The city itself was unenthused. “ngl I didn’t even know that was happening here,” from the group chat, in May. Lest one judge us removed from issues of the moment, especially that great big issue of whom the nation would afford its highest seat, consider that this selfsame archive, along with the rest of the nation, had been tracking, with alarmed amusement, the decline of the party’s best idea: an 81-year-old man running for reelection as president of the United States of America. The same day as the above dispatch, the internet, and therefore the friends, were batting around a clip of the man, who, after being asked about involvement in his opponent’s 34 felony convictions while exiting a press conference, halts and turns toward the camera with slow smile that could be wily or absent.
The mood was jaded, worn out, unwell, irony-poisoned. Saturdays, Sundays and some school nights were earmarked for dutiful, ever-peaceful marches against genocide. And though school was, technically, out, the overreach of chagrined admins the city over—and right up north, in Evanston—persisted. Music for the masses was suspiciously good; Bennifer was back, as well as: exhibited hip bones, casual homophobia, rabid Islamophobia, referendums on infidelity, a taste for Pepsi—suspect, all of it, because I couldn’t help but read these events as symptomatic of what critic Ayesha A. Siddiqi diagnosed as a “Bush Era Redux”: “More war, more violence, more denial and suppression of those realities by the ruling class of the United States, and subsequently more aesthetic trends formed by that suppression escaping in visual motifs, clues to the global mood.”
In truth, I had planned to make myself scarce for the convention, which promised more suppression of reality by the ruling class, this time drenched in blue. Still, when the occasion arose that I might take more than a resident’s interest in the thing, I wondered if I might be in danger of getting swept up, given my weakness for organized fandom, as so much concert merch and collegiate gear can attest. I wanted to be tugged, courted by the party that has, as everyone knows, made for lousy suitors for some time. But a week out, there was no feeling it, in whatever form. I failed to catch a vibe, nothing approximate to the frenzy in my phone. If there was anything the party had done, imbricated with the city I knew, it was too subterranean to catch a tread, or thinner than the air on the ground.
She’d lightened the mood, no doubt. On July 21st, 1:46 p.m. EDT—almost exactly a month prior to the convention’s opening ceremonies—the floodgates to alterity burst open with a tweet. “My Fellow Americans,” the Commander in Chief began. “Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation.” After two self-congratulatory paragraphs, the meat of the address announced that its author felt it “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” That was a funny way of putting it, “stand down.” Though it means simply to withdraw, I imagine that for at least a few it brought to mind a more martial meaning, the one Trump invoked when he urged the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” (The next day Trump told reporters, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. I mean you’ll have to give me a definition, ’cause I really don’t know who they are. I can only say they have to stand down.”)
For the Democrat who beat Trump, not yet known to be the only one ever to do so, standing down was, indeed, a withdrawal from competition, from responsibility, from an ambition whose doggedness finally submitted in the face of a nationwide cry uncle. Standing down was the least he could do after a debate performance in June that offended even liberal commentators otherwise inclined toward prettying up the donkey’s messes. Not every diehard died off, but a number greater than before were inclined to take the symbol—old man, lost among his words with nuclear codes and domestic policy at arm’s reach—as it arrived, foul off the platter. In his initial statement, the president praised the current VP as “an extraordinary partner in all this work,” inspiring confusion and perhaps panic and perhaps hope that this new juncture would present a race more open than had been permitted to be imagined these past three years. Then, as though doubling back to retrieve his spectacles from a room just left, the president returned within the half hour, bestowing “full support and endorsement” for the woman and politician by his side as nominee. The party, as far as anyone could tell, fell in line, much as it had those past three years. The gates stuttered, stopped and sped toward close.
