56 years late, Democrats may again reap the Chicago convention whirlwind

With a divided party base buffeted by campus radicalism, the Democrats’ national convention in Chicago is a riot-plagued shambles. Tarred with extremism and lawlessness, President Joe Biden loses a winnable presidential election to a controversial Republican with his own ample baggage.  

Will that be the history of summer 2024? It happened in 1968, after all.

The radicalism of four summers ago, when Black Lives Matter-inspired activists brought disorder to dozens of cities, has been given a surge of new rocket fuel by the war in Gaza. The radical Left is out in the open now, demanding action against Israel, and even an intifada in America. This can no longer be dismissed as a mere campus matter, however. Biden and his party find themselves in a difficult spot, needing to placate more centrist Democratic donors, some of whom are Jewish, while keeping pro-Palestinian Zoomers inside the party tent. That’s a tall order for any politician, much less one who’s elderly and frequently appears confused.  

Holding the party convention in Chicago this year practically begs for a repeat of the 1968 mayhem. The Israel-Palestine issue won’t be resolved by August. Moreover, the campus protests are suspiciously well organized and supplied, indicating that well-funded activists will use Chicago as a grand stage to showcase their radicalism as the country watches. That’s good news for former President Donald Trump and Republicans. 

But it’s bad news in the big picture. It’s wise to remember that, in the aftermath of 1968 and Democrats losing the White House, left-wing extremism got considerably worse and birthed a major wave of domestic terrorism. This has been airbrushed out of history by many liberals, who use euphemisms about “community organizing” and “direct activism” to describe sometimes lethal leftist terrorism. 

The violent extremism that took root across the West after 1968 wasn’t an American problem alone. But it lasted more than a decade, peaking in the United States in the early 1970s. In those tumultuous years, bombings, bank robberies, and airplane hijackings by leftist terrorists were commonplace. Fortunately, the era of mass-casualty terrorism had yet to arrive, so this terrorism wave caused relatively few deaths compared to later jihadists. Still, the number of attacks ran into the hundreds. One of the best-known groups, the Weather Underground, executed more than two dozen bombings, including of the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, plus numerous law enforcement targets. 

The last major American attack came in November 1983, a bombing of the U.S. Senate, which narrowly missed killing several legislators. Anyone who claims January 6, 2021, was the worst attack ever on Congress is lying to you. The terrorists were revolutionary communists, mainly female, who moved from campus radicalism to bomb-making. They also bombed two military bases in Washington, DC, and tried to assassinate Henry Kissinger.  

Anybody who thinks this ugly history can’t repeat, with frustrated leftists moving from marches and riots to organized murder and mayhem in the service of the mythical “revolution,” is dangerously naïve. Democrats bear blame here since they have normalized radicalism and allowed extremists into the heart of their party.

What is the “Squad” but the Democratic Socialists of America, some of whose members are open communists. The DSA is also uncomfortably close to antifa, which leading Democrats claim doesn’t exist, but which U.S. law enforcement is well aware indeed exists. As an analogy, DSA is the overt face of antifa just like, during Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” Sinn Féin was the political arm while the Provisional Irish Republican Army was the terrorist wing of the movement.  

It doesn’t help that former terrorists have been rehabilitated by leading Democrats. Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers entered Chicago politics after his bomb-making period and played a key role in the rise of Barack Obama. When this came up in the 2008 presidential race, Obama dismissed his domestic terrorist buddy as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”  

Similarly, Susan Rosenberg was part of the communist cell that bombed the Senate in 1983 — her group also killed two police officers and a security guard in 1981 — yet was set free from prison, her sentence commuted by President Bill Clinton on his last day in the White House. Rosenberg reentered progressive politics, as if nothing had happened. She became a lecturer in Women and Gender Studies at New York’s Hunter College, which describes her as “a human rights and prisoners rights advocate.” In 2020, Rosenberg was reported to be the vice-chair of Thousand Currents, a financial backer of Black Lives Matter.

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You get more of what you encourage, per the hoary cliché, and if Democrats keep treating domestic terrorism as a youthful indiscretion on the road to progress, we will soon be experiencing more of it. FBI Director Christopher Wray has been practically shouting that more terrorism is headed America’s way, thanks to the Gaza war, though it may be radical Americans doing the terrorist acts, not far-away jihadists.  

Watch Chicago this summer.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.