Doug Henwood: Everything blew up at the 1968 convention, both inside and outside the convention hall: the riots in the streets, but also the intense conflict within the party over what direction it’s going to go in.
So coming out of that crisis, the party embarked on some reforms. What do those look like?
Adam Hilton: They’re really remarkable. They are, historically speaking, the single greatest moment of party reform in American political history. And they are a piece of reform that I think is largely overlooked by people in liberal-left circles today, even though it was almost an unparalleled victory for those forces.
Those that were continuing to push civil rights into the party, those that were actively trying to get an antiwar position embraced in the party platform, and those who we would later associate with second-wave feminism and even the nascent LGBTQ movement all broke onto the scene and influenced the backdoor negotiations that happened between the 1968 and 1972 conventions. That dramatically changed how delegates are selected for the convention.
Doug Henwood: It went from a system in which party bosses, people in Congress, and people in the state parties really selected the nominee, to one in which primary voters selected the nominee, which is a radical change.
Adam Hilton: Very radical. And there’s an element of unintended consequence in here, if you look carefully at what these reformers were trying to do. Some of them preferred caucuses. Others were fine with primaries. So long as they were married to more frequent national meetings — not just quadrennial presidential nominations, but meetings where members of the party would get together to discuss strategy platforms, et cetera.
But the way things shook out based on victories won and victories lost was that we had a proliferation of primaries. It just became the easiest way for states to accommodate the new party rules by imposing the primary system that we have today. That affects not just how Democrats select their nominees, but also how Republicans do so.
Doug Henwood: That reform process produced George McGovern as the nominee in 1972, who promptly got crushed by Richard Nixon. That encouraged backlash against these reforms.
Some of the old guard were quite explicit about not wanting to embrace the European model of the party. They didn’t want a membership system. They didn’t want the party discipline; they didn’t want the centralization. What did they accomplish, and what didn’t they accomplish?