osupporters The Iraq War came together to disrupt the 2004 Republican National Convention. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in New York City. Some put the total as high as 200,000. A few protesters ignored police cordons. More than 1,800 people were arrested.
But the competition itself went exactly as planned. President George W. Bush was renominated and later won his second term. With this, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the popular vote in 35 years since the end of the Cold War. In 2014, New York City paid $18 million to settle legal claims from people who claimed they were wrongfully arrested in the 2004 convention arrests.
Some radical opponents of President Joe Biden are hoping to have better success disrupting this year's Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They imagine they can do at political conventions what they did at America's best universities. They are almost certainly fooling themselves.
Biden's opponents based their plan on folk memories of the 1968 events. free pressOlivia Reingold and Eli Lake reported from an activist planning conference: [a leader] the crowd asks. 'Are you going to let them come here without protest? This is Chicago, damn it. We should give them a 1968 welcome.’”
In 1968, poorly trained Chicago police brutally massacred protesters and journalists in front of television cameras. This horrific image symbolized a year of political upheaval that upheld racial segregation and forever destroyed the New Deal coalition of conservative southern whites. workers who belong to a labor union; Northern minority voters; and urban liberals. Republicans won the presidency in 1968, and have won four of the next five elections.
I'll leave it to the psychoanalysts to find out exactly why the utterly self-destructive uproar in Chicago in '68 excited modern radicals. Don't worry about it now. why; Let's focus on how. Could the chaos of 1968 be repeated in 2024? Or is the stability of 2004 a more relevant precedent and possible outcome?
FFrom 1968 to present, the responsibility for protecting political customs shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in an order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category called “national special security incidents,” with the Secret Service taking the lead in planning.
National security special events utilize all resources of the federal government, including the Department of Defense when necessary. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major political party conventions.
The money allowed Cleveland, host of the 2016 Republican National Convention, to deploy thousands of law enforcement personnel. Officers were dispatched from all over Ohio and as far away as Texas and California. Federal funding was provided to train police to understand the difference between legal and illegal protests and to equip officers with body cameras to record their interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to purchase 300 bicycles, giving troops the ability to quickly get to places cars can't and patrol public spaces in a more accessible and friendly manner.
In the end, the convention was largely orderly and peaceful, despite some civilians taking advantage of Ohio's open carry laws to carry rifles around town. From the second to the last day of the competition, a rare moment of public order drama was recorded when about 200 police officers confronted a small group of people attempting to burn an American flag. One of the protesters accidentally set his pants on fire. One officer was recorded yelling, “You’re on fire, you’re on fire, you idiot!” The man was arrested on suspicion of assault after he pushed away police officers who were setting fire to him.
At the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, police negotiated with protesters how to allow peaceful demonstrations. At one point, anti-establishment Bernie Sanders supporters attempted to breach convention boundaries. More than 50 people were arrested. Most were released without charge.
Many of the virtual conventions in 2020, amid the pandemic, drew fewer protesters. At the one-day Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, police had little trouble stopping protesters who tried to breach convention boundaries. At the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, protesters didn't seem to even attempt to force a breach. Instead, they marched to the security perimeter, made speeches, and then marched again.
teaHe went viral recently Pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses have been distinguished by more rule violations than the last two cycles of convention protests. But campuses are special places with weak police and weak management. Pro-Palestinian protesters have proven much more cautious when marching where public order is maintained.
On January 13, 2024, thousands of people flocked to Washington, D.C., in a protest sponsored by American Muslim groups, and a protest took place at the White House. Only two people were arrested. More arrests occurred on January 16 when a group backed by the Mennonite Church broke into the Capitol's Canon House office building. But the protests included old-fashioned civil disobedience: breaking the law without threatening to harm anyone, and peacefully accepting arrest. .
Pro-Palestinian groups have blocked bridges in some US cities to stymie traffic. But this tactic has also relied on tacit permission from the authorities. In November 2023, 80 pro-Palestinian protesters arrested for disrupting traffic on San Francisco's Bay Bridge avoided criminal convictions by accepting five hours of community service each. That generosity was an open invitation to try again, which they did last April on the Golden Gate Bridge.
In this country and Europe, some people committed criminal violence against Jews. For example, last week French media reported that a Jewish woman in France was kidnapped, raped and threatened with death by a man who said he was “seeking revenge on the Palestinians.” A pro-Palestinian protester fatally wounded a Jewish man during a protest in California in November 2023. But these crimes occurred without police, not in front of thousands of police officers, as at national political conventions.
When faced with clear rules backed by effective enforcement, pro-Palestinian protests on this side of the Atlantic have generally proceeded in accordance with legitimate authority.
Of course, past practice does not guarantee future behavior. I think a lot of people think that way. want To mess up the Democratic National Convention. When I spoke with Democratic Party executives involved in planning the convention, they seemed keenly aware of the risks and deeply immersed in responding.
Maybe they overlooked something. Perhaps the protesters will discover an unexpected weakness and help Donald Trump by overpowering police, disrupting viral videos and embarrassing President Biden. A better guess is that not only will they fail at it, but they won't be able to mobilize in large numbers to attack police lines and risk serious jail time.
However, so far, the theory of disrupting the national convention has achieved one result. The conversation was temporarily redirected toward anti-democratic extremists who could attack the Democratic National Convention that will nominate Biden, and away from anti-democratic extremists who would take the stage. He was uninterrupted to speak at the Republican National Convention, which would nominate Trump again.