,” and every attempt to turn this year’s DNC into a repeat of 1968 brings him closer to a return to the Oval Office.