The party was a party.
Attending the 2024 Democratic National Convention as one’s first convention, as I did, is like going to Taylor Swift as your first concert. You risk coming away with the impression that that is how concerts are.
But there were enough people around to disabuse me of that notion. From the most detached journalist to the most fervent stan, there was a sense on everyone’s lips that this one was different, felt like its own thing.
One anecdotal data point: A veteran Chicago-based organizer I spoke to told me that, just a few weeks ago, before the Great Candidate Swap, friends at the DNC had asked her to bring her college-age son to the convention — along with, as she put it, “like seven of his friends.” A month can be a lifetime.
In an earlier email this morning, we recapped my coverage this week. But I also wanted to share with you this final reflection on the bigger themes I observed and what they mean for what is coming.
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The great progressive-moderate synthesis
When Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, stood up to speak yesterday, the audience leapt its feet, roared as loudly as it had at virtually any moment until then, and would not stop its ovation for two minutes. Warren, a steely force who is not given to emotional displays, was moved to the point of shaken, her face flushed, her eyes welling, sort of aghast to be so loved by the whole room. She ran a whole presidential campaign; she knows she has supporters out there. That she was surprised beyond measure at the level of consensus fervor for her suggests that she was seeing something she hadn’t before.
Here’s what I think she was seeing: A remarkable and improbable progressive-moderate synthesis/truce/shotgun-marriage that hasn’t been discussed enough.
If you go back to the 2020 primary, there was a real progressive vs. moderate split. Warren had an early surge, and then Bernie Sanders had a strong run in the opening primaries, and it seemed as though the unthinkable might happen in American politics — a socialist atop the Democratic Party. And then, in a moment that still gives progressives palpitations, several of the moderates quickly and concertedly dropped out and coalesced around Biden, seemingly in the hope of preventing a Sanders victory, above all. Meanwhile, relations within the progressive wing, between Warren people and Sanders people, were fraught, too, with Sanders backers mad that Warren dropped out with endorsing him.
All of that now feels like a lifetime ago. Today, progressives and moderates have found a generative working arrangement that is neither consensus nor war. Differences are tolerated and worked around. Mutual respect is paid. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can say that she and Biden wouldn’t be in the same party in many countries and condemn his policies on Israel and Gaza while enthusiastically endorsing him and now Harris. Biden, for his part, embraced an aggressive approach to climate change that probably wouldn’t have come to pass without Ocasio-Cortez’s bold, energetic vision in the Green New Deal.
This was not the relationship between progressives and moderates under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. And it was not inevitable. Biden’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, did remarkable work, starting with the basic paying of respect, to forge it. Progressive leaders showed maturity in continuing to demand more and be morally unsatisfied, while also being grown-ups and making deals. Moderates allowed themselves to be moved by where the shifting energy of where the party was and made peace with a shifting Overton window.
What progressives and moderates have achieved isn’t consensus. It’s the mutual giving of wide berth. Having the maturity and mutual respect to allow each to be in their lane and not needing the other to be like you. There is almost a recognition when you talk privately to lawmakers of a sense in each faction of the need for each other. Moderates are more likely today to speak of progressives as the more idealistic, if in their view naive, incarnation of Democrat, and progressives can grudgingly admit to moderates’ sometimes greater attunement to what the public is ready for today.
Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday night was a relatively centrist speech, aimed at the moderate voters who were tuning in en masse. There was a lot for progressives to cheer in the speech, but also, frankly, a lot for them NOT to cheer. And they didn’t protest, as they once might have. They gave her a wide berth. And they appear to trust — as the Biden administration gives them good reason to — that Harris will be responsive to them in office.
The campaign, the creators, and the press
In one sense, the entire purpose of a political convention is media. You gather in one city, bring everyone who’s everyone in your party there, pack the place with supporters, and invite the media to broadcast to the world your messages, your symbols, your ideas, your enthusiasm. In the United Center arena, directly opposite the stage were the skyboxes given over to all the major news channels. Thousands of journalists were granted credentials, and you saw reporters from Japan to the Netherlands setting up outside in the parking lot, broadcasting to faraway citizens, whose lives, like it or not, will be altered by America’s choice.
Relations between the press that covers politics and political campaigns that need-loathe the press are never easy. But this time around, they were especially fraught because the campaign is conducting an affair out in the open. The kind of affair where you’re flagrantly dining out in restaurants, not furtively meeting in hotel rooms.
The affair is with the so-called “creators.”
The creators are independent citizen reporters and social media explainers and streamers and YouTubers (and, you could argue, newsletter writers like me, though I was credentialed as a journalist). The campaign put old-school journalists up in the cheap seats and rolled out a literal blue carpet for creators, opened a lounge for them with food and drink, and generally was seen as bending over backwards to make these new media folks, these influencers, comfortable.
