The Democrats in Chicago

Friday, Aug. 23

Can Kamala Lose?

Whenever I could this week, I posed a Bayesian query to delegates and smart-aleck political rubberneckers: What is the likeliest reason for a future Kamala Harris defeat? If she loses, it’ll be because the Democrats will have gone too negative, one Florida political veteran mused to me—Trump’s truculent negativity will pierce the “joy” bubble and the ensuing bad feelings will cause the undecided to tune out the election. Plausible!

A party finance chair from a major city in the eastern half of the country said word from the field is that this will be “a persuasion election, not a turnout election,” with the whole thing coming down to, say, concerns over the decay of Pennsylvania’s hospital systems, or rising housing costs in Arizona.

My editor, who parachuted in for the last night of the convention, proposed a third possible germ of a future defeat: Perhaps a decisive number of Americans won’t buy the Democrats’ slickly produced version of reality, which is internally consistent but differs too radically from their personal experience of the past four years, thereby underlining its own candy-spun nature.

The Democrats are tremendous reality-constructors, though. In Chicago they successfully wiped away every recent source of potential embarrassment: The words “structural racism” and “Brett Kavanaugh” were rarely spoken from the rostrum, assuming they were spoken even once. A few years ago, football was a racist brain-scrambling, neo-Roman militarist American bullfighting ritual; in the era of Coach Walz—“Defensive Coordinator Walz,” though more truthful, is cumbersome and lacking in metric balance—football is now the wholesome nontoxic masculine pastime of a now-unthreatening heartland. On Wednesday, the delegates greeted those former Mankato High defenders in uniform as if they were veterans of the most just and righteous of all wars, the high school football wars.

Instead of frontal attacks on the sensibilities of a majority of the country, a new lexicon of gauzy euphemisms was rolled out to keep the 2020 nostalgists satisfied: “letting children be who they are” instead of “protect trans lives,” “freedom” for “abortion,” or whatever. My favorite DNC neologism is the accusation that Trump’s planned tariffs amount to a “national sales tax,” a formula that obscures Democratic opposition to tariffs, which might be bad for the country as a whole but are popular in states that Harris really needs.

Is the Democratic Party overmanaging itself into oblivion? Has a unified party now confidently marched down a path whose folly will only be obvious on Nov. 6? Who knows.

When I arrived in the convention hall on Thursday night, the floor heaved to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”—everyone knew there was a gap in the prime-time schedule; maybe we’d soon see the Angel of History manifest above us in the United Center while the leading American issued the divine benediction to Kamala Harris right before our unworthy eyes. No, there wasn’t going to be a surprise Swift appearance, TMZ reported—instead, Beyonce would endorse and introduce Kamala Harris at the night’s climax. The funniest possible surprise, I decided, would be an onstage reconciliation between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, a real-life, real-time healing of bitter divides. Perhaps it would be Charli XCX introducing Harris, though despite the ubiquity of black text on pale green in Chicago I didn’t hear a single song from Brat across four days, and I have a hunch that few of the people on hand have any idea who Charli XCX is.

It turned out there was no surprise guest, and that joy-intoxicated partisans and the political press had once again projected their fantasies onto a Democratic Party that doesn’t exist in reality. Despite appearances the Democrats are not magic; they can’t just make Taylor Swift appear. Beyonce is bigger than any politician and any political convention. Why would she be here either? Maybe it’s good they weren’t here, and the party is smart not to feed the pathetic nerd fantasy that it’s the overmind of American celebrity culture any more than it already does. On Thursday we got to see Pink, Eva Longoria, Kerry Washington, Tony Goldwyn, DL Hughley. It was like the crappy first hour of the Oscars! Except Americans hate the Oscars, and are generally grossed out by overly dense, overly public concentrations of their betters.

Nevertheless, the faithful were pumped. The only seat I could find in the hall was the bare crawl space of a concrete ledge behind a low fence over a portal in the upper deck. I was not alone up there. Sitting cross-legged to the left of me was a recent immigrant who worked at a startup that turns mushrooms into high-protein snacks—his office is located in Chicago’s former Union Stockyards, once the largest meat production facility in the entire world. Someone found a century-old meat hook during construction and it now hangs in the office, symbol of the cleansing of a bloody and violent inheritance and of the sideways paths America is always taking toward self-renewal. Sitting to my right was a middle-aged Black woman in sharp red Chuck Taylors, an actual delegate who had been kicked off the floor when they shrunk the capacity in anticipation of Harris’ speech. “I gave up Missy Elliot tickets for this,” she said, noting the rap legend’s concert in Rosemont, way across town. I suspect she bought her ticket during the first minutes of the Trump-Biden debate, the purchase being a legacy of this having once been a confused old man’s reelection convention, his coming acceptance of the nomination being too sad and awkward to witness in person. Who wouldn’t prefer Missy Elliot?

But it’s a new world now—tonight, no one’s choosing Missy Elliot over Kamala. A plausible standard for success had nevertheless been raised from up here on our hard, gray perch: To fully satisfy, Kamala would have to have something of the intangible world-conquering power of the big stars everyone thought they might get to see tonight. She had to show she belonged in their ranks, the way Obama did.

Mass political gatherings are a horrible, impersonal slog, but it is worth going to them to see astronomically powerful people in something much closer to their true human nakedness than you could get through the unreal window of a screen. She came out at exactly 9:30 in a black suit that was sharp but not harsh, anchored with a subtle black neckerchief that looked like a wavy extension of the suit’s hemline. The vice president wore pinpoint gold earrings that flashed from behind thick amber trellises of hair, and a tastefully small version of one of those lapel pins where the American flag is frozen in mid-flutter. She spoke against a pixelated gold background that looked distractingly like the Trump Tower lobby, and indeed it cannot be ruled out that this design was meant as a subliminal signal to the ex-president’s tens of millions of supporters.

In person, Harris is most powerful at the softer and slower registers, which like the rest of her presentation connoted gravity and earnestness. When she is quiet you can be certain that she is saying something very important, something you should really listen to—something that sounds too true to actively question. Her account of her origins was moving, unimpeachable, and not so intense as to make her seem too lofty for our mortal world. She described her immigrant mother’s divorce from her immigrant father, chess games with the neighbors in the Bay Area flatlands, the inspiration of Thurgood Marshall’s example, the sexually abused high school friend whose plight convinced her to become a prosecutor—it is the story of hundreds of millions of people in this ever-wondrous land, and also the story of presidents, of which we can have only one at a time.

Her hands spoke with authority, the comforting and noncoercive kind: She placed a hand over her heart at “faith,” chopped the air at “ideals we cherish,” softly pumped both fists downward at “awesome responsibility.” There was little in the way of memorable rhetoric. Policy ideas were scant, and she can be dinged for not really talking about causes of American anxiety that are not directly Donald Trump-related, like inflation or fentanyl deaths. President Harris will create “what I call an opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed”—as opposed to what exactly? The textures of the speech were compelling enough, though. Here was someone you could trust holding power over you and over the entire country and world.

