The Unity Convention
The Unity Convention
The DNC showed a party that has successfully metabolized movement energy and insurgent campaigns while distancing itself from demands deemed harmful to its electoral prospects.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago police (as well as the National Guard and regular army troops) responded to protests with a riot of their own. They beat protesters, chanting “kill, kill, kill.” Along Michigan Avenue, antiwar activists were clubbed and arrested. “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder,” Mayor Richard Daley announced as he spoke to reporters, before making a telling slip of the tongue: “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Delegates on the convention floor fought each other too.
Many have observed the parallels between 1968 and 2024. In 1968 there was also an unpopular presidential incumbent who, with a record of domestic advances but burdened by his involvement in foreign war, had decided not to stand for re-election. The Democratic Party was fragmented: it included the antiwar left and Southern segregationists, liberals and conservatives alike. Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was chosen as the nominee despite not having participated in a single state primary. In November, Humphrey lost to Nixon. Determining that the lack of democratic input in choosing a candidate had cost them, a commission produced recommendations that created a system of primaries and caucuses—competitions in all U.S. states and territories—and bound delegates to the outcomes of those elections. The 1968 DNC produced our modern system of presidential selection, and thus our modern parties.
The ghost of ’68 seemed to be haunting the 2024 convention, probably somewhere in the supply closets of the United Center. (Never mind that Chicago had hosted a DNC in 1996, which led to Bill Clinton’s re-election: that convention lacked the structural similarities to the 2024 DNC. It did not dislodge the ghost, which I imagine standing next to a mop, solemnly trying to touch its shoulders and hips in time to the macarena.) But with his presidency, Joe Biden seemed to have aimed for FDR and landed on LBJ instead: his significant record of domestic achievement unable to improve his low approval ratings, and his moral authority badly damaged by his handling of Israel’s conduct during its war in Gaza.
Those expecting echoes of ’68 in 2024 were mostly disappointed, however. Instead of division, the DNC was a remarkable display of political unity. The candidacy of Kamala Harris offers a great deal to the party’s most important constituencies: she is a woman, especially important after Dobbs; she has a multicultural background in an increasingly multicultural party; and she dropped a few hints for progressives that she is to Biden’s left on some key issues, including Gaza. The 2024 convention did much to move beyond the legacy of 1968. The ghost, by now tired of waiting for Beyoncé, can pass on.
After quickly securing the nomination when Biden stepped down, Harris and her team had just a few weeks to prepare a convention with one goal: maximizing her chance of winning the general election in November. Each speaker and each event aimed to further that goal. They provided evidence of her plans for the party and illuminated how Democratic Party politics have shaken out after the challenges from the left in 2016 and 2020.
Each of the four days of the convention stuck to one or two themes meant to showcase Harris’s agenda or demonstrate her ability to exercise one of the responsibilities of the office of president. One of Monday’s themes was labor, and it was probably here that the left’s influence could be most strongly perceived. For all the talk of Republican efforts to court the working class, Democrats have responded to shifting perceptions of the role of unions in society by more fully embracing a social-democratic, laborist ethos.
The Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee a few weeks prior, featured former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt for Trump. Whether as a conscious echo of that moment or not, the DNC also had a theatrical disrobing. Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, took the stage on Monday wearing a suit jacket with a lettered T-shirt partially visible underneath. When the moment arrived, Fain quoted “the great American poet Nelly” to the effect that it was getting “hot in herre,” and threw aside his jacket to reveal a shirt reading “Trump is a scab.” (Hogan, for what it’s worth, fought attempts to unionize professional wrestlers and is also considered a scab by many of his peers.) The entire arena, filled to its balloon-laden rafters, erupted in chants of “Trump is a scab.” Other union leaders also took the stage, as did workers from the Teamsters, whose president had spoken at the RNC and was not invited.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech delivered in primetime on Monday was one of the convention’s best, and it showcased the way that the once insurgent left—AOC took office only five years ago—has been incorporated into the party. She made the convention’s first mention of Gaza from the stage, praising Harris for working toward a ceasefire. But in keeping with the theme of labor, she spoke mostly about the experiences of working people. “Ever since I got elected,” she said, “Republicans have attacked me by saying that I should go back to bartending.” As the crowd began to boo, she continued: “But let me tell you, I’m happy to, any day of the week, because there is nothing wrong with working for a living.”
