The Offstage Convention
Democratic National Convention, Chicago, August 22, 2024 © Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
As a demonstration that politics have been refashioned as show business, the Democratic National Convention was beyond compare. Delegates chanted the requisite slogans—“We’re not going back,” “Do something,” “Thank you, Joe”—in exuberant unison; volunteers distributed and collected placards and signs—many simply displaying names, including Doug—with faultless efficiency. With exceptions (Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden), most speeches were mercifully brief. Some had unintentionally entertaining lines, as with Hillary Clinton’s assertion that Harris “sat in the situation room and stood for America’s values.” Rumors circulating in the venue —“Taylor Swift and George W. Bush are on their way!”—were diverting, too.
Commentators tut-tutted at the timing of Biden’s late-evening opening-night appearance, at an hour when East Coast viewers had gone to bed and privileged attendees had moved across the street to the free drinks and food at the CNN–Politico Grill (sponsored in part by major corporations, including IBM, the giant private-equity firm Blackstone, and the politically potent Stand with Crypto lobbying group). But it wasn’t hard to side with suspicions that Biden’s delayed appearance was all part of the plan. The president’s bellowing recitation of his accomplishments served as a vivid reminder of the bullet so recently deflected by Nancy Pelosi and her ruthless fellow Democratic Party panjandrums by hustling the would-be nominee into political oblivion. Nevertheless, I detected no signs of bitterness among the onstage performers. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden may hate each other, as Washington rumor has it, but for public consumption their friendship is glossy and bright. There is no denying the success of the event as a well-staged performance, particularly in promoting Harris as a fresh and boundlessly energetic figure, her lackluster years as vice president wiped from official memory.
Watching the spectacle, albeit mostly in conditions of extreme discomfort from the crowded topmost tier of Chicago’s United Center, or while eating the vile hot dogs on offer in the stifling halls surrounding the arena, I felt a surge of nostalgia for the days when conventions were nakedly political, replete with debate and rancor, rather than merely an exercise in entertainment. On the second day of the 1924 Democratic National Convention, at Madison Square Garden, for example, partisan divide reached the point where sweltering delegates, according to the New York Times, were “screaming, jeering, and waving their fists at each other” as thirteen thousand spectators in the galleries above literally spat at them. No wonder gallery tickets were being scalped for $100 a seat (roughly $1,800 in today’s money).
Memory of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, also in Chicago, loomed large this year, marred as it was by the unbridled violence inflicted by Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police on citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Given the current ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, largely enabled by American arms, expectation ran high that history would repeat itself. Conditions were, after all, undeniably similar: America, now as then, is engaged in the mass slaughter of a civilian population, albeit this time by proxy via bombs, bullets, intelligence, and money delivered to Israel without stint. Now as then, the nominee is a vice president in an administration exhibiting not the faintest indication of genuine remorse for its policy. Now as then, one of the candidates on the ticket is a Minnesota politician with a commendably progressive record on domestic policy who loyally supports a foreign war, Tim Walz, just as Hubert Humphrey, the Democrats’ candidate in 1968, stood by Lyndon Johnson as he rained bombs on the Vietnamese. Like Harris, Humphrey had bypassed the need for victory in the primaries, securing the nomination with the help of party machine bosses such as Mayor Daley of Chicago. (Given that machine’s recent record of imposing its preferred candidate, whatever the people may think—Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020—it’s doubtful that the rituals of primary debates and soft-soap media interviews would have forestalled Harris’s nomination.)
For those who looked, there were signs and portents of core Democratic policies pushed offstage. Harris has declared her principled opposition to the death penalty, for example, but a pledge to end capital punishment, a routine feature of the party’s election-year platform, quietly disappeared from the document this year. On the final day of the convention, I ran into a lobbyist searching amid the throng on the floor for a DNC official who could explain why a particular health-care pledge in the platform had also vanished. Most prominent of all the silenced issues, of course, was the war on Gaza.
Most of the disorder predicted for this year’s convention was largely absent. As the New York Times happily reported: “It wasn’t 1968. It wasn’t even close.” Antiwar organizers had worked to mobilize a peaceful protest, fortified by polls suggesting that no fewer than 77 percent of Democrats, according to a CBS poll conducted in early June, favor a cutoff of American arms to Israel. “Seventy percent of Democrats support a permanent ceasefire; sixty percent want an arms embargo,” Hatem Abudayyeh, spokesman for the March on the DNC, assured me. The City of Chicago, or at least its law-enforcement bureaucracy, did its bit to amplify tensions by enjoining onerous restrictions on rally facilities, such as the use of loudspeakers and stages, though these were ultimately withdrawn with the encouragement of Chicago’s progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson. A rally and march on the first day of the convention drew perhaps eleven thousand people. Two days later, another rally, this time largely populated by families from a long-established Palestinian community on the southwest side of the city, attracted only eight thousand. A final rally and march on the last day drew an even smaller crowd, “a cross section of the Chicago activist community,” as a local journalist told me. A few fences on the arena’s extensive outer security perimeter were torn down on opening day, but that was it.
