Democrats Craving a Brokered Convention — Including Elizabeth Warren — Should Learn the Lessons of 1968

From this excellent piece by Glen Greenwald:
"THE PARALLELS TO WHAT the Democratic establishment is plotting to do to Sanders in 2020 is too obvious to require much elaboration. Party leaders, and all of the remaining major candidates — including Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Elizabeth Warren — are making explicitly clear that the strategy on which they are relying is extremely similar to the one invoked by party bosses in 1968 to deny McCarthy the nomination. It is very difficult to understand why they would expect a different outcome.....
"And that’s the reason why the destruction of the Democratic Party establishment remains, for so many, such an overarching political priority. It’s hard to see how any meaningful political progress is possible without first removing that rot."

 

Ignoring the voters’ will through party-boss convention maneuvering is the most likely way to re-elect Trump.

 By Glenn Greenwald

 

For four years, Democratic officials have insisted that Donald Trump is an unprecedented threat to the republic, a fascist and racist dictator whose removal from power is the paramount, if not the only, political priority. Yet the strategy on which they are now explicitly relying to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders from being their 2020 presidential nominee — a brokered convention at which party elites anoint a nominee other than the one who receives the most votes and wins the most delegates during the primary process — is the one most likely to ensure Trump’s reelection.

 

In the 1964 general election, the Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson, won the presidency in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history, with more than 60 percent of the popular vote and all but six states. Four years later, it all came crashing down for the Democrats, as the once-left-for-dead Republican, Richard Nixon, not only reversed the Democrats’ 1964 electoral gains, but also permanently obliterated many of their long-held regional strongholds, while winning an Electoral College landslide against the Democratic Party nominee, Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Nixon achieved this despite running against the third-party segregationist George Wallace, who swept five Southern states.

 

A major factor in that jarring outcome, if not the dispositive one, was the Democratic Party convention that took place in Chicago in late August, just slightly more than two months prior to the election. The convention was a brokered one, marred by protests and riots outside the convention hall, and angry fights among delegates inside of it, that culminated in the anointing of the establishment candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, over the anti-war candidate of the left, Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

 

McCarthy had entered the primary on a platform of opposing the Democratic Party’s commitment to the Vietnam War under Johnson, who had intended to seek reelection and was widely viewed as the favorite to win. But the little-known Minnesota senator — driven at first by massive enthusiasm on the part of young anti-war voters — stunned Johnson by winning 42% of the vote and the bulk of the delegates in the New Hampshire primary, forcing the incumbent president to announce that he would not seek his party’s nomination.

 

The Democratic establishment, desperate over the anti-war sentiment overtaking the party, turned to Humphrey, as well as its arcane rules that allowed backroom deals to choose the nominee at the convention, in order to maintain its stranglehold over the party regardless of what the dirty masses of their voters thought or wanted.   

 

Please continue this article here: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/democrats-craving-a-brokered-convention-including-elizabeth-warren-should-learn-the-lessons-of-1968/