The modern Democratic Party was born not in the distant past but in the battle for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1968. As that year began, Democrat Lyndon Johnson sat in the Oval Office, Democrats had comfortable majorities in the House and Senate, and William O. Douglas was writing majority opinions for the Warren court. New programs like Medicare and the War on Poverty were advancing economic equality a step beyond the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had finally begun to address America's shame of racial discrimination. But all was not well in the republic. It would take Democrats willing to fight other Democrats to end a tragic war and preserve the Constitution.
Fearing that he would look soft on Communism, Lyndon Johnson had escalated America's involvement in the Vietnam War. When the war didn't go well, he responded to growing opposition within his own party and especially among the young by dissembling and repressing opposition. Johnson was employing many of the same ruthless methods that Nixon and G. W. Bush would later use so that he could continue to prosecute a losing war effort even as public support waned.
Eugene McCarthy was not the first Senate Democrat to oppose the Vietnam War, but he was the only one willing to take on an incumbent President in the early Democratic primaries. His success coaxed Bobby Kennedy into the race, much to McCarthy's chagrin, and the two anti-war candidates combined garnered nearly 80% of the total primary vote. Johnson was humiliated and dropped out of the race in a stunning announcement in March, but was replaced by his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, a longtime liberal maverick, who was cast in the uncomfortable role of defender of the status quo.
After Kennedy was killed the night he won the California primary, the antiwar forces were in disarray. They had won overwhelming support in the primaries, but most of the delegates were chosen by party bosses like the kingmaker Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, who had played a major role in selecting Stevenson and Kennedy as nominees. Further crippling the antiwar forces was the fact that the Kennedy and McCarthy forces would not even work together because of the mutual bitterness that had arisen in the primary campaign.
The Chicago Convention was supposed to be Dick Daley's pageant featuring the nomination of an incumbent Democrat, but it turned out to be a death match for control of the heart and direction of the Democratic Party. A few weeks before the convention, George McGovern, an early opponent of the war, announced for the Presidency. He was close to the Kennedy family--Bobby had called him the "one decent man" in the Senate--and many Kennedy delegates who were unwilling to support McCarthy rallied to him. As the week of the convention began, Stephen Smith, a Kennedy inlaw, Mcgovern and Dick Daley were trying to get Teddy Kennedy to assume the mantle, but at the last moment, the Senator from Massachusetts felt he was too young at 36 to run.
As delegates engaged in an impassioned debate on a proposed "peace" plank in the platform, young people demonstrated outside the convention hall. The Chicago police, the Army, the National Guard and the Secret Service, in what a later commission termed a police riot, beat hundreds of demonstrators and even some of the press trying to cover the event.
By the time Senator Abraham Ribicoff took the podium to nominate George McGovern for President, the Humphrey delegates had already defeated the peace plank and plenty of blood had been spilled on the streets. Ribicoff looked over the convention floor and down at Richard Daley who sat with his henchmen front and center. What followed will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it live or on television:
Mr. Chairman, I have a speech here, but as I look out at the confusion in this hall and watch on television the turmoil and violence that are competing for the attention of the American people with what goes on here, there is something else in my heart tonight and not the speech I had prepared to give.
Mr. Chairman, the young people of this country have rallied to the standard of George McGovern as they rallied to the standards of John and Robert Kennedy, and with George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.
Daley stood, shook his first at Ribicoff, threatened him and cursed him. Ribicoff never wavered, never looked away from the most powerful man in the Democratic Party. Meeting Daley's hate-filled glare, Senator Ribicoff said:
How hard it is to accept the truth.
(I encourage you to hear the speech with commentary by George McGovern available here. Look for the blue "Audio" link halfway down.)
But Daley (and Johnson from afar) still controlled the convention. The reactionary forces had won every credentials fight, every platform battle and the nomination for poor Humphrey. By the last night when a moving film about Robert Kennedy was played, there was little those on the convention floor or watching at home could do but weep at what had been lost. Who would have thought at that moment, that the rebirth of the Democratic Party as a truly democratic party was about to take place?
Out of the ashes of the '68 Convention was born the McGovern Commission that reformed the rules of the Democratic Party and transformed it from a party tightly ruled by white men, including many segregationists and autocratic party bosses, into the "rainbow" party it is today. For a brief moment in 1972, the party even had a program and platform that fully reflected the ideals of peace and social justice that had been espoused by FDR, Truman, JFK, Johnson and RFK.
That moment did not last long. For 30 years, mainstream Democrats tried to run away from the legacy of 1968 and 1972 to appear "centrist" and "strong on defense." For those of us whose political sensibilities were formed in that turbulent period, it was not until the appearance of Howard Dean that there was a candidate who reminded us of McCarthy, of Bobby, of McGovern. In those many young people who rallied with such enthusiasm to his cause, we saw ourselves and perhaps even felt nearly dead hope rekindled.
America is now under the thumb of a tyrant worse than Johnson or Nixon, and as tempting as it is to believe that Democratic success in the next or the next or the next election is all that matters, the sacrificing of certain principles will make any victory pyrrhic. As McGovern says of an open party process,
Democracy has always been a gamble, and if we make mistakes, at least they are our mistakes.
The Democratic Party cannot go back to the days when people were excluded or kept out of sight because of skin color or gender or sexual orientation--or immigration status--even if there is a political cost. Nor can it merely pretend that its candidates are chosen by the party's full membership when, in fact, they are picked by a powerful few. The party's current openness took too long and cost too much to be bargained for the porridge of short term electoral advantage.
In times as dangerous as these, the Democratic Party must be the party of peace. We have all been shamed by an America that acts like a schoolyard bully intead of a mature nation that employs its (temporarily) preeminent power with great caution and compassion. It may be possible for those thoroughly inspired by party loyalty to excuse Democrats who supported the Iraq War by saying they "trusted" Bush, but there is no way to condone the behavior of any Democrat who does not do everything she or he can now do to stop a disastrous war against Iran. There can be no votes for it before they were against it. There can be no cosponsoring supposedly "harmless" bills pushed by Republicans with the obvious intent of laying the groundwork for a war-mongering adminstration. If Senators Gruening, Morse, McGovern, Church and Fulbright could stand up against a President from their own party who had just won a landslide while that war was still popular, today's House and Senate Democrats can do as George McGovern promised to do after he returned from a tour of Vietnam in 1965:
not merely to dissent, but to crusade - to join peace marches, sign petitions, lecture across the nation, appear on television, to do whatever might persuade the Congress and the American people to stop the horror.
I am not persuaded by the glib pronouncements on behald of expediency by those who consider themselves politically savvy and pragmatic. I am unimpressed by those who disparage what progressive Democrats did in 1968 and 1972 even from the standpoint of political strategy. The movement conservatives took over the Republican Party in 1964 and suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls. For the good of the country, I wish they had done what Democrats did after 1972: abandon their principles and try to mimic the other party. But they did not. They persisted and now have succeeded in moving the country substantially to the Right and the waffling Democratic Party right along with it. If only Democrats had possessed similar commitment and belief in their ideals after 1972, things might be far different now in the party and in the country.
The young people who were energized by the Dean campaign in '04 are the hope of the Democratic Party and the nation. My deepest wish is that they not allow recent defeats and disappointments to seduce them into compromising their principles. Let the people who make their living from politics as officials or consultants or pandering pundits sacrifice what they believe for the sake of political expendiency. There will always be plenty of them. And America has more than enough people exerting pressure from the Right based on their twisted principles. What America needs more of, what it is desperate for, are people from the Left who speak out for peace and justice, and insist that politicans do what is right not what is safe.
Peace now! Can anything matter more?
Cross posted at MLW