Campus protests Can Biden avoid 1968 parallel?

When student Lauren Brown first heard the commotion, including firecrackers, she assumed the sounds were coming from nearby frat houses.

- David Smith

Then, at about four in the morning, she heard helicopters. Later, she awoke to news and footage of a violent attack by pro-Israeli protesters on an encampment set up to oppose the war in Gaza.

"It was hard to watch," said Brown, 19, a freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose dorm was near the encampment. "And I wondered where the police were. I saw posts from people talking about them being teargassed and maced and campus security was just watching."

Eventually, a large police contingent did arrive and forcibly cleared the sprawling encampment. Flash-bangs were launched to disperse crowds gathered outside and more than 200 people were arrested. Afterwards, campus facility workers could be seen picking up flattened tents and pieces of spray-painted plywood, and throwing them into grey dumpsters.

Similar scenes of tumult played out last week at about 40 universities and colleges in America, resulting in clashes with police, mass arrests and a directive from Joe Biden to restore order. The unrest has unfolded from coast to coast on a scale not seen since the Vietnam war protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

The president has cause for concern as the issue threatens his youth vote, divides his Democratic party and gives Donald Trump's Republicans an opening to depict Biden's America as spiralling out of control.

There are inescapable parallels with 1968, a year of assassinations and antiwar demonstrations that led to chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Democrats lost the White House to Republican "law and order" candidate Richard Nixon.

Now, there are fears that history will repeat itself as Biden faces Republican "law and order" candidate Trump in November's presidential election. Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, told CNN last week: "I am thinking back and other people are making this reference that this may be Biden's Vietnam."