Historians tell TIME that there are some echoes of 1968 in terms of what’s going on in America now versus then, but also some key differences.
The existential crisis that ties 1968 and 2024
Kennedy’s assassination shook up the 1968 presidential race. He was anti-war and one of the few Democratic candidates who was popular among both black voters and white working class voters, says Maurice Isserman, a professor of History at Hamilton College and expert on the 1960s social movements whose latest book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. His assassination by Sirhan Sirhan, which came so quickly after King was killed, rattled the nation, and came at a time when there were increasing acts of violence on both the right and the left, building occupations, street confrontations.
“You can say that Sirhan Sirhan might very well have changed history by successfully assassinating Robert Kennedy, preventing him from being the Democratic nominee and likely prevailing in the fall,” Isserman argues.
Trump’s assassination attempt will not have the same effect, he argues: “This latest attempt was just that. It was an attempt. It was not successful, and it won't change history.” While the attempt will bolster Trump’s popularity, he says voters should remember that the Republican party has, since 2015, been “building up a climate in which expressions citing violence have become the norm. On Saturday, the chickens came home to roost, as some clearly very disturbed young man, a registered Republican, decided to make his place in history by attempting to assassinate Donald Trump.”
But the existential crisis, the feeling that democracy is under siege, is a similarity between 1968 and 2024.
“People are feeling like the country is coming apart at the seams. That's exactly how it felt in 1968,” says Barbara A. Perry, a Professor of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and co-editor of The Presidency: Facing Constitutional Crossroads. In 1968, voters saw the violence in the streets and voted for Richard Nixon because of a sense that he would “bring peace and law and order back to our country.”