Personally, I don’t have the problem with this that some old-school journalists do. But I also see on the horizon a growing rift between the Democratic Party and the traditional press that I think needs to be repaired and dealt with rather than ignored and left to fester. The affair isn’t the solution here. It’s time for the press and campaign to do couples therapy.
Relations are bad for many reasons. The press is angry that the campaign doesn’t seem to want to make Harris available for interviews. The campaign looks at the kind of bullshit questions the press too often asks, as in the well-publicized tarmac moment not long ago, questions hyperfocused on tit-for-tat reactions to Trump and silly clickbait, and feels it’s serving its own interest more than the public’s. Enter the creators, who are the hot new item the campaign can have a dalliance with. They are happy with whatever access they get, they reach millions of people, they don’t have inflated, moralistic expectations of what they are owed, etc. The press feels like the spouse and kids and play dates and lunchbox making and lawn mowing at home; the creators feel like deliverance from all of that.
I’m not going to adjudicate this conflict, but let me say that I think there is a lot of validity in the sense of hurt on both sides. I also think there are dangerous attitudes at play. The media need to realize that a lot of how a lot of it has covered these serious times and the rising threat of authoritarianism is flawed. That is real. Campaigns are right to be wary. And the campaign needs to realize that a streamer or a YouTuber, no matter how compelling their work (and I think their work can be incredibly compelling), is not the same as the press. You know this. You know the role that bona fide, big-time, old-line news organizations have played in investigating Trump and leading to the felonies that the campaign now touts; you know how they cover things like wars and insurrections in a way that individuals like me never could; you know that professionally honed skepticism may not feel good but is ultimately good for you, keeping you honest, and good for democracy.
As someone who is in many ways a very old-school journalist and also kind of, sort of a new media creator, I encourage repair. And a healthy amount of introspection.
It’s not all about her
There are so many comparisons being made now. To Barack Obama in 2008, which both fits and doesn’t. To Hillary Clinton in 2016, which both fits and doesn’t. But I keep thinking about something Senator Brian Schatz told The Ink this week: “The difference between this and any other convention is that I think it’s the three dimensional embodiment of ‘Not me, us.’ It was Bernie’s slogan, but it’s now it’s real…[T]his doesn’t feel like it’s a cult of personality — this feels like a movement. A movement is faith in strangers.”
This rang true at the DNC. For all the enthusiasm in the air, and it was an astonishing level of enthusiasm, it wasn’t fixated on Harris herself. Even though a Shepard Fairey poster has now been made of her, she is not her Fairey poster, a solemn and stirring icon and object of adulation and projection, in the way Obama was turned into. Even though her election would make history on three dimensions, the trailblazing aspect is something she never mentions. If Hillary Clinton rallies were full of reassurances about being “with her,” the direction of concern seems to flow in the other direction with Harris. She worked at McDonald’s; she gets you. As Barack Obama said in his speech this week, Donald Trump isn’t losing sleep over your problems, but Kamala Harris will. She is not the nation’s messiah, in this telling; she is its Momala, a comparison her stepchildren explicitly made.
The merit of this dynamic, as Schatz notes, is that it leaves space for movement. It allows energy to develop laterally, among supporters, instead of having it all be directed up at the Leader. It is less prone to sugar highs and sugar crashes.
Please all, please none
Harris’s acceptance speech was a moderate one. It was short on dramatic language about climate change and long on talk about securing the border and ensuring the supremacy of the U.S. military. Many liberals and progressives in the room had to shudder at some of that. But what is preventing a revolt, in addition to the great synthesis described above, is that there are plenty of other indications that Harris intends to pick the right fights when needed.
Consider, for example, the selection of The Chicks as the national anthem singers. This is a frontally provocative pick, a thumb in the nose of the right wing that chased the then-Dixie Chicks out of town. Or Harris’s selection of Walz, who was hardly a palatable-to-all choice with his quickly contagious “weird” takedowns. Or her embrace of YIMBY housing policy to tear down oppressive local zoning codes. Or her support for a tax on the unrealized capital gains of some of the wealthiest households.
Harris, in other words, seems interested in a delicate balance of claiming the mushy middle when the politics of the issue, which is to say where the broad mass of people are on the issue, demands it — while not simply lapsing into being a mushy centrist. That, at least, is the hope. It remains to tell.
Progressive patriotism
The chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” were irrepressible this week. A new progressive patriotism is rising among Democrats, with some of the old hangups dissipating.
