CHICAGO — “I believe in America,” shouted Cory Booker, the bear-like New Jersey Senator, last night. He was standing on stage at the United Center, in the middle of a ring of lights shaped like stars that were set into the stage’s surface, giving each speaker a heavenly garland. His was not the brutish Republican form of believing in America, the transparent mythmaking, the denial of all of the nation’s past sins. He spoke instead of all of the oppressed, the strugglers, the civil right marchers who had overcome, and said, “Every single one of them believed in America, even when America didn’t believe in them.”
This is the Democratic version of the American myth: not that America is innocent of all sins, but that all of America’s sins are deviations from America’s true nature, that can be solved by ever greater applications of love for America. In this formulation, all basis for despising America evaporates. America is not characterized by the outrages of its past, but rather by those who fought to correct those outrages; any currently outstanding outrages call for patriotism and not its opposite. The urgency of bringing about justice is diluted by the conviction that injustice will never persist forever. America can continue on at its leisure, and years from now, history will look backwards and name who was on the right side today, and declare them the true Americans. This is a blueprint for Begging the Question of America, one that says that all of the nation’s evil sits, definitionally, outside of its substance. When Nina Simone said “Mississippi Goddam,” she wasn’t cursing America’s soul, but rather expressing her deep but momentarily thwarted belief in our country. Republicans will kill ‘em all and let god sort it out. Democrats, more civilized, leave the sorting to historians.
The Democratic National Convention is a machine for the production of this sentiment. It is very good at its job. It takes in the ragged world and produces smooth unanimity. All inequities are recast as feel-good stories. Tom Suozzi, the blandest of cardboard Congressmen, proudly told the crowd that his father was elected the youngest judge in New York state. “What a country!” he said. An amazing country, where the son of a judge can become a Congressman.
There is rhetorical jujitsu and then there is the even more masterful form in which every edge of every issue has been sanded down so cleanly that they all flow by without any objectionable points that one might even grab onto. There was Keith Ellison, the progressive attorney general of Minnesota, dutifully assuring anyone worried about Kamala Harris’s and Tim Walz’s foreign policy that “everyone is included in their circle of compassion.” There was Mindy Kaling, testifying to her close personal friendship with Kamala Harris, who came to her house a few years back to record a video about cooking. There was Stevie Wonder, urging us all to “choose courage over complacency.” Courage for what? Who cares! That’s Stevie Wonder!
No one has mastered this form more than Barack Obama, whose graying hair has only added a touch of statesmanship to his personal charisma. I got in a cab while Obama was speaking on Tuesday night. The cabbie was listening to Obama’s speech and the guy at the corner store was listening to Obama’s speech and every occupied house on the walk home had Obama’s speech on TV. To his rapt audience, Obama said: We can all get along. Get along about what? Do not ask.
In this fuzzy atmosphere, all things become easier to swallow. At the beginning of the evening, the stadium crowd solemnly bowed its head and nodded along to the benediction from the book of Isaiah: “Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and thou shalt be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of Paths to dwell in.” A couple short hours later, they were cheering wildly for a campaign ad on the big screen in which Kamala Harris promised to Get Tough on the Border and pass the bill crafted by the right-wingers in Congress, the bill that Trump had shot down for reasons of political self-interest. A Texas sheriff in full uniform, complete with cowboy hat, strode out to make the point that Harris was no weakling on this migrant situation. The crowd’s cheers rose to an ecstatic pitch when Jeff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia who had refused Trump’s election-fixing demands in 2020, stared into the cameras and declared, “If you vote for Kamala Harris, you’re not a Democrat. You’re a patriot!”
This is not necessary. This is not the only way for the Democrats to be. I thought in those moments about Shawn Fain, the UAW leader whose prime-time turn on Monday night has already sold thousands of “Trump Is a Scab” T-shirts. One of Fain’s best qualities is that he is willing to follow his convictions wherever they may lead, rather than respecting the sharp lines that national politics attempts to impose on morality—lines that are drawn, often, at the United States border. When Fain speaks of immigrants he speaks of a humanitarian crisis, rather than an invasion. He speaks of a need to take in people who are in search of a better life, rather than a need to heighten walls. On Wednesday morning, Fain and several other national union leaders were gathered on the 17th floor of a tower in the West Loop, in a grand event space bounded by floor to ceiling windows on all sides, the sort of place where Bruce Wayne might hold a reception. On closer inspection the space was actually a basketball court, the hoops folded up toward the roof and the floor covered with gray carpeting. Tiny lobster rolls were served. The passed grilled cheese appetizers were cut into minute squares, a sign of sophistication.
Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s dapper and hoarse mayor, was hosting the event to “honor” labor leaders. (There is a strange impulse in politics to turn every gathering into some sort of “honor” or award for political leaders themselves, but sometimes that is what it takes to get political leaders in a room.) Really, the event was a signal—a signal, during the Democratic Convention, that organized labor had arrived in the Democratic Party, in a way that has not been true for many years. The mayor, a former union organizer himself, was hosting the convention with one hand, and with the other hand raising up labor until it stood quite literally atop the skyline, surveying the world below in a way that makes you feel mighty.
That room, full of local and national union people and organizers and Chicago political functionaries, represented a faction of the Democratic Party that can consider itself, I think, equals of the neoliberals now, and on a trajectory to surpass them. In the room stood Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal, the head of the swelling Congressional Progressive Caucus (which now includes almost half of the Democrats in Congress), and Fain, and April Verrett, the voluble new president of SEIU, the big union that is dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on the Harris campaign, and will be pushing her to do something tangible for the type of people who take care of your elderly parents for $13 an hour. Gatherings like these were happening all over Chicago this week, but this one could make a fair claim to being the one that embodied the hopeful future of the party. Not the featureless “HOPE” of the latest Shepard Fairey poster, but the substantial hope that the aircraft carrier of this major political party, sprawling though it may be, is being dragged some meaningful distance toward representing the working class.
I will not directly quote Fain’s words because a mayoral press aide insisted that the event was off the record, despite the hundreds of people there desperately tweeting photos of everyone. Gimme a fucking break, man. But Fain spoke of a party finding its way back after spending the decades since the Reagan era lost. And the moral clarity of uniting the party around the interests of the working class was one and the same with the knowledge that the immigrants coming across the border are people just like us. And the UAW, which has joined SEIU and other unions in calling for the U.S. government to shut off military aid to Israel as the destruction of Gaza drags on, extends its concern to all those who need it. This is the real “circle of compassion.” The workers of the world uniting. This view, I must admit, does not control the Democratic Party. It has not commanded the stage of the Democratic National Convention. But it is right there on the edge. It is real. It is strong. It is poised to assert itself within the party more with each passing year. If you want to hope for something in politics, hope for that.
Still, there is a cruelty that lurks at the heart of all American politics. The belief that political parties should be vessels of moral change is a minority view. The Democratic Party, evolving though it is, has not lost its muscle memory for bringing down a hammer on its own left flank. All week, the Uncommitted movement—the delegates who have been withholding their formal support of the ticket in order to try to force the Democrats to do something meaningful for the people of Gaza—have been asking the party to allow a Palestinian American to speak from the convention stage. The party said no. Instead, last night it gave a large block of time to the Chicago-born parents of a young man who had been attending the music festival in Israel when Hamas attacked on October 7, and who is still being held hostage. Their pain oozed from their faces. Their story was heart-wrenching. They even expressed a generic hope that someone, somewhere, will “stop the despair in Gaza,” as though despair is a naturally occurring phenomena, rather than one with a very specific source.
Their voices deserved to be heard. Their speeches would have been a perfect time to also feature remarks from one of the many Palestinian Democrats who have asked for a chance to give voice to the pain of their own friends and family. But no. What cannot be said on the stage of a political convention tells you just as much about a party’s values as the things that they allow you to hear. You must admire the skill of the Democratic Party in keeping the chaos behind the curtain. You must also, if you’re a fair person, despise it. The vice president of the man who sent the bombs that have blown up thousands of kids in Gaza is running for president, and her campaign gives every indication that she does not plan to stop sending the bombs. You might enjoy hearing Stevie Wonder sing, but you still have to reckon with this.
As I left the arena last night, a half dozen or so protesters with Palestinian flags and signs stood doggedly alongside the police barriers that all the attendees walked by as they exited the secured area. They weren’t yelling angrily at the passing delegates. They were pleading. They were asking them to spare a thought for the dead. All of them told me that most of the delegates had just been walking by without speaking, without looking, without allowing their attention to be pulled out of the haze of euphoria that the convention produced.
One man, middle-aged, balding, looking fatigued, leaning against the railing, was holding a sign that read “Stand With Palestine. Stand With Humanity.” When I asked him why he thought people were not stopping to speak to him, he answered simply, “They are ashamed.”
He was smiling as he spoke. Not because he had any of the joy that the Democrats had proclaimed from the stage, in their circle of stars. But because he was not ashamed.
