We’ve been here before: widespread Democratic opposition to an outrageous war, particularly among the young, while a good chunk of the party’s establishment remains unwilling to halt U.S. involvement in that conflict. In the ’60s, that was Vietnam. Today, it’s Gaza.

Echoes of that rift were loud and clear at this week’s meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis. There, on Tuesday, the party’s Resolutions Committee voted against bringing to the floor a motion to put the Democrats on record as opposing the continuing provision of arms to Israel to wage its war of extirpation. It did vote for a resolution essentially restating the Biden administration’s position on the war: calling for a two-state solution, for the release of hostages, for an end to the conflict. That resolution said nothing, however, about America’s ongoing provision of the arms with which the Netanyahu government is waging its war.

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Martin apparently understood he was hurling the party into an abyss if he then brought his own resolution to the floor. Instead, he withdrew it, and had a five-minute impromptu meeting with Minnerly, in which he agreed to form a commission to devise a party stance that presumably reflects more of a consensus. Minnerly welcomed his proposal, hoping, as she told me, that the commission would come up with something more reflective of the view of the “everyday people” who fill the party’s ranks.

If we go back 60 years, we can find the same generational dynamics playing out. It was in 1965 that Lyndon Johnson began deploying massive numbers of U.S. troops to Vietnam, a move that initially had the backing of the majority of Democrats. As nightly TV news reporting, however, began revealing the actual shape of our war there—the wanton destruction of villages, the cascading number of civilian casualties—young Americans turned against the conflict. Their ranks weren’t limited to the radicals of SDS (who, in 1965, weren’t really all that radical). That year also saw the first Democratic organization come out against the war: the California Young Democrats, headed at that time by two UCLA Law School students, Henry Waxman and Howard Berman, both later to become nationally important Democratic congressmen. Opposition to the war grew among the young to the point that it came to define their generation against their elders. Within the ranks of Democratic activists, it was the young who not only demonstrated against the war but also walked the precincts and worked the phone banks for anti-war Democratic presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972.

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