If AOC’s speech showcased what the left has been able to offer the party, it also demonstrated what the party has required of her. Rather than offering a critique of the United States and its institutions, she presented her story as embodying the country’s promise. The closest thing to class conflict was wrapped in her critique of Trump: “You cannot love this country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business.”
Off the main stage, there was more room for the party’s left wing to make deeper critiques, including of their own party. In the mornings and early afternoons, before delegates moved to the United Center, caucus meetings were held in the large convention center McCormick Place. Most of the caucus meetings served as opportunities for mobilizing, strategizing, and community-building. Attending from all fifty states and territories, including from conservative areas, many delegates are working simply to achieve a functional and viable local party. But at a meeting of the Poverty Caucus on Tuesday, for example, Representative Jimmy Gomez noted that for the poor residents of his part of Los Angeles, what Democrats offer can too often be “too small, too slow, and too inefficient.” Lucid and spry at ninety-four, Dolores Huerta shared memories of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for hungry visitors during the Great Depression and expressed indignation at current levels of homelessness in the richest country in the world. “Our model of capitalism doesn’t work in the United States of America,” she said, “and we have to make sure that we change it.”
Such critiques would never make it to the main stage, where speeches were designed to project moderation and optimism. Through all four days, the convention’s message was about reclaiming the ideal of freedom from the right. The concept of freedom links together several of Harris’s campaign objectives: to support the demands of women for bodily autonomy, to support LGBTQ+ Americans living and loving as they please, to stand in opposition to book banning and other manifestations of the right’s endless cultural panics, and to put an end to the threat to democracy caused by Trump’s refusal to acknowledge electoral results when he loses.
Similarly, the DNC reclaimed patriotism for the center-left, seeking to reshape it in the process. Both on stage and on the floor, this was almost certainly the most racially diverse political convention in American history. The performances that seemed to signal promising futures at higher levels in the party all came from nonwhite politicians, including AOC, Raphael Warnock, Jasmine Crockett, Wes Moore, and Maxwell Alejandro Frost. “Making America great does not mean telling people you’re not wanted, and loving your country does not mean lying about its history,” argued Maryland Governor Moore on the third night. “Making America great means saying the ambitions of this country would be incomplete without your help.” Harris’s story was situated as an extension of the civil rights struggle. “USA” was printed on placards handed out to the crowd, and chants of those three letters, which once would have had at least a whiff of reaction, attempted instead to put an inclusive patriotism on display: a refusal to concede love of country to the cramped and ugly version offered by Republicans.
The corollary of these displays of patriotic unity—which aimed not only to excite committed Democrats but also to reach voters who need to be introduced to Harris in a hurry—is that they put anything that looks like radicalism way out of sight, behind layers of security fencing and bored policemen in Kevlar vests. On the convention’s second night, Ana Navarro asserted her refugee status and refuted the charge that Harris is a communist by saying that she knows “communism,” comparing Trump to various nominally left-wing authoritarian governments in Latin America. (Navarro’s family left Nicaragua in 1980 when she was eight, a year after the Sandinistas overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.) Bernie Sanders appeared two speakers later to talk about healthcare—but neither he nor anyone else endorsed socialism. To ensure that people have access to affordable healthcare “is not a radical agenda,” asserted Bernie. “Let me tell you what a radical agenda is: Trump’s Project 2025.”