Few people thought of Kamala Harris that way a couple of months ago. Way back in, say, early June, Harris was some combination of erratic and invisible as vice president, a tyrant to her staff, an especially unlikable figure in an unpopular administration. There was no evidence she had any real national appeal and her political instincts were suspect, tending toward self-immolating outbursts of pettiness, like her botched debate-stage gambit over Joe Biden’s ancient opposition to forced busing during the 2020 primary campaign.

I had seen Harris speak two other times before and found her a Chuck Schumer-level political retailer. That’s not how I think of her now: This was a new person on Thursday night. Harris and the Democratic machinery, in all their efficiency and imagination, had constructed a reality where the candidate, like her party, could unburden herself and the entire world of who and what had so recently been. The risk is that the change is too stunning and too abrupt, that there is some unknown and unsettling essence of character that the national divining rod that is the autumn of a tied presidential race cannot fail in surfacing between now and November.

On Thursday I saw a possible Kamala Harris. Whether she wins or loses—especially if she wins—we’ll eventually get to find out how real it all was.

Armin Rosen

Thursday, Aug. 22

Don’t Be Fooled by Riot Porn. It’s Fake. The Radicals Who Matter Are Inside the Convention Hall.

If I can convey one lesson from observing the DNC Gaza protests firsthand, it is that they are inconsequential. The radicals who actually matter have been brought back into the Democratic fold in order to project party unity. The Harris-Walz campaign is simultaneously courting the party’s pro- and anti-Israel constituencies in an effort to delay intraparty debates until after the election. The people on the outside of the convention are the leftovers. They have no power of their own now that their patrons within the party establishment have withdrawn their support, and their protests are, in effect, media pseudo-events, misleading even when they depict something “real.”

Let me give you an example. Yesterday, The Post Millennial posted a video, which as of my writing has received nearly 10,000 views, of a Black “counterprotester” (described as a “veteran” in some versions), carrying an American flag through the Wednesday protest in Chicago’s Union Park. A protester attempts to steal the flag, and it is snatched back by a young white man with long hair, a mustache, and a goatee. Watch it here, at 1:25.

Now, watch this video interview from Iran International with a “protester” carrying an Iranian flag (100,000 views on X), who tells the incredulous camera crew that he supports Iran for its “anti-Zionist policies.”

Notice anything? The “patriot” confronting the protesters in the first video and the “protester” waving the Iranian flag in the second video are the same guy, wearing a different shirt.

Now, here is a photo of someone in an alien bodysuit covering their face while waving an Iranian flag in Union Park—posted by the self-proclaimed “National Socialist” internet personality Thomas777. And here is the patriotic pro-Iranian goatee man dancing in the street with alien bodysuit man, now holding a Japanese imperial rising sun flag. They’re all part of the same crew.

The same goes for the “protester”—a white kid with a crew cut—seen waving a Hezbollah flag outside the DNC. That protester is X user “Zoran Zoltanous,” who writes the “Fascio Substack.” Zoran and Thomas777 were part of a crowd of what I can only assume were far-right pranksters sitting at the corner of the park on Wednesday, and which also included a young man dressed as a female anime character flying a “National Bolshevism” flag. When I walked by them, a man who appeared to be their cameraman shouted out “femboy National Socialism!” Internet-poisoned Zoomers? Actual fascists and neo-Nazis? Some combination of the above? No idea, and not sure if it matters. My own attempts to talk with them were met with deadpan assertions that they were “trolls.”

Whatever the case, the widely circulating videos purporting to show the “extremism” of the protesters are either falling for, or participating in, some sort of op. Yes, of course, there are plenty of extremists within the anti-Israel protest movement, as Tablet has documented for 10 months now. But the events outside the DNC this week are a clown show, and not necessarily what they seem anyway. My best advice is to ignore them.

Park MacDougald

Thursday, Aug. 22

Who Is Barack Obama, and Was His Speech Any Good? A Dialogue.

Armin: Who is Barack Obama? I’ll answer Talmudically, with another question: Who is DJ Cassidy, turntable-spinning host of Tuesday night’s “celebratory roll call” of the states? DJ Cassidy is the Upper East Side-raised, NYU educated child of the music industry superagent Johnny Podell. The corporate rap pioneer and alleged sex abuser Sean Combs, whose mansion was recently raided by the FBI, fake “discovered” Cassidy at a CQ-sponsored party at an especially plutocratic Manhattan night club. Cassidy is not a hip-hop producer of any particular note. Neither is he a turntable wizard who packs out the clubs with bliss-seekers. I can find scant evidence of him having any creative talents whatsoever. He’s instead famous for MCing parties for the upper reaches of the American political-celebrity complex. He DJ’d at Biden’s inauguration, at parties for Oprah Winfrey, Anna Wintour, and Beyonce, and of course at both Barack and Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday celebrations.

DJing and beat-making are among the most democratic of the arts, with self-taught geniuses arising from every corner of society, but for some reason the American establishment has an elite-educated pet DJ who is descended from relative privilege and has nothing obviously special about him. He performs in loud tuxedos; a stupid wide-brimmed hat and a goatee combine to hide his census designation from the naked eye—DJ Cassidy is from nowhere and everywhere. In a perfect world Lil John would’ve run the entire roll call yesterday—that man is a clarion of pure integrity, a populist from the very beginning, and a creative giant who is actually cool. I experienced his entrance as a lightning strike to the spine. But DJ Cassidy, who bobbed in place and yelled out “we’re passing the mic around the states!” at odd intervals, represents a kind of ideal type from the perspective of the Obama-era establishment. He is a knowledge-economy creative with a veneer of coolness. He can play act as The Future. His main skill is that he looks really good being someone else’s tool, and is thus a model citizen for our time.

Do you mean to say that Obama is the embodiment of a superficial type of cool whose sociopolitical function is to unite Jay-Z and Democratic megadonors together in a way that cements the party as the central institution of American life in exchange for protecting the social prerogatives and mind-bending wealth of America’s new Gilded Age oligarchy?

Armin: No, I think Obama himself is actually cool. He could only have pulled off what you described through the possession of actual coolness. But it’s a trick that requires dozens, hundreds, maybe millions of DJ Cassidys as its raw material.

Park: Obama is not cool. Or rather, he is not cool in the way that an authentically cool person is cool, “coolness” being the name that a democratic society gives to those of its members who embody the values of aristocracy—courage (physical and social), independence, and the willingness to treat life as a game, or at least as a work of art. Cliff diving is cool. Street racing is cool. Being a mixed-race international kid from Hawaii could be cool, depending on what you do with your life, but reinventing yourself as an American Black guy so you can run for office in Chicago is not. Politicians are very rarely cool.