Some delegates arriving for the first evening of the proceedings literally plugged their ears as activists on the security perimeter shouted grim statistics of Gaza’s death toll. Later that night, while Biden was speaking, a group of antiwar delegates smuggled in and held up a Stop Arming Israel banner. Outraged Harris delegates attempted to block the offending banner with We Love Joe signs before eventually tearing it from the hands of Liano Sharon, a Jewish delegate from Michigan, and ripping it up.
Many attendees expressed muted sympathy for the Palestinians’ desperate plight. Early in the week, I stood with Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, a veteran activist, as she lobbied delegates lining up at one of the ubiquitous security checkpoints insulating conventioneers from the world outside. “Do you know that one hundred eighty three women give birth every day in Gaza without anesthetic?” she asked a pregnant woman. “I can’t begin to imagine that. It’s horrible,” the woman replied quietly. “I’m getting a lot of reactions like that,” Benjamin told me. Days later, I came across Benjamin and her Code Pink co-founder, Jodie Evans, who reported cheerfully that they’d just interrupted Walz’s address to the Democratic Women’s Caucus, demanding an end to arms supplies to Israel. Overall, the random delegates I queried as to whether Gaza should be discussed at the convention tended to reply nervously, fearful of breaking a taboo and disturbing the harmony of the hive. One, from Washington State, told me that such discussion might be appropriate, “but not here this week, because that would affect the unity of the convention.” “It’s complicated,” said another, from Oklahoma. Even so, by the end of the week, at least three hundred Harris delegates had signed a petition for a ceasefire and weapons embargo.
Liano Sharon was one of thirty uncommitted delegates who had been sent to the convention, after some 700,000 primary voters nationwide had chosen the option on their primary ballots to protest Biden’s support for the Israeli onslaught. In a hard-to-find windowless room allocated them by the DNC, deep in the maze of the tightly guarded McCormick Place, a secondary convention venue, uncommitted delegates made their case in the company of six doctors in hospital scrubs, who sequentially described the horrific conditions they had experienced firsthand in Gaza. “We cannot unsee what we witnessed. It gives us nightmares. Having worked in many other horrific conditions, I can personally testify and say I have never seen anything so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane,” said Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, an intensive-care pediatrician. “Entire families exterminated, humanitarian workers and health-care workers and journalists killed in record numbers, children with their extremities amputated . . . All the records are being broken in the most horrific possible ways.” As colleagues detailed their experiences in traumatizing detail, Haj-Hassan began quietly weeping. Soon, her colleagues, along with the uncommitted delegates, were crying, too, passing tissues down the line.
Before the DNC began, the uncommitted group requested that Haj-Hassan be allowed to address the convention, but officials turned them down. They then asked that Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American state representative from Georgia, be allowed to take the stage, offering for her speech to be reviewed and approved by producers. After several days of stalling, the DNC turned down that request, too. As a result, the only focused discussion of the war in Gaza permitted in the United Center came in a moving address and call for ceasefire from the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American whose remains, along with those of five other hostages taken on October 7, would be recovered by Israeli troops from a tunnel in southern Gaza roughly a week after the convention ended, stoking demonstrations in Israel this week in favor of a ceasefire.
Regardless of whether the uncommitted group genuinely expected to be allowed a public platform, the idea that the Democratic machine would have made such a concession is inconceivable. After all, AIPAC, Israel’s much-feared lobbying machine, and other pro-Israel groups had just spent $25 million to crush two congressional critics of Israel, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, in their primary races—a financial overkill clearly designed to intimidate the country’s critics. (“I’ll be back,” Bowman said, tugging me close for a selfie as he headed into the arena.) Unvarnished sentiments prevailing in the Israel lobby are well represented by the billionaire Haim Saban, who has said that he is “a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Saban contributed $7 million to Hillary Clinton’s super PAC in 2016, and in the current cycle he and his wife, Cheryl, have so far delivered almost $2 million to a Democratic PAC, and a further $1 million to AIPAC’s election PAC. Biden’s partial blockage of some heavy-weapons shipments to Israel earlier this year swiftly evoked a reprimand from the billionaire: “Bad . . . decision, on all levels,” wrote Saban to Biden aides. “Pls reconsider.”
