CHICAGO — James Connolly was a stout Irish socialist, union leader, and freedom fighter who was famous for not settling for bullshit. Before being executed for leading an insurrection against the British in 1916, he penned his best-remembered ditty, “We Only Want The Earth.”
“Be moderate,” the trimmers cry,
Who dread the tyrants’ thunder.
“You ask too much and people fly
From you aghast in wonder.”
’Tis passing strange, for I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.
A statue of Connolly—perched atop a pedestal, gripping his own lapels—stands at the southwest corner of Union Park on the west side of Chicago. On Monday, thousands of Connolly’s own spiritual descendents could be seen massed behind him. They had gathered to march for Gaza, the biggest protest march planned during the Democratic National Convention. Chicago bicycle police in ridiculous balaclavas ringed the park; overhead a police helicopter circled, adding to the wind that kicked up orange dust from the baseball infield just in front of the stage. None of them had much to do. Though it was treated like a threat, it was a rally for peace.
The shinier the event in question, the more that protests of it are generally despised. A presidential convention is a party, and a protest is seen by most of the party’s attendees as pissing on the lawn. A few months ago, everyone anticipated a repeat of 1968, with bloody street battles between cops and protesters as a desperate and divided party fretted. Instead, Biden dropped out and a relieved nation has rallied around Kamala Harris and the appetite for dissent among faithful Democrats has evaporated. This is a good thing electorally speaking, but it doesn’t do much for the 15,000 dead children in Gaza. Even as Harris hints at perhaps shifting policy on Israel, the war drags on and the U.S.-supplied bombs fall and the people trapped in the rubble cannot wait to see how it all pans out. The protesters are there for the noble cause of trying to hurry this all along.
Unfortunately, a protest at the DNC will be covered mostly by D.C. reporters, who will shove all human events into a frame of D.C. politics, by nature. A protest sign reading “Victory to the Palestinian Resistance” will be evaluated primarily in terms of how it might strike a swing voter in Arizona. Thus the coverage of the protest focused on the fact that it didn’t seem as big as the organizers had hoped. Whereas the DNC was very big. See? One smaller and one bigger.
Are protesters just ignorant kids and unserious freaks? Maybe, sometimes. (Though not as unserious as all the slacks-wearing journalists threading their way through the crowd, looking like Visitors From Planet Dork.) It is a little unusual to rouse yourself to paint a huge banner with the Palestinian flag and march around town on the most beautiful day of Chicago’s year rather than, you know, barbecue. A halfway decent writer can sit back like a sniper and pick out all the signifiers at the protest to be wielded against the protesters: the pink hair, the unnecessary army boots, the young people in red hammer and sickle t-shirts, the old hippies with too many buttons. One could argue, though, that it is far freakier to watch your government send bombs that incinerate families and crush thousands of kids for months on end and then turn away and pretend it isn’t happening because you have a celebratory party to go to. That seems downright pathological. And besides, don’t we want weirdness to be pointed in the proper direction? It is good for the weird people to be calling for not killing people, rather than for killing everyone. It is good for weird people to ask for freedom rather than for jailing a long list of undesirables. It is good to be weird in the direction of peace. America has millions and millions of residents who are weird in the opposite way.
The Democrats’ determination to seal off the Gaza issue in a small container that will be buried out in the woods is sad, too, because in other ways, the party offers more hope than it has in generations. The lefties—not just the intellectual lefties, but the fucking people—are on the rise in the Democratic Party. A 10-minute walk from Union Park is the sprawling brick headquarters of the Chicago Teachers Union, one of America’s strongest local unions, a union capable of shutting down the city in order to get resources for poor children. A union that just got one of its own former staffers elected mayor. A real badass union that is no longer on the outside looking in.
In their auditorium they held a two-day conference for progressive Democrats, a sort of shadow prelude celebrating the left’s consolidated gains that would manifest at the convention in the form of mainstream speaking slots for AOC and Shawn Fain. One panel there on Monday morning featured Nina Turner, the frenetic Ohio leftist, orating like a preacher about black liberation, followed by Saru Jayaraman, the small but mighty head of the group One Fair Wage, narrating a decades-long struggle to get restaurant workers a minimally livable minimum wage, followed by Sara Nelson, the blonde and telegenic and fiery president of the flight attendants’ union, leading the crowd in a verse of “Solidarity Forever” before speaking about how unions can help defeat sexism.
“When I started working at United, they made me wear two-inch heels. That’s why today I only wear tennis shoes,” she hollered, swinging her leg out from behind the podium to reveal some Asics.
That three-speaker run, delivered to a modest crowd of lefties in a half-full auditorium, was more true and powerful than anything the DNC could deliver on its main stage. But it was fine. The labor movement isn’t peering into the Democratic Party through cloudy glass any more. We are fucking ascendant. Something has happened since 2016. An invisible line was crossed. Too much inequality and suddenly the Democrats snapped to attention and realized that they had to take the people talking about class war seriously. And in that short time, the ground has shifted, from The Party of Larry Summers to The Party of Shawn Fain. I don’t want to overstate things, but you can feel it. The labor movement, which has spent most of my life in the party’s lobby, is now in The Room Where It Happens.
Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, stood on the stage at their headquarters with all of America’s left-wing titans around her, with Bernie Sanders on the way, in her city, where her guy is mayor, where the party’s convention is being held, the strongest union in a strong union town in a union party. Swagger comes naturally in that situation. “Sometimes we focus on November” and its elections, she said, gazing around the room. “But there’s December. And there’s January. And there’s February. And there’s March. And there’s April. And there’s May.
“You get the idea.”