She was an alternate mostly in name and charisma, not that there weren’t differences in her candidacy worth distinction. But what we knew of the candidate right then had not much changed from her first run, though now, at least, it seemed relevant that we knew how to pronounce her name. No more than before would the candidate make it personal. In her memoir, The Truths We Hold, childhood, adolescence and supporting characters therein speed past with as much coloring as a stump speech might allow. About those activist parents of whom you’ve heard, the daughter writes, “my parents and their friends were more than just protesters. They were big thinkers, pushing big ideas, organizing their community.” The lines bespeak a political inheritance as forceful as an awareness of other people and the promise of something better, expressed as an order of magnitude (“big”) that is left undetailed. By page 27, the protagonist has embarked on a legal career within the district attorney’s office, where, as left to be inferred, the relevant biography begins. Yet the recorded priorities of a prosecutor’s office, occupied with increasing jurisdictional capacity until 2017, followed by the up-down motions of a senator had still, in the run-up of 2020, yet to cohere into an idiom affirming anything other than affirmation itself.
During her first campaign for president the candidate was thought to lean overmuch on the fact of her existence, allowing the historical production of race, ethnicity and gender do the work of crosshatching her intentions. She was not alone in, as culture writer Shamira Ibrahim wrote in a postmortem of the earlier campaign, “banking on identity,” but some identities are taken to be more conspicuous—and by 2019 even internet outlets showed signs of fatigue with that sort of thing. That fatigue, bordering on skepticism, foreclosed the Obama playbook, even if she could match him for charisma, which she couldn’t. The vice presidency, with a job description that may as well read “affirmation” in its entire, ironed out her image. She gave the appearance of being good at her job, and without any indication that the party would be auditioning alternates, the appearance was judged good enough.
Every candidate is an exterior; it is always the idea of a person to whom we’re obliged, which one supposes is the same in the case of any other person, but politicians are supposed to make us forget, like a good lover. Obama once described himself as a “blank screen,” but his real talent was for sweeping up his audience in emotions that obscured this blankness. There’s no escaping that electoral politics, like all politics, runs on feeling. This is what’s meant by “electability,” for all its claims to rational distance. That dreadful nominalization, raising shaky criteria to the status of innate character, amounts to little more than a feeling about the future. A feeling more material than material.
She was not there yet. We didn’t know her. Washington, it was rumored, didn’t know her. Her staffers, few long-haulers if any, barely did. As the campaign took the time to determine which candidate the candidate would be, dodging press corps, to the corps’ consternation, the internet, as they say, got to work. If debates over platform were being had, I admit, reader, I caught no wind of them. The one-out, one-in policy of the party had let in enough life-giving air for a million civilian-created memes, crowding the field and the field of vision with supercuts of the VP out in public speaking and laughing, speaking then laughing, then speaking again, for, as these videos contend, she cannot have one without the other. Though the videos predated this candidacy as an effort to discredit the candidate, the wider audience that emerged in late July was ready to view them in a different spirit. The supercuts, intended smears, became fan cams.
The candidate had done star turns in meme format before. Gifs still had currency back in 2020, when moving images of the then vice-presidential candidate making faces at her unskilled opponent roused those inclined to view the high drama of public figures as a parable for their professional lives. The Saturday following that year’s election, the then vice president-elect tweeted an open-captioned video of herself taking a call outside in the fall grass: “We did it. We did it, Joe.” The video was winnowed into a still, paused on the latter phrase for ease of transport, ready-made for the occasion of accomplishments such as grading papers and folding the laundry, or cleaning out the dishwasher filter that nobody talks about. The more mundane the better, toward the notion that incongruity yields comedy. This truism gave humor to the original too; dressed in gray athleisure, with corded earphones in hand, as though pulled from a jog, she appears utterly unserious. The video ends in laughter, sliding out from the final “s” in “states,” as in, “You’re going to be the next president of the United States…” Ha ha ha. The laugh presages wider use of the acronym IJBOL, for “I just burst out laughing,” which became glued to her vice presidency—“what has kamala harris given us besides ijbol memes quickly,” I apparently tweeted in March—and followed into her second presidential run. The memes became loud in the way going on the internet has again, in memory of flash video, become loud.
