Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Feel free to shoot me a direct email if you need an explainer on the Kendrick-Drake feud.

Tonight, with campuses about to let out for the summer, attention is turning to what might become the next ground zero for progressive unrest: Chicago, the site of this summer’s Democratic National Convention. The location has prompted comparisons to 1968, but while President Biden will almost certainly face protests, the analogy is misleading and lazy—and diminishes the real violence that actually unfolded that fateful summer.

But first, Abby Livingston has the latest chatter around Capitol Hill…

• The Merrick Garland angle: It’s a big deal to go after a sitting member. Recall that this investigation first became public after local news captured images of F.B.I. agents hauling computers from the Cuellar home, just weeks before his punishing 2022 primary fight with attorney Jessica Cisneros. Typically, the Justice Department avoids such dramatic operations so close to an election, for fear of influencing a race—and in this case, there were direct consequences: Cisneros experienced a surge in fundraising in the days after, and nearly toppled Cuellar. Capitol Hill will be watching to see whether Attorney General Merrick Garland sheds any light on the timing of that raid in court documents.
• South Texas stronghold: The indictments have landed at an interesting point on the campaign calendar. For Democrats, primary season is in the rearview, so Cuellar only has to worry about electoral consequences in the general, at least for this cycle. I spoke with a Laredo pal over the weekend who was skeptical that Cuellar is in immediate political trouble: The Cuellar name is powerful in South Texas, and the 10-term congressman has represented the region in various posts since 1987. I remember speaking with him in 2017, on the night of the Sutherland Springs church shooting, when he was en route to the scene. He was so familiar with the tiny, off-the-beaten-track town that he could describe the church’s intersection.
• Strange bedfellows: Of course, Cuellar’s indictment could open the door for a G.O.P. offensive. Since a 2021 redistricting, Texas hasn’t hosted that many competitive races, which has kept TV ad rates low in Laredo and San Antonio, and national Republicans could take advantage of the bargain prices. However, there aren’t many Texas Republicans eager to see Cuellar go; several consider him their best friend in Congress.

There might even be a ceasefire deal coming into view as I write this, which would satisfy a key demand of the activists who have been raging against Israel for seven months now and promising not to vote for “Genocide Joe” in November. Hamas said Monday it has accepted a ceasefire proposal from Egypt and Qatar to halt the war. Israel is reviewing the matter, and the State Department is approaching the news with caution. Don’t hold your breath.

But even if the campus protests evaporate for now, the young left—and the ratings-hungry media—have already identified the next conflict zone. That would be Chicago, the site of August’s Democratic National Convention. Or at least that’s what we are supposed to think, based on the somewhat forced symbolism. Here we have a Democratic nominee, out of touch with a younger generation furious over a foreign war, accepting his party’s nomination in the same city that spiraled into violence in 1968, when Mayor Richard J. Daley’s bloodthirsty cops attacked protestors with billy clubs and tear gas—“Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” in the famous words of Senator Abe Ribicoff—while the world was watching.

It was at that convention, three months after the assassination of Democratic primary candidate Bobby Kennedy, that Hubert Humphrey won the nomination, with an assist from party bosses who didn’t want antiwar crusader Eugene McCarthy anywhere near the ticket. (And no, the 1968 convention was not “contested”—Humphrey was nominated on the first ballot.) The whole spectacle was broadcast live on national television and radio, with Dan Rather being manhandled on the convention floor, angry young people in the streets facing down angrier cops, and behind the scenes, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman plotting to send attractive young women into the convention hotels to dose Democratic delegates with LSD. The televised turmoil horrified the buttoned-up voters of the Silent Majority, who elected law-and-order Republican Richard Nixon in a landslide that November.

Could it happen again? If you look up “D.N.C.” and “Chicago” on Google News, it’s immediately clear that many people believe so. But I’m not among them.

Elon Musk, who is very smart but also knows almost nothing about the nuances of American history or politics, giddily posted on X last week that “the Democratic National Convention this August has a good chance of outdoing 1968!” Sure, man. If the Democratic Convention were being held in Atlanta or Houston—two cities that were bidding to host the gathering—would we be talking about the prospect of chaos in the streets in the same way? Probably not. But easy narratives make for fun copy.

