Steven Hayward writes for City Journal about interesting parallels in American political history.

Campus unrest and a threatened mass protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago are summoning flashbacks to 1968, touching off the irresistible urge to predict a rerun of that year’s Democratic disaster this November. Cooler heads, like Willis Sparks at Gzero Media, note several distinctions between our moment and those that precipitated the late-sixties clash. Which perspective is right? Both are.

While we can make sensible distinctions between then and now—the student protestors of 1968, for example, were rebelling against a war with direct American involvement, and one that was drafting their cohort into arms—those differences recede beneath some deeper and more ominous parallels. The most significant is the radical Left’s success in humbling a Democratic president. In 1968, anti-Vietnam War protests drove Lyndon Johnson from the race, only four years after he had scored one of the largest landslides in American history. Before the protests ended Johnson’s presidency, they changed his war policy. …

… A similar sequence is repeating itself today. Though the anti-Israel protests won’t drive President Joe Biden from the Democratic nomination, they have transformed his war policy. After months of declaring his “ironclad” support for Israel, Biden has suddenly declared an arms embargo against the Jewish state, seeking to forestall its attack on the last Hamas redoubt in Rafah, while offering more ceasefire concessions to Hamas behind Israel’s back. As LBJ’s retreat from American resolve in 1968 emboldened North Vietnam, Biden’s split with Israel will bolster Hamas to demand more concessions for a ceasefire. It might also enable Hezbollah to open a second front in the north. …

… Biden’s Israel pivot is also further evidence of liberals’ willingness to indulge the demands of the radical Left. We saw this in 2020 with the respectable Left’s capitulation to the insane demands of Black Lives Matter (“defund the police”), and we’re seeing it now, as liberal college presidents rush to placate anti-Semitic campus mobs.