We remember that the artist Charli XCX, high on triumph, tweeted at some point, but do we recall that it was right that evening, not seven hours after the president’s breaking news, that she said, “kamala IS brat”? Who knew what was meant, but those in the know knew what to do with it. Certain longtime fans of Charli cringed at this millennial show of “cheugy,” a word without organic bona fides that I remain convinced an influencer made up for the purpose of receiving comment in the New York Times. Whatever was communicated in political terms, the declaration also worked as a sly bit of promo, waking up Stanley-cup moms who otherwise couldn’t give a fig about thirtysomething gays and ravers to the fact that they might be missing something. The evolution of “brat” and “kamala,” drawn into symbiosis by the unexpected capital “I-S” ontology of an English pop star, leveraged multimedia to odd ends: the candidate’s laughter pitched and patterned in a hiccuping recreation of the synth motif in “365”; neon and coconuts abounded, in “coconut-pilled” images after an adage that now lives on Wikipedia, transcribed as follows:
Part of the extension of the work you will do is, yes, focused on our young leaders and our young people, but understanding we also then have to be clear about the needs of their parents and their grandparents and their teachers and their communities, because none of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.
My mother used to—she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” (laughs)
You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
Pardon my being buoyed by an internet that could still be weird without going too far. I laughed a lot. There is one image of the candidate looking up from a downturned head, lips pursed as though damming that trademark laughter. The text pasted on top reads, “When a mf says something so contextphobic / You gotta hit em with the coconut tree stare.” I saved the image and uploaded it among a carousel of personal images on Instagram. I saved it because it made me laugh and I shared it because it made me laugh and in sharing it I conveyed that I was with it, I got it, I am fluent in this language that has torqued my grammar and thinking since AIM. But it would have been a mistake to call that enthusiasm. Memes are ambivalent artifacts. Some people just like a good party.
The relief was real, I think. An eerie sort of collective, especially amid ongoing reasons to feel alternately dismal and bellicose, especially as the candidate seemed unattuned to those reasons, proving herself jerky and brash on the issues the last guy had been jerky and brash about, slipped into a pantsuit of another color. In Michigan, she sicced her sista girl catchphrase on the voices doing what unconvinced voters are supposed to do rather than wallow, which is pull their candidate in the correct and moral direction. But the candidate was speaking, she said. She told them not to pull, not to try. Trying, she implied, is what gets you the other guy. Her supporters shrugged and, if a little sheepishly, agreed. This felt decisive, though the candidate did try and massage the blunder in subsequent days and weeks, strumming the trusted notes, “ceasefire” and “hostage deal” (but never “arms embargo”). The party, as it must have been decided, would alienate a cause before letting its candidate feel the chill. Relief would turn over into dread given time, but for a time it was as though we—yes, “we,” they insisted—had already won. If there was any felt déjà vu regarding the last time a candidate distinguished primarily by the professionalism of her record—weighted against the faux pas of a buffoon—aspirant constituents comforted themselves with the knowledge that this time everyone knew how bad the bad man was. (He had been convicted, which must mean something!) It was going so well, they thought. Even race, for once—finally! they couldn’t bring themselves to say—was taking a back seat in messaging, as though the other side would ever forget. A savior, yes, but let no one mistake her for Mammy. If she did it right, this historic candidate would have rendered history impotent.
We didn’t know her. What an opportunity. She could have said, been, anything.
●
Blue to Green Line on Monday morning. Monitoring excitation, finding none. The stretch between the Cermak-McCormick Place stop and McCormick Place has been cleared of traffic, lending an unnatural silence to this interminable length of pavement. An appropriate precursor to a destination that should not exist. McCormick Place is as ugly as a designated “convention center,” monument to bullshit capital, should be. Just south of Soldier Field, just west of the lake, not that one would ever know it. What passes for scenery, aside from potted plants, decorates the glass overhead. This provided whatever holds one there affords the chance to take air in the cavernous walkways between windowless rooms at regular intervals.