What Obama is is the face of the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party is a strange thing. It is the party of the majority of the billionaire class, who fund the party’s operations (reports from this week suggest the Harris campaign is bringing $500 million a month), and of vast numbers of the real and nominally “disadvantaged,” who provide votes in exchange for patronage. Neither constituency cares about being “cool.” Who does? The legions of urban college-educated professionals, who make up the party’s activist base and staff its semi-official extensions in the media and nonprofit world. They are generally paid well, but not too well. They live in places where the cost of living is astronomical, and where the basic trappings of middle-class stability—homeownership, marriage, children—are out of reach. Their psychological integrity depends on the belief that flipping through The New Yorker every few weeks has elevated them a cultural rung above their friends back home, who may have kids and a car, but who have never experienced the pleasures of a $19 Negroni. Obama is a screen onto which these people can project their own unearned sense of superiority over their fellow Americans. He’s a lame person’s idea of what a cool guy is. His great political genius is in recognizing this, and cultivating it to his advantage.

What did you think of his speech?

Armin: I thought Obama’s speech was powerful, mesmerizing, all the usual adjectives that have been mindlessly applied to the guy for decades. For a couple interrelated reasons. Firstly, a political convention is a blurred-together vortex of throw-away rhetoric in which every passing scripted second—there are no unscripted seconds at conventions anymore, except when someone bursts into tears—has the effect of melting J.B. Pritzker and Keenan Thompson and the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, into a single shibboleth-spouting blob. In the midst of it all you come to realize how few real differences there are between a lot of the speakers. Everyone is making the same pitch in the same way, and because of this you almost never lose the exhausting feeling of being pitched to. Freedom, joy, Project 2025, IVF bans—these become nonsensical signifiers within the first couple hours of this four-day advertising blitz. It takes a special politician indeed to trick you into forgetting that his job is a subspecies of marketing, and ever since his earliest days as a national figure Obama constructed himself as someone too elevated to ever worry about something as vulgar as clinching a mere retail transaction. The sale was the crude necessity on the way to some other, much bigger thing, like hope or change or full nuclear disarmament. On Tuesday Obama once again made it seem like he was opening up big, tough questions about what America really is and what we as citizens are supposed to do with it all. He found that upper register, which might be an Obama-crafted fiction meant to flatter people in The New Yorker tote bag demographic—except that almost no one else at this convention could even attempt to achieve a self-conjured height beyond politics in front of a crowd of 20,000 people without sounding delusional or messianic or like an Obama imitator, except for maybe Oprah.

And the second reason: Obama’s 2008 campaign was a phenomenon without any real parallel in my lifetime—he single-handedly ended the nation’s sense of feeling demoralized after the Iraq mess and the recession. I don’t even know if that’s true, but at the time it felt true enough. Then he became a real-world wielder of mind-boggling power and the spell was broken to the point that Donald Trump was elected president after him. Obama nevertheless knows that even his critics carry around a powerful residual memory of what his election once represented, or of what we thought it represented. I think that’s why he’s viewed as an oracle: He was a transitional figure to a new American reality, and there is no one with totally uncomplicated or completely negative feelings about the shift in eras he embodies.

Park: I was less impressed by the speech. As one of our colleagues asked about midway through: “Did he lose the magic or was this it, and everything just changed too much since?” The crowd went absolutely nuts when he walked out, which elevated the performance for those of us inside the building, but once the magic wore off, I was bored. There was lots of chin-stroking about the pernicious effects of polarization, our fraying “bonds of affection,” the rise of social media … all the sorts of things you’d expect to hear in a Fresh Air interview with Jonathan Haidt circa 2014, before elite liberal culture was consumed by identitarianism, #MeToo, BlueAnon conspiracism about Russian subversion, and all the rest. Two years ago, surveys showed that nearly half of Democrats wanted to “fine or imprison” Americans who questioned the efficacy of vaccines, and more than one-quarter wanted the government to seize unvaccinated children. Now Obama’s going to tell us that democracy is the “way we treat each other”? Put aside the insult to our intelligence: What country is he talking about?

But yes, Obama is definitely talented: He embodies the way that liberals would like to see themselves—cultivated, tolerant, hip, open-minded, and always willing to extend the olive branch to the other side. The party’s lesser lights are unable to access this more idealistic register; you never get the sense that they “respect” conservatism’s “insights,” or wrestle with the “tragedy” of choosing between “incommensurable ends.” They just sound like partisan hacks. Obama makes you think he’d love nothing more than to respect the Republicans, if only they’d make themselves worthy of his respect. And indeed, for the past several days, we’ve seen the Democrats, presumably under Obama’s influence, make a whiplash-inducing pivot to the rhetorical center. BLM, Palestinian radicalism, gender insanity, climate change, “misinformation”—everything that has defined the Democrats ever since Trump won the White House has vanished without a trace. Instead, we’re getting family, freedom, football, the flag, and Obama quoting Lincoln. You’d almost forget that Obama’s wife had just declared her “palpable sense of dread about the future,” attacked Trump and Vance in explicitly racialized terms, and cast Republican voters as unreconstructed bigots and misogynists.

Bill Clinton said something about Trump Wednesday night that I think applies equally well to Obama: “He creates chaos and then he sort of curates it, as if it were precious art.” Just look at the Gaza protests. Most of the groups responsible are funded by Obama’s donors; during his presidency, their leaders were frequent guests at the White House. The difference is that Trump creates the chaos himself, whereas Obama leaves the dirty work to surrogates. Michelle can issue not-so-subtle digs to white America so that Barack can declare there is no such thing. Linda Sarsour and Hatem Bazian inject blood libels into American politics so that Barack can tell us not to “scold and shame” those who disagree. I prefer the Trump version, which at least strikes me as more honest. But Barack won two terms, and Trump only got one. I wouldn’t bet against him taking a third or fourth.

Armin Rosen and Park MacDougald

Thursday, Aug. 22

“You Like Me, You Really Like Me”

The actress Sally Field never actually delivered her most famous line. What Field actually said, when accepting her Best Actress Oscar in 1985 for director Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart, which is a type of film that Hollywood hasn’t made for ages and might usefully resurrect, was miles less pathetic and more self-aware: “Right now, you like me!”

