What we learned from the DNC

The Democratic National Convention ended August 22, launching the newly minted Harris-Walz ticket into a two-month-plus race to election day on November 5. Before the Chicago-based DNC becomes a footnote in the 2024 campaign, it’s worth listing a few key takeaways.

The Democrats didn’t let genocide spoil their party. The most contentious issue surrounding the convention, as well as the main motivator for protests outside of it, was the Biden/Harris administration’s support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder and destruction of all elements of a functioning society in Gaza. Thirty “uncommitted” delegates, chosen to represent a protest vote of 740,000 votes in the Democratic primaries, worked inside the convention center to win the party and the Democratic ticket to commit to a ceasefire and an arms embargo against Israel. Harris made clear that the administration opposes an arms embargo, and that her administration would too. The uncommitted delegates then proposed what should have been an uncontroversial demand: that the DNC allow a Palestinian speaker who would endorse Harris/Walz while calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance to Gaza. A proposed speaker, Democratic Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, submitted for DNC approval a short speech, that read in part:

Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can—yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars.

The answer from the DNC, delivered by phone on Wednesday, the second to last night of the convention, was ‘no.’ Out of options, some uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in outside of the United Center.

After months of negotiations with the DNC that look more like a concerted effort to string the uncommitted delegates along than a serious DNC attempt to address their concerns, the uncommitted movement left Chicago empty-handed. At this point, it’s unclear what impact on voters the Democrats’ dismissal of Gaza will have, even in the crucial swing state of Michigan. But the group Muslim Women for Harris, one of the Zoom-based rallying organizations like Black Women for Harris or White Dudes for Harris, announced it was dissolving and withdrawing its support for Harris.

The Democrats’ swap of Harris for Biden gave some uncommitted delegates and many rank-and-file Democrats opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza hopes that Harris and her administration would adopt a less one-sided pro-Israel position on the war. Harris deliberately encouraged those hopes in a press conference after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu July 25. Then, Harris said “to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.” Even during her DNC acceptance speech, she expressed a desire that: “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

But Harris’s approach to Gaza amounts to a change of rhetoric for public relations purposes and swing state politics, not a change in policy. She has done nothing to break from the administration that she still serves as vice president, and we should remember that “her people” were running the DNC. The positions on a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance she has reiterated are the same ones Biden has been promoting since May.

A commitment to arming Israel and to providing it impunity to violate international law is a bipartisan pillar of U.S. foreign policy. On that score, Harris is and will be no different from her predecessors. But many ordinary Democrats and activists—including many on the marches outside the convention center—will be encouraged to believe otherwise. And even for those who are completely clear-eyed about what Harris represents, many of them will still vote for her as a lesser evil to Trump. Even Abbas Alawieh, the main spokesperson for the Uncommitted National Movement told the Washington Post: “I know that the choice in November is a binary choice, and if I’m in the ballot box and it’s a choice between Trump and Harris, of course I’ll vote for Harris.”

Democrats extend their hands . . . to the right. It wasn’t just the chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” and the sea of U.S. flags that filled the arena at strategic moments. Or the fact that DNC planners could make room on its program for multiple conservative Republicans, but not one Palestinian speaker. Or the deployment of Walz as archetypical Midwestern white guy/veteran/2^nd Amendment supporter/football coach to balance the ticket with a biracial woman from “ultra-liberal” Berkeley/Oakland.

It was about what this stagecraft was meant to communicate. Some of it no doubt reflects a Democratic Party version of what used to be called Popular Front politics, where everyone from “never-Trump” Republicans to “socialists” like Bernie Sanders is considered part of the anti-MAGA coalition. Another is the Democrats’ long-time obsession, since at least the Clinton years, of inhabiting an imagined “center” in U.S. politics. In 1996, Republican candidate Bob Dole complained that President Bill Clinton had adopted so much of the Republican agenda, that it left him with nothing to run on.

But for 2024, this means a revival of the kind of “technocratic liberalism” that the Obama administration practiced. Harris spent the first couple of weeks after she declared her candidacy repudiating her (brief) support for Medicare-for-All, pro-immigration policies and Black Lives Matter demands for de-carcinization. And as she sketched out where she stands, she touts an “opportunity economy” perfectly aligned with the capitalist ideology of “pull yourself up by your boot straps.” She doesn’t talk about making health care or childcare a “right,” but “affordable.” Meanwhile, she and surrogates like former CIA Director Leon Panetta champion the U.S.’s armed forces’ lethality and their intention to challenge China.

Democrats made a big play on the concept of “freedom,” tied to promises to pass federal guarantees for reproductive rights and voting rights. If Harris/Walz win the election, they would have to overpower what will sure to be stiff GOP, conservative and even Supreme Court resistance to keep these promises. Will Harris/Walz be up to it? Or will they end up like Obama did, reaching for an unattainable compromise that squanders whatever hope anyone put in them? That hopelessness, with millions still reeling from the wreckage of the Great Recession, is what opened the door for a Trump victory in 2016.

Bernie Sanders and the Squad are deep inside the tent. Given Harris’s plans to run to the “center” (aka, to the right), the Democrats will lean on some time-tested strategies to keep their more liberal base from getting discouraged. One way is their deployment of a type of identity politics to associate any criticism of Harris from the left with Trump’s racist and misogynist attacks.

Another is to deploy as surrogates people who have progressive bone fides. That’s where people like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez(AOC) really show how they fit inside the Democrats’ big tent. Sanders and AOC both gave endorsements of Harris. After slamming the “billionaire class” and Big Pharma and calling for the US to make health care a right, Sanders assured us that “I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda.” There’s no indication that Harris and Walz have any such interest. AOC’s praise for Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home” was even more cringeworthy. As AOC left the stage with the United Center chanting her name, the national press started churning out articles on her newfound comfort as a “rising star” in the Democrat “mainstream”.

Jacobin editor Matt Karp lamented that a generation of people younger than “the original Berniecrats” see themselves as Democratic partisans rather than scrappy fighters against the Democratic Party establishment. Karp worries that “some of our best young people have been bought cheap.” Karpand his colleagues, who have spent years as virtual PR reps for Sanders’s and AOC’s promotion of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change—even “socialism”— should ask themselves if they also allowed themselves to be “bought cheap.”

Immigrants’ stories are fine for speeches, but today’s migrants are threats to “border security. ”For the biographical documentaries and endorsement speeches at the DNC, Vice President Kamala Harris’s story as a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica was key. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore paid tribute to the construction workers, all immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who lost their lives when a cargo ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in March. Harris herself wove her mother’s life into a patriotic riff on how only in the U.S., the “greatest nation on earth,” could such story take place.

Yet while immigrants served as talking points in speeches, the Democrats were selling themselves as the party of “border security.” Responding to the anti-immigration core of Trump’s appeal, they presented themselves as the only party serious about cracking down on the southern border. Harris pledged: “… as president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.” The contrast with previous DNCs was palpable. The last three DNCs featured undocumented speakers describing their plight. And the 2020 virtual convention featured special condemnation for Trump’s policy of “family separation” at the southern border.

2024 could not have been more different even if a DREAMER was given less than a minute at the podium to endorse Harris. The sheriff of Bexar County, Texas spoke. Senior Latino politicians like Rep. Pete Aguilar and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto vouched for Harris’s toughness on border policy and transnational trafficking. And all speakers who touched on legislation touted Democrat support for the “toughest border bill” in decades that conservatives largely wrote. Unlike their RNC counterparts, DNC delegates didn’t brandish “Mass Deportations Now” placards on the convention floor. But it’s clear that they’ve decided to “counter” Trump by trying to steal his thunder.