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

Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet Magazine.