Jewish Democrats may have left the United Center last night feeling much the same way. It’s no big secret that somewhere around 70% or more of American Jews identify as Democrats, with many experiencing the party as their quasi-spiritual home. Yet at this year’s DNC, any event with an explicitly Jewish angle to it is being held in a location that the organizers won’t share until you’ve gone through a multistep RSVP process. At the first post-Oct. 7 Democratic convention, no podium address has mentioned Israel’s security or its right to defend itself against past and future jihadist pogroms—the acceptable, campaign-vetted pro-Israel formula for convention speakers is a light variation on “free the hostages and secure a cease-fire,” which treats hostage-freeing as the sum total of Israel’s current strategic challenges and a near-term cease-fire as an obvious inherent good for the U.S. and its closest Middle Eastern ally, rather than as coerced surrender to terrorists.

On Tuesday night, Doug Emhoff, who the Harris-Walz ticket has charged with rekindling the party’s old magic among Jewish voters and donors, recalled the plastic on his grandparents’ furniture, a schmaltzy callback to the stereotypes of a much earlier time. In contrast, he did not mention the Oct. 7 attack, a communitywide trauma that happened only 10 1/2 months ago. The whole topic of Israel, a country Emhoff apparently didn’t visit until his mid-50s, is one he has sought to avoid during his time as second gentlemen, which is odd because Emhoff ostensibly led the Biden administration’s effort to develop a national strategy on antisemitism, a hatred with a pained relationship to broader questions of the Jewish state’s continuing existence. On Tuesday, Emhoff spoke about going to church with his wife on Easter, but not about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His daughter Ella, who does not identify as Jewish, has used her celebrity-by-association to raise money for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is terror-linked enough for her stepmother’s administration to briefly cut off U.S. funding to the agency.

“There was a proud and explicit celebration of Jewish identity during the DNC last night, and that matters,” Amy Spitalnick, director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said of Emhoff’s speech, and she is of course correct. It is important that the party is telling Jews that it likes us, though there is always a danger of relying on symbols too much, or misreading what the symbols mean. I met Spitalnick at a jam-packed lunch reception organized by the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and the event was a remarkable show of force, a symbol even more powerful than the brisket Kamala Harris supposedly cooks on Rosh Hashanah.

A couple dozen members of Congress dropped by a fancy events space near the United Center, as did New York Mayor Eric Adams, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and a passel of other national figures. Scores of elected officials addressed the gathering. “This problem we’ve had with some elements of the Democratic Party is horrendous, but it’s not new,” California Congressman Brad Sherman reassured everyone. “The other side can’t win elections. That’s why they’re blocking traffic.”

Don’t worry, we’re winning! Across over an hour of speeches, Eric Adams, the eccentric who runs the nation’s largest city, was one of the few who strayed beyond the bounds of in-group reassurance. “It’s become popular to hate,” fretted Adams in the event’s most candid moment of intracoalition criticism. “The days of just having dinners or idle conversations are over” for Jews who want to form connections to the Black community, he said. “We need to go outside our comfort zone and bring the young people along.”

The same unspoken anxieties hovered over every speech and over the event in general. Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden. Are there differences between the two of them on Israel that we will only learn of once she becomes president? “She was intimately involved in core decision-making throughout the conflict,” said Mark Mellman, veteran Democratic consultant and president of DMFI. “I think that’s important evidence.”

For skeptics, direct participation in post-Oct. 7 policies, which include sanctions relief for Iran and a U.S.-brokered effort to redraw Israel’s border with Lebanon to bring it closer to Hezbollah’s demands, will be mixed proof of Harris’ pro-Israel bona fides. Luckily DMFI has printed up a 14-page booklet of “Kamala Harris’ Twenty-Year Record of Pro-Israel Statements and Actions,” which includes sections outlining her opposition to BDS and her support for the Abraham Accords.

But hadn’t Harris surrounded herself with key figures from the pro-Iran deal wing of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, and wasn’t Ilan Goldenberg, her campaign’s Jewish liaison, a former adviser to Elizabeth Warren, who is far to the left of much of the Jewish community on Israel? “This is history,” replied Mellman, “in some cases almost ancient history. You don’t have a lot of people talking about resuscitating the Iran deal.” Besides which, “the president and the vice president make the policy,” not their staff. As for getting something, anything from the convention stage beyond the hostages-and-ceasefire formula: “I’m hopeful that tomorrow night we’ll hear some strong statements from Vice President Harris.”

Hours later, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hamas hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, pressed her forehead to the United Center podium and wept as the convention hall rose to its feet to welcome her. The delegates on the floor remained standing as Rachel and John Goldberg-Polin pleaded for their son’s release and an end to civilian suffering in Gaza. Jewish Democrats now had the validation they needed in order not to worry anymore. The inner reckoning would be much less painful than some Jews had feared—the party really does like us, and how silly and paranoid we were for ever thinking otherwise.

On Israel, just like on a host of other issues, there is a legitimately unknowable gulf between messaging and policy—which is a problem the Democratic Party doesn’t think it needs to solve right now. It’s a problem much of the party might not even see. And for the sake of defeating Donald Trump, keeping on Harris’ good side, and preserving a sliver of bipartisanship on Israel, the ones who do see it must pretend there isn’t a problem at all.

Democrats generally view Trump as a racist threat to democracy, but to defeat him in November they will need to make an intellectually honest attempt to understand his appeal—and not just to Jews. A side gathering of religious Christians on Wednesday morning got admirably close to a true understanding of what Harris is up against. “There’s no candidate less like a faith voter than Donald Trump—Amen to that?,” Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, said during a panel discussion hosted by Catholics for Kamala, “but he tells them he likes them.”

Trump has made himself the champion of people the Democrats now scorn. It would be a good start for Democrats not to scorn them anymore. But will nonscorn really be enough to swing them?

Marginal reversals in the Catholic vote in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could determine the outcome of the election. Abortion rights have been a huge theme of this DNC—though the overwhelming majority of noneuphemistic mentions of abortion from the podium have focused on medically necessary procedures rather than purely elective ones. The week’s emphasis on morally less ambiguous cases for terminating a pregnancy is a decision of messaging, not of policy, and if Harris loses, it is liable to be because Democrats have lost sight of any difference between these two things.

Evangelicals and traditional Catholics don’t just want to be told they’re liked, though it takes a surprisingly unusual degree of discernment and foresight to understand how necessary this is as a starting point. Of course politically liberal but religiously conservative abortion opponents don’t want the people they vote for to belittle or disrespect them, but they also want their elected leaders to reflect their preferences on the issues they most care about. Might it be possible for the Democratic Party to throw soft pro-lifers the smallest of bones for the sake of beating Donald Trump? “That’s a question we ask ourselves all the time,” replied Denise Murphy McGraw, national co-chair of Catholics Vote Common Good. “What does the campaign plan to do about these faith voters? There are a lot out there.”

These “faith voters” include people who are horrified at both late-term abortions and at forcing women to give birth to nonviable infants at the risk of their own health. They include people who are practically socialist but also believe that life begins at conception. “If you’re a Catholic you have neither political party that’s with you on everything your Catholic teaching teaches,” says Pagitt. “You’re always making a bargain.”