Leading lights of the party, including Schumer, Cory Booker, and Steny Hoyer, ignored or brushed aside questions from the reporter Max Blumenthal, of The Grayzone, who had penetrated a basement passage leading to a VIP area, about the influence of AIPAC money on their silence over the Gaza slaughter. Convention rhetoric itself was replete with tributes to the administration’s allegedly “tireless” efforts to broker a ceasefire, repeated so frequently as to become the liberals’ equivalent to Republicans’ standard “thoughts and prayers” response to school shootings and other gun massacres. In her own carefully crafted and flawlessly delivered speech climaxing the celebrations, Harris asserted that she and Biden were “working around the clock” for a ceasefire and hostage release. After predictably pledging enduring support for Israel in all its works, she segued into language that echoed in form the heartfelt pleas that I had been hearing all week from the doctors: “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking,” she intoned. Once the hostages are released and the war is over, she claimed, “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” While it was an abbreviated mention, it seemed to me, from the crowd, that her reference to Palestine drew a louder cheer than her pledge of fealty to Israel.
Somewhat depressed at the lower-than-predicted volume of outrage over Gaza, I left the convention bubble behind me to go look for Bill Ayers—militant opponent of the Vietnam War, prominent in the far-left organization Student for a Democratic Society, founder of the militant group Weather Underground, and survivor of years on the run from the FBI. I found him, entirely brisk and alert at nearly eighty, on a park bench on the city’s South Side. Ruminating on the events of the week, he acknowledged the diminished protest turnout, which he attributed to the removal of “Genocide Joe” from the ballot and the substitution of an energetic candidate unburdened by his record. Nevertheless, he bade me be of good cheer. “I’m hopeful because I thought the antiwar movement made a tremendous impact all week at the convention,” he said. “I think we walk toward fundamental change on two legs. One leg is established politics, and the other leg is mobilization, organization, and education of masses of people. It took two years to mobilize people on Vietnam. I was first arrested in October of 1965, opposing the war. But it never really had the impact that it needed to have until 1967. And so it took us a couple of years. In ten months, the narrative has changed about Israel-Palestine.”
As an alternative to the much-worked-over allusions to 1968, Ayers raised an earlier precedent: the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in Atlantic City. There, President Johnson, like Harris and her fellow speakers, spoke of “freedom” and “opportunities” in his speech accepting the nomination, determined not to alienate a key component of his coalition: the Southern Democratic bosses whose party faction had long been a bastion of white supremacy, leading to blacks’ being rigorously excluded from Southern delegations. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who had become a powerful voice for civil rights, led demands that delegates from the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, which she had co-founded, be allowed to sit at the convention. When she spoke to the credentials committee, Johnson held a press conference just to keep her off live TV, and the DNC determinedly rejected her request to seat the integrated delegation. “The Democratic establishment failed to acknowledge what was really going on in the world, in 1964 and in 1968,” Ayers told me. “Had they acknowledged it, they would have animated a base that might have changed the outcome. But it wasn’t the fault of the left that Hubert Humphrey didn’t get elected. That wasn’t their fault. They were raising a moral issue. And it was up to the political class to respond in kind to the raising of that issue. And they didn’t. Didn’t yet again this week, which is a damn shame.”
This, to me, was the most important message of the convention. The event’s producers had achieved their purpose by delivering exciting entertainment to uplift Democrats’ spirits. But Ayers was surely correct: despite efforts to avoid the issue, the relevant powers could not entirely silence those who stood for Gaza any more than an earlier generation of bosses could appease the racist wing of the party. My interest was piqued by his reference to Fannie Lou Hamer, and I searched for a video of her speech demanding admission to the 1964 convention. I found it on Instagram, posted by the account of Win with Black Women, a group headed by the powerful Silicon Valley PR executive Jotaka Eaddy. The page juxtaposed Hamer’s raw, powerful voice—“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. . . . [where] we want to live as decent human beings”—with a clip from Harris’s polished speech, delivered sixty years later to the day, in which she accepted the nomination on behalf of “everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth.” The connection was clear; the irony, doubtless unintentional. Ruwa Romman, the uncommitted delegate from Georgia, had also thought of the resonances between Mississippi sixty years ago and Gaza today. In the speech she was not allowed to deliver on the DNC stage, she was prepared to declare: “They’ll say: this is how it’s always been, that nothing can change. But remember Fannie Lou Hamer—shunned for her courage, yet she paved the way for an integrated Democratic Party. . . . It’s her example we follow.”