The Place teems with a motley trained on one thing. Suits and slogan tees, badges in various colors—“Some credentials are yellow, blue, money green,” an army vet announces as we queue up—vendors towing boxes through security and volunteers looking for lost-seeming faces, and many, many, many milling military and police, torsos thick with Kevlar and paid-for toys, leaning against concrete barricades courtesy of Lorig Construction. At one end of the building, media has been corralled into a blank conference room. The nearest coffee, for those not staffing the campaign, I was told, could be bought at a Starbucks about half a mile across the building. There is WiFi: “DemsWIN24. No password.” (I decline to connect.)
There is confusion about the morning press briefing, scheduled for nine o’clock. There was an email that went out, did you receive it? The cameraman to my left did not—nor did many. This process would smooth itself out in the coming days, by which time it became apparent that these briefings were the opposite of a hot ticket. With halting enthusiasm, a parade called “Harris for President,” made up of committee members, senators, a governor and the campaign’s communications director, Michael Tyler, previewed the night show for the day crowd, following public-speech advice to the letter, telling us what we’re going to hear right then, what we’re going to hear later and what we have just heard about what we’re going to hear later. The room seemed content with this, if hungry for further detail for that which had yet to occur, with questions geared toward what I assumed were write-ups due yesterday such that readers may be informed of what will have happened by tomorrow.
“On the subject of the speeches,” Jackie Koppell, of NewsNation, asked the comms guy during one briefing, “do you have—can you talk about any details in terms of the policy we’re going to hear specifically, not just the autobiographical information?” The response, like those before it, kept to form, shuttling from “what you’ve seen” to what “you’ll see” in lieu of a set agenda. We had seen, said Tyler, “both the vice president and the governor fan out across the country, introduce themselves to the American people, to the voters that are going to decide this election, that’s included rallies, it’s included, uh, you know, the bus tour that we’ve done across Pennsylvania.” And we would see—“the vice president and the governor as they continue to fan out … continue to expand on their vision, expand on their agenda, including policy details, and we’re excited to share those with the American people. Whether it’s on the economy, whether it’s on our fundamental rights and freedoms, I think the contrast is going to be very stark and very clear for the American people to see.”
The campaign had found a way to avoid conveying the present-tense commitments of their candidate: contrast, expressed in declension. What she wants done, in terms of emphasis, pales in comparison to what he has done and will do. It was the line of defense against a deleterious return to the past embodied by the opponent’s future plans. If we could be assured there would be no going back, the now was left to inference.
Will there be a Palestinian speaker, and if not, why not?
On day two, they don’t know. By the fourth day, they won’t answer.
At the other end of the building, euphoria spoke in the love language of screen printing. Typography and portraiture were undeterred by the memory of what “Yes We Can” had become, or else recollected those eight years in power differently. For some, the years since have intensified their fondness, memories of a respectable politics in velvet packaging, a put-together family man who kept the world out of sight for anyone who didn’t want to think about it. Despite every evidence of how conciliatory the man was to enemies of hope in America, they would, to resurrect that threadbare joke from Get Out, vote him into a third term if they could. The party was betting on it. And yet, despite the premised continuity between his slogan and hers, attendees did, indeed, have some hope of going back. They wanted to feel again now what they had felt then, and you could blame them and understand them at the same time.