Jews are drifting into the category of religious-minded voters who must strike bargains with themselves in order to remain inside the Democratic tent. There’s bad conscience on offer on the Republican side as well. The GOP is effusively pro-Israel and friendly toward school choice, public accommodation of religious practice, and religion in general. But then Donald Trump will also meet with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and the Republicans support a raft of policies that are deal-breakers for most of the country’s Jews—including on abortion.

Armin Rosen

Wednesday, Aug. 21

The Politics of Joy

“Joy” was the rallying cry of the most consequential loser the Democratic Party ever nominated at any of its Chicago confabs (other than maybe George McClelland). “And here we are, just as we ought to be … the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy” exclaimed Vice President Hubert Humphrey as he launched his campaign for the White House, “and that’s the way it’s going to be, all the way, too, from here on out.”

It was not that way. The 1968 presidential election and history in general went in such a different direction that Humphrey-branded “joy” has fallen out of American political memory, and lives on only as something you might underline during a preconvention rush-read of Norman Mailer’s account of the ’68 edition. “If Hubie got in, the after-hours joints would prosper; the politics of joy would never demand that all the bars be dead by four,” wrote Mailer, deeply suspicious—maybe righteously incredulous—toward any power-seeker claiming to have shackled politics to enjoyment and fun.

A political convention is not cool, and it is not fun. In our present day these events are experienced as miles and miles of temporary fencing, concrete roadblocks, exotic police units—fully-kitted sheriff officers in forest camo, barking muzzled K-9s on the subway platforms, Secret Service snipers under rooftop tenting, watching you—with occasional political content thrown in. Vast areas around McCormick Place and the United Center are cities in suspension, with no traffic and very little street life. It’s like a theme-park version of a post-disaster Chicago.

How does one feel joy in any of this? Reality buckles under the strain of it all: Chicagoans are not used to motorcades and on Monday night drivers on the I-290 couldn’t be blamed for not knowing whether to pull over or speed up or dodge lanes as the flashing black metal armada of the national leadership charged toward downtown. At the United Center, the sconces in the trophy case that usually holds the Chicago Bulls’ six Larry O’Brien trophies—spoils of the world-beating champions, paragons of America’s dominance and greatness during our nation’s brief and happy post-history—are empty for the week, though the security guard stationed to watch the empty case told me I was about the 20th person at the DNC to have photographed it anyway. The Michael Jordan statue is still there, in a lobby where the camped-out media mingles with the more populist of the VIPs. The statue is a depiction of the living god, “the greatest there ever was, the greatest there ever will be,” as it says on the pedestal: A host of disembodied cloud-limbs rises to thwart His Airness, but he vaults even further into the heavens, reaching toward a numinous goal only he can see, his lips pursed as tightly as Hillary Clinton’s were last night when the crowd broke out into a “Lock Him Up” chant. Except Jordan shows no sign of Clinton’s giddy pleasure, for he is a winner without joy, just like Richard Nixon in 1968.

The statue is the cosmically perfect place to bump into Andrew Gillum, the Tallahassee mayor who is now a famous loser, having lost to Ron DeSantis by a mere 33,000 votes in the 2018 Florida governor’s race. After that his life devolved into a sad chaos of drug abuse and alleged graft. (The charges were dismissed and Gillum is reportedly clean now, and I’m fairly certain he was at the convention as a member of the media.) Gillum is friendly and reflective and looks fantastic—he’s tall and athletic, and his former disgrace and total retirement from politics have given him a kind of world-bitten gravitas. We touched briefly on the overall theme of joy.

I asked Gillum how DeSantis had gotten so popular, given how close Gillum had been to beating him. “He won by 19 points?” Gillum said, in reference to the governor’s 2022 reelection landslide. “There’s not a bone in my body that believes he’s got that kind of support in the state.” DeSantis had won by so much because of “a depression in the vote. And that depression speaks more loudly than people who do show up and vote.” Floridians had become so demoralized that they believed voting was pointless. “His actions make people feel like they are helpless,” Gillum said of the governor. The 2022 gubernatorial had been a reasonably high-turnout election by Florida standards, but whatever: Gillum isn’t entirely wrong that there is contentment in having a sense of agency, or maybe just satisfaction in the idea that people who disagree with you must abide by your preferences when you win. Maybe joy is a feeling that comes in anticipation of holding power.

Another explanation for what joy really means came from one of the leaders of the Washington state delegation, a serenely long-haired man named Sonaar Luthra who was wearing a Cowboy Kamala sash, a garment drawing a synecdochical link between the Democratic nominee and Beyonce, whose most recent album was the country-inflected Cowboy Carter. Was the sash saying that Harris was like Beyonce? What did it mean to merge these two figures—and was it not a little insulting to shackle Bey, who is extremely cool, to any politician, a person who is by nature uncool? The sashes, explained Luthra, a Truman Project fellow who focuses on water security issues, were “born out of a desire to really celebrate and embrace the joy of this moment. And they are for sale, if you want to add that.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen the Democrats this optimistic since 2008,” Luthra continued, which could be interpreted as a slight on Hillary and Joe, neither of whom was ever put forward as an exemplar of joy, happiness, or any related borderline ecstatic feeling. Upon quick reflection, Luthra’s statement is factually correct. In 2016, the Democrats were bitterly divided over the Bernie Sanders socialist insurgency, which a coven of party high-rollers colluded to defeat for good in 2020. And of course Donald Trump sucks the positivity out of everything. It is hard to wage a joyful power quest when a figure as indulgently nasty as Trump stands in your way.

“It is a blessing at this moment that we found a way to make this election positive given who the other candidate is,” Luthra noted. Under the pressure of Trump and the promise of a universally beloved nominee with undeniable star power, the Democrats had repaired their own lingering divisions. “We can trust each other, and we don’t all have to agree to get stuff done,” said Luthra, sounding himself like a perfectly reasonable pol from the long-vanished Hubert Humphrey era, a time in which “getting stuff done” was generally understood by grown-ups and even some hippies to be the sine qua non of politics.

Shasti Conrad, state chairwoman of the Washington Democrats, practically burst with exuberance when I asked her to unpack the Democratic “joy explosion.” “It’s grounded in an understanding of what it feels like to lose,” she explained to me when I asked where this exciting headrush had come from.

Later that night, the convention would hear from the man who had led the biggest victory these party foot soldiers had ever experienced, the one that many of the attendees in Chicago had shaped and that had shaped them in turn. Conrad had volunteered for the Obama campaign, just like half the building had, and later worked in his administration. “It’ll be like seeing your long-lost cousin or your uncle you haven’t seen for a while,” Conrad said of the night’s headliner. “He always knows how to own the moment.”