A lot of the callbacks to the ’60s have been facile, clichéd, and easily debunked. Squad members Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar compared police actions against Gaza demonstrators last week to Kent State in 1970, when National Guard members opened fire on students protesting U.S. military action in Cambodia, killing four of them. “On the 54th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, students across our country are being brutalized for standing up to endless war,” Bush tweeted. Any aging American with a friend who died in Vietnam would probably object to the term “brutalized” in the case of Columbia or any campus protest today, where approximately zero people have been murdered. But language isn’t used with precision anymore in politics. It’s only used for attention.

The Associated Press ran an article last week, too, that was roundly mocked for comparing the current campus unrest to Kent State and the turbulence of the Vietnam era. Any editor at the AP could have spoken up to say, actually, no student today is being drafted to fight in an unpopular war overseas. Or that during the Columbia protests in 1968, roughly 1,000 New York City police officers arrested more than 700 and injured more than 150 people in a single night. It is not the same.

In 1968, more than 536,000 Americans were serving in Vietnam and 17,000 were killed. No U.S. troops have been deployed to Gaza, and there are no plans for a draft. As grim and brutal as the war in Gaza is, Americans are simply not being confronted with it like they were with Vietnam. (In total, 58,000 Americans died over the course of the war.) To paraphrase a popular joke on TikTok: Men used to go to war. Now they just post about it.

Any comparisons to Chicago ’68 must also reckon with the other great cause of the time, the civil rights movement, which brought legions of activists to the city. Chicago’s overwhelmingly white and racist police force—taking cues from a racist mayor in one of the country’s most racist cities at the time—took pleasure in beating down Black people protesting for basic equality and economic freedoms. And that violence happened just months after the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and R.F.K.—one, the greatest civil rights leader in our country’s history; the other a political champion of America’s underclass.

Today, Chicago has one of the country’s most progressive mayors, Brandon Johnson, who supported a city resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas War. Johnson, too, was elected as a critic of the much-maligned Chicago Police Department, but has since worked to expand the police budget while also seeking reforms. Richard J. Daley, he is not.

Unlike in 1968, when protestors were right outside the now-demolished International Amphitheatre on Halsted Street, activists today have to contend with the fact that nominating conventions are highly secure events managed by the United States Secret Service. Demonstrators can complain—anti-Biden and pro-Gaza protesters are suing the city over limits on where they can march and demonstrate—but they haven’t been able to get close to a convention site, for Democrats or Republicans, in decades. I’ve been to six of them. It’s basically like walking into the Green Zone.

In 1998, under a declaration signed by Bill Clinton, nominating conventions became “National Security Special Events,” a federal designation giving the Secret Service full control of all security aspects of a convention. Teams have already been in Chicago for months preparing a security plan alongside the state and city governments. Chicago has also grown more accustomed to hosting massive events—like Lollapalooza, a yearly NASCAR race, and all kinds of other conventions—since that violent summer of ’68.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that there have been protests at other modern conventions: antiwar protests at the Republican conventions in New York, in 2004, and in Minneapolis, in 2008; or those pro-Bernie Sanders marches outside the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 2016. There were scuffles here and there, but none that escalated into chaos or mass violence. The media aimed their cameras at the conflicts, but in the end, the presidential nominations continued as planned.

As much as the press is fixated on the prospect of young people rebelling against Biden in the streets of Chicago, it’s also worth remembering, as I’ve been writing for weeks now, that Gaza is not a main driver of their discontent. It’s Biden’s age, it’s the price of rent and groceries, it’s a growing distrust of the entire political system—and it’s the economy, stupid. Polls continue to show that Gaza remains a boutique issue, a preoccupation of young Americans who can afford to forgo a paycheck in order to attend a protest.

And for those who can’t resist talking about Chicago and 1968, here’s another caveat for you: There happens to be a Republican convention up the highway in Milwaukee this summer, featuring a nominee who has actually stoked violence in the streets. It might be worth training some cameras on those protests, too.