On cue, leftovers from the prior campaign were available for purchase: a white tee bearing a polyptych of the party’s past presidents labeled “SQUAD GOALS”; a gray tee with the current president’s résumé, as if they were stops on a concert tour. A purple, female-cut tee reads “Trust DEMOCRATIC WOMEN” in three different font styles. But as is usually the case, fan-spun merch surpassed the official selection for cleverness; one woman’s bosom spelled out the candidate’s name as the Tide detergent logo (“removes nasty orange stains”). A pair of black women in white pantsuits sported sashes with the candidate’s name lined in red and blue, referencing Beyoncé’s bid for Americana earlier in the year. At the LGBTQ+ Caucus meeting, because where else, I spotted the candidate’s name on a t-shirt in Brat green. Those who found the contents of their suitcase wanting could seek out third-party vendors at DemPalooza, referencing the Grant Park festival. There I watched two women maneuver a cardboard cutout of the candidate fashioned as a hybrid of Supergirl and Wonder Woman, with a dash of Captain Marvel. It strikes me now how much of this relies upon the charisma of other brands. (Even the convention logo kept reminding me of DNCE, the short-lived venture fronted by Joe Jonas, known for a song that may or may not be about eating ass.)
Black or Hispanic? a woman with a clipboard asks. I indicate the former, privately amused by the inadvertent confirmation as I follow the woman’s directions toward the Black Caucus meeting, which was, indeed, black on either side of the microphone. “Are there any black people in the room?” opened Rep. Maxine Waters, introduced by chair Virgie Rollins as “Auntie Maxine,” initiating call-and-response for a room well-skilled at it: “Say it loud!” (“I’m black and I’m proud!”) She, as an auntie would, still has some trouble pronouncing the candidate’s name; the first vowel sounds more like “eh.” Rollins brags that the Black Caucus made the party “accountable to black folks” and that the caucus “is the conscience of the Democratic National Committee.” Rep. Barbara Lee invokes, as would be often done across the days, the spirits of Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer and the still-living Jesse Jackson, “bookends,” she says, to the achievement of “our candidate,” who is, as we’re reminded, a black woman. That difference “is different,” asserts the candidate for vice president, whose surprise appearance is met with praise worship and phone cameras. He knows he is “preaching to the choir,” he says. “But man, the choir needs to sing.” After his departure, the caucus proceeds with a panel called “Seat at the Table,” dedicated to “normalizing black excellence.”
Whereas the Black Caucus made window dressing of civil rights-era motifs, the LGBTQ+ Caucus leaned upon the template sourced from corporate Pride, pronominal introductions included. LGBTQ people “have always been at the forefront” of social change, one speaker asserts, and today’s fight, says another, is “not just the stigmatizing of trans kids or taking health care away from the trans community.” (“Just” as in: “simply, merely”; also, “used to weaken the force of the action expressed by a verb, and so to represent it as unimportant.”) During her 2020 bid, the candidate recanted her former office’s argument against the continuance of gender-affirming care to a woman placed in a male prison; this time around, she had yet to confirm, or affirm, much of anything on the subject—as a once-niche performer, Chappell Roan, made headlines for noticing. Even as bills with the express purpose of criminalizing trans lives have crowded state legislatures in the interim, the party, having invited trans people into the big tent, has come to see defending their civil liberties as a losing issue. As if to put a fine point on it, a speaker out of West Hollywood put forth his municipality as “a shining example of progressivism.” At one point, a “USA!” chant, such as I hadn’t heard since college, broke out. There were fewer shows of jingoism at a Chicago Bears game I attended the weekend before. The vice-presidential candidate made another surprise appearance, toning down the sermonizing aspects of what was essentially the same speech from before, spurring on another chant. “Not going back!”
I write this down: “I am looking for a difficult idea.” By “difficult” I mean defensible, as in “capable of being defended,” as in that which “can be defended by argument.” I am new here but not so wet behind the ears to think this is a space affording political radicalism, as in an idea that could be called dangerous. This is a pep rally among many, a stop on the tour, in pursuit of infectious enthusiasm, priming us for uniform action. The work to be done takes a single verb: vote. That purpose took its purest expression in the evening showcases at the United Center, known to me as the place to pay Bulls ticket prices to watch pop stars twirl. This time the place was busting with too many somebodies to distinguish anybody, though the real stars reserved their presence for the perimeter of broadcast news programs occupying the box level and, of course, the podium, which slid up and out from the stage like a reverse turd. On the first night, I arrived just in time to see, clad in stark white, Lauren Underwood, a former nurse who flipped my hometown district in 2018. As I took a seat somewhere in the back of the arena, a young woman seen from the corner of my eye was doing the “Apple” dance, the convention her backdrop.