“Joy,” as I now understand it, refers to the realization of the process that Obama began in 2007, namely the merger of the donor-establishment and activist-progressive wings of the Democratic Party, the grafting of hope and power to a degree so thorough and meaningful that even neo-Mailers couldn’t afford to be too cynical about the whole without facing existential exile—a condition Mailer himself welcomed, but which few of his pallid successors could stomach. Here’s Mailer again, way back in 1968: “The party had always been established in the mansions and slaughterhouses of society … social legislation and the lubricating jelly of whores had been at the respective ends of its Democratic consensus.”

It’s still true, though, that with the right mix of competence and vision the party can make itself and the entire country forget that either the mansions or the slaughterhouses actually exist. For example, on Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders, avenging champion of the working American and enemy of the billionaire class, spoke right before Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is worth $3.6 billion. “Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections,” bellowed Sanders, returning briefly to his role as the guilty conscience of a party that now embraces him, and whose prerogatives he now mostly follows in return. Pritzker spent $323 million of his own money to get elected governor, but the living contradiction with Sanders’ speech from three minutes earlier disappears under the intoxicating influence of joy, which can not only contain both Sanders and Pritzker but can juxtapose them deadpan in prime time.

Where do such lofty yet strenuous contradictions find their higher synthesis? In Barack Obama, of course. The genius of Obama, the trait that makes him the greatest political talent of my lifetime, is that he can articulate an ideal of civic and human existence capacious enough to fit everyone. He talks about higher principle in a way that doesn’t sound fake, or like a cosplaying version of some earlier political archetype, which is how 95% of politicians usually sound. Whether a universally workable liberal civic compact in a country as complex and traditionally minded as ours was or is Obama’s actual objective is a question for another time. He can raise the possibility of the thing, which is hard enough.

Obama has aged to the point that I could see the dime-colored gray of his brow from the back of the 300 level, but once that familiar smoker’s baritone kicked in on Tuesday, once the crowd was riding that warm airstream of his vocal highs and lows and hanging on the music of his pauses, we were again hearing from someone who talked like no one else had talked before him, who appealed to something no other figure seeking ultimate earthly power had appealed to, and who could breathe life into otherwise platitudinous one-syllable concepts such as hope, joy, and the like.

“Democracy is the values we live by, the way we treat each other, including those who don’t look like us, pray like us, or see the world exactly as we do,” the former president declared. “We’ve all got our blind spots, our contradictions, our prejudices … Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.” This was the best possible Obama, the speaker of compact formulas that make his listeners see a better reality in spite of everything and in spite of themselves. “The ties that bind us together are still there,” he continued, summoning long, deep cheers from a reverently silent crowd. “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided.”

The Democrats have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. Surely some of the current bitterness and division relates to factors that Obama, who no doubt still wields some deliberately hard-to-qualify measure of unaccountable national power, injected into American life. Maybe the idea of rapid, unstoppable social transformation under the guise of civic peace is itself dishonest and embittering. It is certainly possible that the joy of the Democrats’ subsumption of progressives into the party structure will generate its own contradictions and bitternesses, or produce a mix of policies whose unappealing and incoherent nature will only be obvious after Harris loses or her presidency disappoints. But that all comes later. Based on the paucity of detail Harris has given about her plans for America, the lack of interviews and the vagueness of her proposals since entering the race, joy might not translate into any exact policies until it is safely ensconced in the White House.

Armin Rosen

Wednesday, Aug. 21

Pathetic Gaza Street Protest Fizzles, the Real OG’s Are Inside the Building

On Monday, I went to the much-hyped “March on the DNC” rally, whose organizers promised to bring 30,000-40,000 people to protest the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and who ended up bringing about 2,000. On Tuesday evening, hoping for a bit more excitement, I went to the Israeli Consulate for the “Shut Down the DNC for Gaza” protest, organized by Samidoun (a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a subsidiary of the tax-exempt Alliance for Global Justice) and Behind Enemy Lines, a local militant anarchist group led by Michael Boyte, who I’d never heard of before Sunday, but who is evidently fond of macho proclamations. Sample: Boyte said back in April that his plan for the DNC was to “make bruises from Chicago police batons the 2024 back-to-school Fall fashion.” His tagline for Tuesday’s action: “Make it great like ’68.”

It was not great. Perhaps 30 young militants, several of them dressed in red PFLP kaffiyehs, others sporting black bloc attire, did the anarchist equivalent of a shuck-and-jive routine for the gathered members of the press, who outnumbered the militants by at least two to one. Some sort of communique was read in front of the consulate, denouncing imperialism and praising the “brave Arab resistance fighters of Palestine.” A tall man in a ski mask and Chicago Bulls hat, Boyte, shouted imprecations against the “pigs,” “killer Kamala,” and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson into a microphone. Show time!

What followed was nothing short of pathetic. The initial plan (per the protest website) had been to march from the Israeli Consulate to the United Center, presumably smashing Starbucks windows along the way. But the protesters didn’t have the numbers for bloc tactics to be effective, and they were immediately corralled by Chicago police, who numbered in the hundreds. Half-hearted scuffling ensued. The anarchists were driven back to their starting point. Boyte reformed his lines and then launched into a new tirade against Brandon Johnson, of the come-see-the-violence-inherent-in-the-system variety. An American flag was produced for burning, but it went up too quickly to be satisfying. A second flag was produced (they’d planned for this), at which point a right-winger I’d seen trailing Jack Posobiec the day before leaped forward to save Old Glory. A shouting match ensued between him and a kid in a Behind Enemy Lines hoodie ($45, black only, email Boyte for sizing) who looked like Christopher Mintz-Plasse in ski goggles. I vaguely hoped someone would be punched. Nearby, a newsman with a camera crew yelled into an AirPod and what I assumed was the assistant who’d brought him there. “We’re missing good stuff at the United Center. You really fucked this one up.”

Later, as I filed into the United Center to watch Barack Obama emerge briefly from his occultation, I saw various riot-porn accounts on X hyping the “protest” with scary-sounding captions. They’re burning American flags! They’re assaulting cops! This is who the pro-Palestinian protesters really are! Short, narrow-angled videos gave the impression of a big crowd of radicals “clashing” with police. Nope. Fake. It was an almost unbelievably lame bit of street theater, with far less respect for the craft than your average shit-tier-indie wrestling production in Kentucky.

It was useful, however, in shedding light on another, larger fake. For months, we’ve seen police in cities like New York refuse to enforce the law against much bigger and more disruptive protests. On Tuesday, Johnson, the mayor who once proposed to defund the Chicago police, gave them seemingly unlimited authority to ensure that Obama’s big evening went off without a hitch. Linda Sarsour helped block the Manhattan Bridge back in November; on Monday she was in attendance at the official “uncommitted” panel at the DNC, where activists calling for an arms embargo to halt the “genocide” praised the Harris campaign for offering them an “officially sanctioned event.” In one of his pre-“riot” communiques, Boyte told The New York Times, “We’re not a pressure group on the Democrats, we’re trying to confront them.” Well, yeah. That’s why he and his buddies were getting worked by Chicago’s finest 2 miles east of the United Center. His former comrades with better connections were sitting inside of it.

