We witness them every four years, but the conventions of the two main American political parties are nonetheless deeply strange. Not weird. Just strange. Eldritch even. Part of it is the slapdash pageantry, the organization of enthusiasm for worldviews that range from the milquetoast to the downright sadistic. But this is mostly an outgrowth of what a deeply apolitical society America is.
Ideas and worldviews mutate when they aren’t exposed to light for too long, and regular press briefings are a poor substitute for fresh air. Every notion presented is either focus-grouped or circle-jerked beyond recognition by party leaderships in the name of giving a static and mythical people what they want. By the time any of these twisted policies make it into the larger discourse, they are at best clumsy.
It is rather dizzying seeing the various visions jockeying at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago right now. Depending on which angle you look, each proceeding portends a future wildly different from the next. Given the Democrats’ long-standing struggle to coherently present themselves, it is only fitting.
At one glance, it seems feasible that the Democratic Party of neoliberalism is a thing of the past, but this doesn’t necessarily imbue Harris’ rhetoric of economic populism with any substance. Maybe the optimists are right then a Harris administration will usher in a raft of progressive legislation. If so, then the question remains why their campaign is packed with the same Clintonian hacks who have given the party’s policies such disastrous shape. It also leaves one wondering why Tuesday’s lineup on the DNC stage was packed with Republicans.
How, exactly, is this a movement that can hold these erstwhile enemies and the likes of (an admittedly rightward-drifting) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left-wing of the party? It’s not clear, but I’m not sure the Democrats want it to be. None of it works, in keeping with all of the mainstream solutions trotted out for climate change, refugee crises, or the rise of the far-right death cult. But maybe, just maybe, if we jam it all into the same space and frame it with the right amount of blue and red fanfare — like we’ve always done — we can make it seem plausible. At least until November.
Outside, thousands are demanding an end to the massacre in Gaza. Biden said they had a point during his speech. He was pandering. How could the man so committed to arming Israel do anything else? Uncommitted Palestinian-American delegates inside heard something hollow in his words. This may very well be a new Democratic Party, but the old one is still occupying the same space.
Hence the protests. Even with all the limitations of “activist brain,” of jumping from action to action without regard for strategy, it encouraging to see the mad and screaming crowds that regularly congregate around both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. John Berger once wrote of how mass demonstrations are designed to transform urban space, pulling it away from the sanctioned rhythms of commerce and official politics and suggesting a different vision. They are intended to illustrate the gap between a world that exists that the one that could.
Take the Republican National Convention of 2004, held in New York City of all places, during the height of the Iraq War. Compared to the contemporary political landscape twenty years later, this wave of protest seems positively quaint. Inside the convention were George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and all the other sneering ghouls who wanted nothing more than to trade out their penises for cruise missiles, trying to paint their grotesque agendas with some form of grace and dynamism.
Outside, 300,000 marchers. The tragedy in waiting was that most of them would end up voting for another awkward blueblood bobbing in the Democratic center who should have been wiping the floor with Bush. He would lose, and so would they. It was a stark difference from the energy and mood that emerged on that sweltering late summer day. These were some of the busiest streets in the world, now jammed with signs and chants demanding troops out.
In February of 2003, an even larger crowd had swarmed this city, again in protest of what was then an imminent invasion. Then, the crowds had broken through the lines of the NYPD, who had refused to grant permits to the march. It was difficult to forget eighteen months later. Moving crowds bring memories beyond the scope of individuals. Put aside your cynicism; you know this is impressive.
Right about now, your thoughts are probably going to an even more recognizable moment of upheaval at the Democratic Convention. Plenty of histories write off the protests at the 1968 Chicago convention as a riot, which surely was part of it, but the label tends to diminish the scope of demonstrations and the scale of the chaos. Even on the convention floor, there were scuffles over Humphrey vs. McCarthy, the continuation of the Vietnam War vs. its end.
As is often the case, the socialist left was also divided. One stark example was that while several members of the American Socialist Party were inside, tirelessly beavering away to make their efforts to turn the Democrats into a left vehicle bear fruit, their comrades (including fellow members of the same Socialist Party) were outside getting their skulls cracked by the cops.
In other words, wonky and chimerical conventions such as these are nothing new. Maybe they need to be, insofar as any movement can force them. But we’ve been bandying about that Gramsci quote about old worlds dying and new ones struggling to be born for some time now. We should wonder why it’s taking so long.
Header photo is from Creative Commons.