I have dragged us this far without a single word on the speeches, perhaps, in a generous read, a testament to their vapor. I have notes, but what are the particulars compared with the formatting by which many spoke as one? The elasticity of the script fit all manner of personality inside. Shawn Fain sounded like Kathy Hochul sounded like Jim Clyburn sounded like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sounded like Hillary Clinton sounded like, yes, the Obamas, whose departure from the face of the party in favor of a second life in media production hasn’t dulled their political magnetism. Yet even Barack and Michelle, distinguished for their cadence, spoke the same seesaw of past and future, of worse and better, professionalism and crackpottery, a contrast whose revelations must be expressed in negative, in terms of what—and who—the candidate is not. Diversity testified to sameness. That this collection of people found their way to a coherent script, changing pronouns like that, in a matter of weeks is remarkable. If not for the hosannas collected by the old candidate, the man who was still president, you would think she had been running all along. “Let’s salute President Biden—he has been democracy’s champion at home and abroad,” Clinton said that first night. You could tell she believed it. The woman next to me, from Alaska, was wiping away tears. I think she believed it too.
The rainbow has long been captured, but the room showed no knowledge of what this might augur. There is no missing that the average American, however one presumes that to mean, has had their fill of diversity in both name and presentation, for reasons both bratty and shrewd. Corporations took the notion of difference in hand, working the appearance of coalition toward profit. There was one joke I liked from that regrettable Chris Rock special from 2023, swinging at the convolutions—or rather, appropriations—of corporate speech in a moment of marketable inclusivity, already on its way out by the time he hit the stage. He parrots the Lululemon credo against “racism, sexism, discrimination or hate.” And yet, Rock adds, “They sell hundred-dollar yoga pants. Hundred-dollar yoga pants. They hate somebody.” The poor, he means. They hate the poor, yet have the nerve to hang their shingle for blacks, browns, queers. Identical hypocrisies litter the Obama years; an entire generation of intellectuals have vented their indignation at becoming declassed at the behest of race, seeing only one of these categories as needlessly punitive. More see through it now, but then, I also said “bratty.” As DEI is legislated away, liberals and conservatives alike have taken to suspecting any cry of oppression of being a cry wolf, sympathy gone with the bathwater of the girlboss and Antiracist Baby. They that call themselves moderates have awaited their moment, ready to blame the party’s depleted people power on the people. They have already tsked at identity politics gone too far, but there is ground yet left to cover in blaming minorities for having interests at all. They will spin scraps into a feast, spurn the sin of gluttony, and push for a middle that so happens to entail rightward movement. The party, as one corporate body, will confess they are correct and race them there.
But right then, it was about “Not going back!,” repeated at every opportunity. You could be forgiven for wondering just how far back they meant. The city had done everything it could to keep history at bay. Who didn’t have 1968 on their mind? Yet the spiritual verdict on what went wrong on Michigan Avenue as a record of what oughtn’t be repeated remains segregated along immiscible planes of political reality. What radicals understand as a case study in the high expression of the billy club and its holder, the party records as a blemish caused by internal fractiousness and too much indulgence toward activists. A friend, a local politician who happens to hold the minor seat left behind by a man who went on to become president, joked about the potential for another round, which a colleague did not appreciate. The colleague suggested a better and more recent model in the last time the show came to town, 1996, when Clinton touted his abandonment of welfare (“a quiet revolution”) and an additional hundred thousand new cops “on the streets.” The party would prefer politics be anything—ineffectual, genocidal, even—but embarrassing.
