FIFTY YEARS AGO . . . a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends.
The party in question was the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and JFK, which perished during . . .
. . . the riots in Grant Park, Chicago, on the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the party's national convention.
Its children in this case were the rioters from the anti-Vietnam War Left. After killing off the traditional liberal Democratic party they despised, they would go on to take over the corpse and make it the host of America's radical Left, from Jerry Brown to Bernie Sanders -- with George McGovern, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama as their front men.
The friends who joined in the kill were the mainstream media. Their coverage of the riots, that night and later, would make the SDS demonstrators and their violent cohorts -- the predecessors of today's antifa -- into martyrs of "police brutality" and Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley's "Gestapo tactics," as one Democratic senator from Connecticut put it in a speech to the convention that night, when they had in fact been -- like today's antifa -- the deliberate instigator of mayhem and bloodshed. Starting that night the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC and CBS News would become the enablers of America's radical Left, even at its most violent -- and in the process cut themselves off from the millions of ordinary working Americans who had made the Democratic party their political home.
. . . .
. . . . [The riots and their coverage] destroyed [Senator Hubert] Humphrey's chances in the 1968 election, and Richard Nixon won instead. But the damage ran deeper Humphry would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protestors: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America's past sins -- essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, "Reagan Democrats" who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump presidency.
In the end, the main ideological battle lines of American politics were drawn that night, and the shadow of Grant Park still hangs over all of us 50 years later.
(Arthur L. Herman, "Chicago 1968: The Night the Democratic Party Died," nationalreview.com, August 28, 2018)
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