At 6:00 p.m., the world’s longest freestanding line had formed outside of the United Center, where the Bulls usually play but which had been taken over by armed guards and metal fencing for the DNC. Imagine everyone attending an NBA Finals game—except with more men in blue blazers, no tie, and tennis shoes, who are the “fun” kind of lawyers—lined up in single file down a city street. That is what the line was like. I made it in, though, to my seat in the upper-upper deck, almost close enough to touch the roof. The mild altitude-induced vertigo was counterbalanced by the fact that I had a good view of the enormous nets full of red, white, and blue balloons, stuck up in the rafters, waiting for their big moment. It would be cool to have that many balloons at a party.
When covering political events like this, of either party, I quickly find myself scoffing at all around me. The middle-aged woman across from me intently mouthing along to the phrase, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris said: Hope is on the way!” What the fuck? The deafening roar that went up when Harris herself made a brief appearance on stage—a roar that was equalled, I must tell you, by the roar that went up when Hillary Clinton took the stage. What the hell? The people clamoring for a nod from Mayor Pete, or reacting ecstatically to the appearance of Jamie Raskin. Really? “Who are you psychos?” my brain asks, panic rising, sending me Darwinian signals to seek an exit from this bizarre situation.
The problem is me. My reaction is the equivalent of going to an Alabama football game and spending the whole time haughtily saying to myself, “Don’t these people know that football is not as important as other, more complex issues?” Who the fuck do I think I am? These people know why they are at the DNC: They are there to party, for the Democrats. Why am I there? I am there to analyze, a task that is hard to do well when all you are doing is wondering what percentage of the crowd has “In This House We Believe” yard signs. That is not proper analysis.
Those who can fully buy into the Democratic Party as an identity in itself—rather than buying into a political ideology, which forces you to forever be tortured by the party’s failure to live up to its moral demands—have a straightforward recipe for satisfaction: Democrats win. All is well. You can see the appeal. From the ideological point of view, an interesting consequence of these party animals is that they will take whatever the party feeds them, and embrace it. That is bad when the party feeds them Neoliberalism at Gunpoint, but in 2024 it can be good, since the swinging pendulum is forcing the party to feed them new things. These people would clap for Bill Clinton talking about ending welfare as we know it, but they will clap equally loudly for AOC talking about the mandate of helping the working class. The important thing is not the content, but the fact that the person is appearing on a really well-lit convention stage. The Democratic Party is a cafeteria that serves one thing each day and the party faithful will invariably eat it. So the real fight goes on in the kitchen. The real fight is in writing the menu.
Shawn Fain, the plainspoken UAW leader, got a primetime slot at the DNC, which is a big deal because Fain is basically a socialist who talks nonstop about class war. This is a new thing that the Democrats have been forced to put on the menu. Fain got his sort of Leftist Dad Joke moment when he whipped off his boxy, ill-fitting suit jacket and revealed his red “Donald Trump Is a Scab” t-shirt.
“Trump’s a Scab!” chanted thousands of people in the arena.
“Trump’s a scam!” chanted the nice lady from Oregon sitting next to me, who had brought her teenager to the DNC for the experience, and who didn’t quite hear it all correctly.
This matters, though. Teaching (almost) an entire stadium full of normal people what a scab is—that is the sort of mass education that the labor movement has spent decades trying to pull off. Here, it happened in an instant. There is a reason why snide left-wing writers don’t always make good political consultants. When Steve Kerr took the stage and said, “I can’t think of a better metaphor for what this nation is about” than the USA basketball team, I rolled my eyes. Can’t you? Can’t you, Steve? How about a voracious Godzilla monster rampaging across the virgin earth, smashing and consuming all in his path, including basketball courts, not to mention indigenous cultures? Wouldn’t that be a better metaphor for America? Are we writing an essay here or marketing copy for Spalding, Steve?
What this fails to acknowledge, though, is that an NBA coach of Kerr’s fame appearing on stage at a major party convention is a big fucking deal by normie 2024 standards. People in Kerr’s position typically won’t even say which gambling app they prefer, much less speak out on the dangers of Trumpism. We have to take what we can get. We have to welcome all comers. We have to balance the fight in the kitchen with the need to put a smile on our face when we serve the meal. This is the struggle of politics. Why, it’s a lot like coaching a team—you all have to come together to win out there on the court.
As the crowd filed out of the arena at the end of the night, one lone young stubborn man stood on a corner by the Uber pickup lot, holding a Palestinian flag. He was too tired by then to even say anything to the passing delegates. He just stood there. Across the street, a TV reporter filmed a standup shot. “Behind me is the last protester at day one of the DNC,” she said brightly.
Earlier in the day, I met the Redneck for Palestine. His pickup truck was parked on the street just next to Union Park during the protest. “REDNECKS SUPPORT PALESTINE” was lettered across its back windshield. “STOP THE GENOCIDE” was written on the tailgate. Two Palestinian flags waved from flagpoles bolted to the back bumper, jutting out at 60-degree angles in each direction. The front of the truck was covered in red, white, and green keffiyeh patterns. Lounging on the sidewalk nearby was the owner, a large white man who looked like Bubba Sparxxx. He had a short blond goatee and his right front tooth was gold.
“I’ve been doing this for 10 years. Every vehicle I had has been for Palestine,” he said. He grew up in Texas and now lived on the outskirts of Chicago. Why did he do all of this? Why?
“We’re killing people over there,” he shrugged. “If someone was doing that to my country, I’d want people to speak up.”
Joe Biden is far weirder than this guy, and not nearly as cool. If the Democratic Party can ever internalize that, they will be unstoppable.