The Democratic Party sought to present itself as the normal party for normal people, in contrast to the “weird” and unhealthy obsessions of Republicans in the age of Trump. Where the Republican Party has been taken over by its political fringes, the Democratic Party has done a better job of incorporating them into the mainstream. It is hard to argue with the strategy. Trump’s “birtherist” attacks on Barack Obama, or his obsession with Harris’s multicultural parentage, appeal to an audience that cannot accept someone with these characteristics as authentically American. In contrast, the DNC repeatedly emphasized how typical Harris’s story is: a middle-class upbringing, a child of divorce, now a stepmother in a blended family, where her stepchildren call her Momala. The convention preferred to describe her upbringing in the “East Bay” rather than Berkeley, presumably because the latter might trigger associations with radicalism or coastal liberalism. The effort to generate a “Momala-and-apple-pie” vision of wholesomeness around Harris does real work on behalf of anyone who has had their identity and belonging—or that of their family—questioned. It is a story of American history that does not conceal past exclusion and injustice but is focused on its ever-widening circles of inclusion. The convention steadily built the case that in this version of the American story, the next chapter can only begin with Harris as president.
From the parade of diverse speakers, however, there was one prominent absence: a Palestinian American. The only drama to come from an otherwise uncontested primary were the voters who chose “Uncommitted” to signal displeasure with Biden’s continued commitment to arming Israel as civilians in Gaza suffer and die. The Uncommitted delegates had a significant presence throughout the convention. On the floor and around the hallways of McCormick Place, many attendees wore buttons advertising their status as a “Ceasefire Delegate” or keffiyeh-patterned scarves identifying them as “Democrats for Palestinian Rights.”
The organizers were allowed one panel for Palestinian rights on Monday afternoon but were hoping for more public recognition and a more dramatic shift in policy in the party’s platform. At a rally and news conference held outside the security perimeter of the United Center on Wednesday, leaders of the Uncommitted movement pressed their case, arguing for an arms embargo against Israel rather than just a ceasefire. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who had worked in hospitals in Gaza with Doctors Without Borders, spoke of treating children with fractured bones without anesthesia and having nothing to offer patients as they died in agony. After such shattering experiences, she found the behavior of enthusiastic Democratic partisans in the arena disturbing, even cultish.
Nevertheless, the rally’s speakers tried to emphasize that they were doing what they could to work within the party. They recognized the danger of Trump. “We are the [Democratic] Party,” insisted Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, recently defeated in her primary by a candidate who received $8.5 million in support from AIPAC. “Our calls should be seen as helpful and not harmful.” Ilhan Omar, whose district had the highest percentage of Uncommitted voters—over 30 percent—of any in the country, spoke of her own experiences as a child in Somalia and wondered why no one seemed to care about the suffering of children. Minneapolis city council member Jeremiah Ellison (whose father Keith spoke from the main stage) insisted, “Our goal is to be able to walk out of here excited, but we can’t do this at the expense of children, of innocent lives.”
The Uncommitted organizers were hoping to secure a main-stage speaking slot for a Palestinian American. They put forth Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman, who had prepared an endorsement of Harris and a speech that called for “enforc[ing] our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a ceasefire . . . and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety.” The Uncommitted delegates never got their speaking slot, and Romman delivered her speech outside instead, as part of a sit-in on Thursday.
The failure to secure a speaking slot, however, probably understates how effective the Uncommitted delegates were in advancing their cause. Harris delegates were often friendly to them, with more than 300 identifying themselves as Ceasefire Delegates. Rami Al-Kabra, the founder of the Uncommitted movement in Washington state (but who ended up a Harris delegate), told me that he thought about 40 percent of people on the floor were in broad agreement with their cause. Although the goal of an arms embargo of Israel is probably unworkable given U.S. concerns about Iran, the Uncommitted movement helped show that there is a significant constituency within the Democratic Party that wants a comprehensive shift in its policy in the Middle East. Harris advisors keep hinting that she is personally sympathetic, and potential staffers at a meeting of progressive foreign policy groups were optimistic that a Harris presidency will be different from a Biden one, even if no one is quite sure how. Even Biden conceded in his speech that the protesters “have a point.”