Too many progressives, having misplaced their dictionary, confuse patriotism with nationalism and thus think the former ugly. But it’s not the same, and it’s not ugly.
Will Bunch, a veteran Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who wrote some of the best dispatches from the convention, wrote this:
The political party that’s been battered and bloodied in America’s culture wars since the end of the 1960s by not even really knowing how to fight them finally decided to stop worrying about churning out policy papers and pleasing newspaper nitpickers, and instead start playing to win — and on their terms. Backed by a pulsating soundtrack that jumped from the soul of Stevie Wonder to Lil Jon’s hip-hop to the Texas Americana of The Chicks, Democrats in Chicago successfully argued that their culture — a middle class full of hardworking Black and brown folks and strong women, seeking only the freedom to make their own life choices — is America’s culture. And that fighting for things like reproductive rights or against climate change should not be pigeonholed as progressive but embraced as patriotic.
What took them so long?!
And yet, liberals and progressives being who they are, with their profound responsibility complex, it wasn’t a chest-thumping patriotism. Even as the chants throbbed through the hall, several speakers spoke in a language of civic repair. You couldn’t imagine the right’s patriotism, which really is often nationalism, taking this form. But it was welcome to hear calls for returning to our neighbors, rekindling affections, re-tying severed communal bonds.
As Barack Obama put it:
As much as any policy or program, I believe that’s what we yearn for: a return to an America where we work together and look out for each other. A restoration of what Lincoln called, on the eve of civil war, our “bonds of affection.”
They’re baaaaack!!!
Speaking of which, the Obamas appear to be back. In recent years, they have been focused on projects in content creation and foundation- and library-building and book writing and touring, and the Biden White House, for its part, understandably wanted to show that a former vice president was his own leader.
But with Harris’s ascension, the Obamas have very much returned to the political sphere. David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, is now at the top of the Harris effort. The echoes of hope are being explicitly called out. Oprah is once again involved.
When Michelle Obama said, “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it? You know, we’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading across this country we love. A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long,” some took it as a dig at Biden. A more generous interpretation might be that Bidenism was, by choice, not an evocative approach but a sober one, focused on being a counterpoint to Trump’s pyrotechnics. That worked in 2020. By 2024 it was leaving latent much of the potential energy that we now know was there, ready for a reason to be fired up. 2024 is not 2008, but the Obama-era politics of story and sentiment and cultural participation and movement do appear to be baaaaack.
Selective liberation
The protests over Gaza hovered over Chicago but didn’t become the conflagration some predicted. Still, they raised questions for Democrats — questions that the party leadership didn’t seem eager to grapple with.
But the dilemma raised by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his essay in Vanity Fair this week will grow increasingly unavoidable. At the heart of it is this: The 2024 Democratic Party’s program is perhaps among the most inclusive political programs in human history: committed to the liberation of all people, all groups, all kinds, from every oppression.
But this is also the party currently in charge of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and the Democrats’ standard-bearer is not just a candidate but also the sitting vice president, and this party remains steadfastly committed to sending bombs to arm a country, Israel, whose conduct is, even in the eyes of many of its own citizens, as immoral as it is self-sabotaging.
Harris spoke eloquently and helpfully of Israel’s rights and, equally, of the rights of Palestinians this week. But the underlying reality remains unchanged. Over time, the cognitive dissonance of the selective liberation on offer from the Democratic Party will grow more unsettling and problematic. This is not just a problem of managing a small group of protestors in Chicago. It’s a problem of being philosophically coherent and of not letting joyful unity abet barbarism.
Saving democracy for a reason
With this convention, the Democratic Party seemed to move decisively beyond the Biden-era focus on defending democracy as a paramount and existential purpose. To be clear, the Biden approach proved effective in its moment, winning not only the 2020 election but also showing strength in subsequent midterms.
But there was always the problem that the democracy pitch could ring hollow to certain voters: those upset who were about prices that were too damn high and felt the democracy pitch to be worthy but a trace remote; those who do not live and breathe politics every day and felt the democracy threat talk, incorrectly, to be overblown; those who do not perceive America, based on their life experience, to be an especially realized democracy and therefore weren’t sure what was being saved.
The Biden approach was reflective of someone who came up during the Cold War and had a stark, democracy-or-tyranny view of the world. But what is emerging now is an approach more of saving democracy both as an end in itself — and as the means to other ends. So many of the pitches at the convention spoke of saving democracy not as some self-evident truth, but because…
Because then you can choose the policies that will allow you to go build, create, do. Because then you can have Thanksgiving dinner again without it devolving into conflictual madness. Because then you can get the healthcare you need. Because then we can get these prices under control. Because then we can build again.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty
This post was originally published on The.Ink.