Park MacDougald

Tuesday, Aug. 20

The Democrats’ Lean, Mean Messaging Machine

The most recent in-person Democratic National Convention took place in 2016, in a reality now almost totally alien to us. A battery of plagues, wars, and bitter national reckonings separated Monday morning from the last time the world’s most powerful political party had put its entire self on public display, risking an overly honest exposure of its innermost nature. As noon approached on the McCormick Place concourse, a trio of reporters, already stony with exhaustion, limply lowered their iPhones to the face of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who was saying nothing interesting of course but who at least represented a traditional core constituency of the national party. “In this reset moment she has come out courageously and passionately,” Weingarten riffed, without having to say who “she” is. A little farther down the same concourse, dressed in a black robe and a fabulous purple hijab, was another celebrity activist too recognizable to require a visible convention badge: The Bay Ridge firebrand Linda Sarsour, who was greeting admiring delegates from the “uncommitted” movement, a nationwide expression of discontent toward the Democratic presidential ticket’s excessively pro-Israel policies amid the fighting in Gaza.

The true self of the Democrats as expressed through the anthill of freshly arrived partisans at McCormick Place on Monday is somewhere well beyond ambivalence, as far as the Jewish state goes. Kaffiyehs with “Democrats for Palestinian Rights” printed on either end were as innocuous as those red “Donald Trump Is a Scab” shirts the United Auto Workers were all wearing. The uncommitteds’ “Not Another Bomb” buttons were rapidly subsumed into the wider convention panoply, taking their place alongside the “Remember January 6th” stickers and the “People Who Believe in Science for Harris” pins. The uncomitteds’ greatest stroke of genius was to produce attractive and plentiful beige “Democratic Majority for Palestine” T-shirts, which did not refer to any actually existing organization and were thus a bold guerrilla assault on the Democratic Majority for Israel, a high-spending PAC with no visible presence on Monday. It may well be a real organization before the end of the week.

“The only way the people we represent will rally around the nominee is if we believe they’ll work towards an end to the war in Gaza,” a youthful-looking 29-year-old named June Rose told me. Rose is the one uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island and the chief of staff of the city council in Providence, a skilled young Democrat in good standing in a place where 29% of primary voters chose “uncommitted.” As I prodded Rose, I discovered that “rally around” did not have the specific meaning of “vote for.” The uncommitteds were in fact committed to Kamala Harris, but only to a point. “We want to support her with enthusiasm,” Rose said of Harris. “And to do so we need to know she’ll save lives” and stop the U.S. government from “funding a massacre of children and families.”

Rose had stated the basic formula of anyone serious about politics. Uncommitted is backing the Democratic nominee for president but doing so through a carefully calibrated attitude of reluctance and expectation, meaning that they are holding out for more than they’re getting this week. But what they got was significant: On Monday, the movement hosted an official, DNC-sanctioned event at McCormick Place, a jam-packed panel discussion focused around the humanitarian situation in Gaza and a gathering executed with astounding political tact. The hand of the Harris campaign was obvious—as was the uncommitteds’ willingness to abide by the campaign’s apparent rules.

The panelists, which included Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, longtime Democratic party activist James Zogby, former Congressman Andy Levin, two Palestinian American women active in Democratic politics, and a pediatric surgeon who had worked in Gaza this past March treated Iran and Hamas as if they didn’t exist and decried Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascism without so much as saying Yahya Sinwar’s name—only Ellison made any mention of the Oct. 7 attack. But the panelists also never talked about BDS, made only passing references to a one-state solution, and did not praise Palestinian militancy or treat America as inherently evil. Most of the panel wept when the doctor, Tanya Haj-Hassan, described watching children die at overwhelmed Gazan hospitals. Hala Hijazi, the California-raised child of Gazan parents, and someone who has lost scores of relatives during the war, emphasized her own patriotism, recalling that she had given a speech before a citizenship ceremony and knocked on doors for Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. “I know everyone is struggling, but the vice president is working very hard,” Hijazi said. “We have to hold her accountable, but we also have to give her a chance.”

“She can say things that don’t betray the president,” instructed Andy Levin. “She can say we’ll follow U.S. and international law.” A packed ballroom erupted in cheers.

At the very moment a pro-Palestine rally in Union Park fizzled into a sad carnival of Hoxhaists and other angry weirdos, the people who want to reorient American policy toward the future nonexistence of the Jewish state had made real progress through normative procedural means. The uncommitteds had organized a national movement within the country’s leading political party, established a measurable degree of intraparty leverage during an election season, made limited concessions to potential allies in the party hierarchy, pragmatically moderated their message, traded away their leverage for things that would actually advance their issue set, and then held out for more. They recognized that the Democratic Party wants this process to happen, even if it’s for cynical reasons of internal contradiction-management and even if it’s a long way off from an official full turn against Israel.

“We can call it what it is, it’s genocide,” Zogby alleged of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, “but what’s historic here is that we have an officially sanctioned panel to talk about it.” Zogby lauded “The message the Harris campaign is sending by saying we wanna talk about it, and we wanna hear you talk about it. … Thank you to the campaign for sponsoring this. Thank you for listening to us.”

The protests on the streets and parks of Chicago this week are inevitably minor episodes, but actual history might have been made at McCormick Place on Monday—and made within the structure and under the auspices of the Democratic Party itself.

What is the meaning of the strange and truncated presidency of Joe Biden, and does the man himself even know? “President Biden addresses the DNC, reflects on his legacy” read a USA Today headline that popped up on Apple News toward the tail end of the president’s lengthy headlining convention speech on Monday night, which began well into the 11 p.m. hour on the East Coast, outside of prime time. But this wasn’t true—Biden, who is less given to poetic flights of interiority than any of his recent predecessors in the White House, hadn’t plumbed any previously hidden inner depths across a half-hour of slurred and halting oratory. He’d listed his achievements, played the hits: Charlottesville, Wall Street didn’t build America, our best days are before us, etc., etc. A half-hour earlier he’d weakly gripped his daughter Ashley’s arm and mugged in front of a perfunctory dull roar from an already-thinning crowd, a welcome marked by its length and monotony—the delegates had launched into open frenzy for Hillary Clinton earlier in the night, but it was getting late, both for the Democratic faithful and for Biden himself, who never once articulated some larger theme or meaning to his unlikely four years in possession of ultimate earthly power.