On the fourth and final night, the decision not to feature a Palestinian-American speaker seemed all the more egregious with each appearance of DJ Metro, or a former Republican now voting for Harris, or an alarmingly fit police officer with a checkered history. But this was the night designed to appeal to the proverbial swing voter, to address perceived weaknesses for Democrats on public safety, and to show that Harris was ready to step in as commander-in-chief. For the progressive wing of the party, this was unquestionably the night that required the most toad-swallowing. The radical reimagining of security policy entertained after Black Lives Matter has clearly been judged electoral deadweight. On immigration, Democrats touted their support for the bipartisan Secure the Border Act, which Republicans had negotiated until Trump ordered it killed to preserve the issue for him during the campaign.
What was offered instead was a story of Harris the prosecutor (even if a reform-minded one) versus Trump the criminal and aspiring autocrat. The chants of “U-S-A” rose to levels that would not have seemed out of place at a Republican National Convention just a few years ago. John McCain was praised as an American hero, and the slogan he used against Obama in 2008—“country first”—was reappropriated in the service of an anti-Trump coalition.
Harris’s appearance itself was effective, if ever-so-slightly deflated when rumors that Beyoncé would appear to perform “Freedom” proved unfounded. Still, Harris kept the generally joyous mood going. Many delegates—including most of the women on the floor—had dressed in suffragist white to celebrate her historic candidacy. Harris was, by turns, cheerful and stern, invoking her past as a prosecutor with the slogan of “Kamala Harris for the people.” She reminded voters of the threat of a Trump presidency “with no guardrails.” She committed to shoring up traditional alliances, declaring she would “strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.” And she brought the crowd to its feet when she said she would work to “end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”
If the convention had displayed a party comfortable with itself and its evolution and almost universally happy with its candidate, anyone who left the United Center on foot was confronted by groups that fell outside its ever-expanding circles. Funneled through the security perimeter, they met anti-abortion and pro-Palestine protesters, both of whom accused the visitors of responsibility for killing children. Though videos circulated of a few convention-goers covering their ears in response, most shuffled slowly through while they heard chants of “shame on you” and “Killer Kamala, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today?” Many thanked police officers for keeping them safe. I asked one protesting couple if they had been satisfied with Harris’s remarks. “Fuck Kamala,” the woman said, leaping into the air. “Stop the bombs,” said the man. “I don’t think what she said was enough.”
In a two-party democratic system, a party is a machine for producing national political majorities. The 2024 DNC showed us how the party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris thinks it can do that. In Harris, the Democratic Party has stumbled onto a unity candidate. The convention did not replicate the experience of 1968 for many reasons: there is no draft, nor are Americans fighting on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza. Biden’s resignation from the ticket took some wind from protest sails. Though some protesters were arrested, the current mayor, the progressive Brandon Johnson, is no Richard Daley. Most ironically, Harris could be a unity candidate because she bypassed the post-’68 reforms for selecting a candidate, which would have exposed her to internal criticism and produced divided delegations.
That unity is also there because the party has metabolized movement energy and insurgent campaigns that have appeared in the years after 2008. It has taken some of the most talented politicians and lifted them up. It has taken on board some of the issues—inequality, labor, climate, gun control—from which it thinks it can craft majorities. Elsewhere, especially on public safety and immigration, it has distanced itself from demands and messages that it has come to consider harmful to its electoral prospects.
If the left has taught the party something about how it needed to change, the party has responded by asking the left to speak its patriotic language in order to be part of a winning coalition. Florida’s Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the youngest member of Congress, was given a prime spot on Thursday night to talk about climate change. Acknowledging the challenges ahead, Frost projected optimism: “With our movement and with organizing and an administration that cares, we are making progress.” The crowd cheered his formulation that “fighting the climate crisis is patriotic.”
Moving from outside to inside the party has made it possible to counterbalance competing factions of the party. The 2024 DNC was a demonstration of a party that had accepted its internal ideological diversity, that can cheer now for Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders alike. Deflecting attempts at red-baiting him for things like supporting universal free lunch programs for Minnesota’s students, vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz said that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” But as he well knows, there are a lot more neighbors in this country than there are socialists.
Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.
