Mitch: Chicago 1968: The Democratic Convention

Source:Mitch– I guess this couple was at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Hopefully they survived the experience.

You can also see this post at The Daily Journal, on WordPress.

“1968 Democratic Convention special.”

Source: Mitch

“As delegates arrived in Chicago the last week of August 1968 for the 35th Democratic National Convention, they found that Mayor Richard J. Daley, second only to President Lyndon B. Johnson in political influence, had lined the avenues leading to the convention center with posters of trilling birds and blooming flowers. Along with these pleasing pictures, he had ordered new redwood fences installed to screen the squalid lots of the aromatic stockyards adjoining the convention site. At the International Amphitheatre, conventioneers found that the main doors, modeled after a White House portico, had been bulletproofed. The hall itself was surrounded by a steel fence topped with barbed wire. Inside the fence, clusters of armed and helmeted police mingled with security guards and dark-suited agents of the Secret Service. At the apex of the stone gates through which all had to enter was a huge sign bearing the unintentionally ironic words, “HELLO DEMOCRATS! WELCOME TO CHICAGO.”

Source:Smithsonian Magazine– Welcome to Chicago, Illinois.

From Smithsonian Magazine

1968 is when the Democratic Party changed and no longer became a Northeastern progressive party with a Southern coalition, made up of people who basically make up the Religious-Right and Neo-Confederate wing of the Republican Party today. By 1968, the Democratic Party was moving away from the South and becoming the party of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, as well as the Mid Atlantic.

With the emergence of what I call the Green Party wing of the Democratic Party, that is represented by the so-called Progressive Caucus in Congress that you see today in the Green Party, but also in Occupy Wall Street, the Democratic Party now had a major, left-wing in it. And this is how the Democratic Party lost the White House in 1968 because Classical Liberals on their Right and Progressives on the Center-Left in the party were now divided between the New-Left in the party made up of Socialists-Anarchists, as well as Communists. The group called Students For a Democratic Society then was what Occupy Wall Street is of today.

The Democratic Party lost in 1968 because they were divided by their two wings on the Left: The FDR/LBJ Progressive coalition, with this new coalition that’s called the New-Left, people who are against war (at all costs) but are in favor of using violence to get their message across. Who are against American capitalism and corporate America, but in favor of the New Deal and Great Society, but would expand into what’s known in Europe as the welfare state. What the Green Party today calls the Green New Deal.

The Green Deal would be a whole host of new Federal Government social programs to finish off of what the New Deal and Great Society didn’t accomplish.

The New-Left then made up of Students For a Democratic Society and Occupy Wall Street today, are not Pacifists in the sense that they are against violence and would never use violence. They just don’t want violence coming from their government, but are more than willing to use it against government or people in society. That represent what they do not like about America, like private corporations.

1968 is basically when the Democratic Party basically became three political parties: New Democrat Liberals, the center-right, (where I am) the FDR Progressives or what’s left of them, and Occupy Wall Street today or the Green Party. That sees the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as the same party, but with different names.

And even as split as the Democratic Party was back then, they still came within a state or two of winning the 1968 presidential election. But they would’ve done much better without the split happening all in one party.

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