Onstage, Biden looked and sounded less like the president than Kamala Harris had during her surprise appearance over two hours earlier. From within the convention hall, I could sense a growing collective panic about how long the shuttle bus lines back to the hotels were likely to be. Those who stuck it out till the end got to see Hunter among the Bidens who joined the president onstage for his curtain call, another one of the night’s little reminders of the unanswered and unanswerable questions about who’s been running the government lately.

Of course, the lack of a compelling or believable first-person master narrative was always part of Biden’s appeal: He presents as a problem solver and a pragmatist, someone dedicated to improving the country without threatening the deepest values and interests of the people who disagree with him. Less generously, he is a conflict-averse power seeker whose true political talent is an ability to detect where the party is going and to cloak any cynicism behind a folksy, ice-cream loving exterior.

Within that rubric, it was possible to read moments of candid self-assessment into his speech. “We saved Democracy in 2020, now we must save it again in 2024,” he warned. So it turns out democracy’s survival had not become a settled issue on Biden’s watch. He had not snuffed out the Trumpist plot against our way of life—or perhaps he’d failed to sufficiently convince Americans of the existence of the threat or of the appeal of democracy as he understands it. Biden would not get another chance at either coercion or persuasion, though he provided no explanation, other than a single self-deprecating reference to his age, for why he had decided to drop out of the race.

There was no sense in the convention hall or from the night’s other speakers that the departure of this man from the heights of national leadership was any kind of a tragedy, and his speech was notable for never reaching any even vaguely lyrical register of open regret. The closest he got was during an ad lib about the Gaza war. “Those protesters out in the streets, they have a point,” Biden said, referring to the Hoxhaists and cultists who had gathered to accuse Biden himself of committing genocide. “Too many innocent people are dying on both sides.”

Biden spoke for half an hour, but he did not tout his record of sending arms, experts, and American warships to Israel in the days after the Oct. 7 massacre, and never recalled his visit of solidarity to the reeling country in the week after the attack. Perhaps such things can’t be touted as achievements at a Democratic National Convention anymore. What does seem true is that Biden’s real political talent as revealed over the past half-century is that he always knows where the party is going.

Armin Rosen

Monday, Aug. 19

Squandering the Revolution

“This is a precious opportunity that must not be missed—a rare chance to make revolution—which must not be squandered (wasted, thrown away) but must be actively seized by everyone who hungers for a radically different and emancipating world.” So I read in REVOLUTION 66, a dispatch by Bob Avakian collected in “The Increasing Craziness, The Intensifying Situation and the Possibility of REVOLUTION,” a pamphlet handed to me by a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA as I entered Chicago’s Union Park late Monday morning for the March on the DNC Rally. After a few hours, I couldn’t help but conclude that despite Mr. Avakian’s warnings, the revolutionary situation was indeed being squandered (wasted, thrown away).

The March on the DNC, organized by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)—both of them connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terror group—had been billed as the culmination of 10 months of radical protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. The march’s “coalition” included an eye-popping number of groups, ranging from hard-left stalwarts like the CCP-adjacent ANSWER Coalition and CODEPINK to groups that sounded like they were made up on the spot, like Skaters in Solidarity (motto: “recreation is a privilege born of resistance”). Organizers predicted that 40,000 might show up to vent their anger at “genocide Joe,” “killer Kamala,” and “baby killer Blinken.” But that was before Joe Biden was deep-sixed by the party inner circle so that Kamala could usher in a new era of Joy.

At the rally itself, USPCN executive director Hatem Abudayyeh hopefully proclaimed that 15,000 people had showed up, an estimate that was clearly off by a factor of 10. I overhead several attendees estimate the crowd size at between 1,000 and 3,000, which tracked with my own guess work. Whatever the real number was, it was small, with the crowd filling less than a fifth of the modest-size park, where hundreds of unused, preprinted signs littered the grass.

The attendees that did show up were almost invariably members of one or another radical microsect that exist outside the broad penumbra of party and foundation-sponsored and payrolled activists: Maoists, Trotskyists, The New Afrikan Black Panther Party, pro-Cuban groups, Puerto Rican independistas, Korean Juche apologists carrying banners demanding an end to “the War in Korea.” It was a diverse affair, but skewed toward the demographics of the dwindling white left. On the one hand, there were the aging militants who looked like they’d been to hundreds of these things, and who loudly kvetched that the sun was too hot and the speeches were too long. On the other hand were the Zoomer radicals looking exactly like they do in right-wing Twitter feeds: pasty, pear-shaped, Dada-punk hairstyles dyed strange colors, the vast majority of them in well-fitted N95 masks.

I chatted with one young man with peroxide blond hair who was holding an unfamiliar (to me) communist banner. He explained that it was a “Stalinist-Hoxhaist” flag, after Enver Hoxha, the lunatic leader of communist Albania. I asked why he was a Hoxhaist, of all things. He said he was still completing his political education, and asked that I direct further questions to his comrade, who was dressed like Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago. When I persisted, he explained that his “buddies” were also all Hoxhaists. He himself had been a psychology student at the University of Wisconsin, but dropped out when he ran out of money. When I passed by later, he was giving the same spiel to Jack Posobiec.

The Islamist contingent was almost entirely absent, save for a small American Muslims for Palestine booth and one group of masked young men wearing hoodies that said “One UMMAH.” No Quranic verses on signs; no Muslim calls to prayer; no Hamas and Hezbollah flags; no Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud chants. Even the counterprotests were half-hearted. A dozen people arrived to wave Israeli flags, while a street preacher blasted Christian rock in the background—police quickly formed a bicycle line to prevent any clashes, and they soon wandered off out of boredom.

The only excitement to speak of came from a young woman with purple hair carrying a sign scrawled with various anti-Black and antisemitic slurs, a swastika, and “Race War Now!” She told me she was against “Israel and Palestine,” then explained that while she was a “real reactionary,” her sign was also “performance art” to demonstrate that she had the same First Amendment rights as anybody else to write something extreme on a sign. I told her I agreed, but that she should try not to get beat up. She told me she’d already been “kicked by a man.”

Several months ago, when the Democratic Party was split over an aging and ailing Joe Biden, Israel’s war in Gaza was enough to draw more than 100,000 people to Washington, D.C., with activists from organizations wholly funded by the world of progressive big-donor dark money proudly marching alongside the partisans of Islamic terror to declare their implacable opposition to “genocide Joe.” Now “genocide Joe” is gone, the donors and the party are united behind Kamala, and there’s an election to win. Even while Jewish Democrats resorted to holding their conclaves in hidden locations for fear of pro-Palestine mobs, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that what I saw in Chicago on Monday—a paltry crowd of misfits, weirdos, and aging radicals—is what the “radical left” looks like in America when it is no longer being employed as a tool by far more powerful and important people.

Park MacDougald