Conditions were ripe for a repeat calamity—although, let’s be honest, the euphemistic “law enforcement agencies,” putting officers through their paces weeks earlier, had fresher memories in mind. They were thinking of another day on Michigan Avenue, during a nationwide uproar in the name of George Floyd, damages collected from a city with its branded technique for dismissing its black and poor under the right politics. They were thinking of campuses, not just here but in New York and California, at the University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University and Emory, where students, Palestinian and not, protested their nearest institutions, joining a worldwide cause at every turn flouted by the party with the purse strings.
For not everyone who watched, witnessed or learned of ’68 saw the end of something. I am always thinking of Lauren—Lauren Berlant, a student of Marxist criticism (among much else) who gifted me, and us, an interpretation of the present as historical. Decades ago, they wrote of getting called “so ’68” by colleagues for refusing the usual lessons of that era’s social movements—that is, a refusal to get over the politics that formed those movements. Their essay “’68, or Something” lingers on the insult as ’68 itself lingers, “an event whose history is still unfolding, still cluttering the way with little piles of waste and inspiration” despite a certain propriety, posited as the requisite professionalism of an intellectual, that would wave away insurgent freedom dreams in language akin to a bad trip, “a blot, or a botched job,” a blemish. Goodbye to all that. Yet, wading into that perceived failure, Berlant invites a present-tense attempt at radical political imagination—writing not about but from the vantage of that period—that might keep our memory of ’68, of social change, of history itself, “open, animating, and vital.” Askew from “pragmatic, possible, or useful politics,” the “something” in the essay’s title denotes a placeholder for the as-yet language—“novels, songs, lyrics, histories, letters, criticism”—commensurate with domination and its violent trespasses. It is a figure in the way that ’68—or 2020, or a scene of the encampment—is itself a figure, if “ill-fitting,” standing “for something like the risk of political embarrassment,” what also might be called trying.
The manicured insides of the convention reflected forgetfulness of ’68 and its untidy strivings. The party, and the candidate by extension, took itself for the culmination of that decade’s wildest dreams. “I grew up immersed in the ideals of the civil rights movement,” the candidate (b. 1964) said upon accepting the nomination. “So, at a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work.”
The concluding speech was not bad, as in, it was surefooted and stately. It was the sleekest expression of liberal politics we have seen in this century. (I hear you, but Obama was, rather, smooth.) “Prosecutor” acquired the ring of “protector,” a job ballooned to the height of a vocation, a life pursuant to the rule of law taken for granted as the arbiter of justice. “As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim, but in the name of the people, for a simple reason. In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.” This is how the speech and the person giving it can recuperate the police from within a party that trumpeted its sympathy for families whose lethal evidence of what police do was flashed to the world; but here they are not “police” or “cops,” they are “law enforcement officers,” precious victims of January 6, 2021. But snark wields weakly. Whatever can be said to have happened here, in language and signage, it was not sweaty or mussed. It is only the affordances of a postmortem that might fixate on, say, the word “abortion,” too often unsayable, and still only in reference to its prohibition. In affirmative terms, the candidate supports “reproductive freedom.” She supports “a nation of immigrants” and “earned” citizenship, reinforced with a border that is, before anything, “secure.” She supports “Israel’s right to defend itself,” so nice she says it twice, and “self-determination” for “the Palestinian people.” I want to point out that, even in grammar, Palestinians cannot get separation from the apartheid nation threatening their existence. But these contradictions are not an affront to liberal sensibilities; they form the ambivalence constitutive of their worldview and rhetoric since last October, and before. People liked this, in other words. The speech pleased a lot of people, maybe even moved them. People—but not enough.
The candidate wanted to shake off the present as a record of the past. Her party was embarrassed of what came before, of all that brought us here. But the problem with taking leave of history is that you lose the good stuff too. You lose a record of trying, a record of what worked and what might have worked, of what would work if this one and that one had moved aside for a second, if this zig had been a zag, if the party hadn’t killed—momentum, a movement. You lose motivation, connection, attention. You lose the pulse. You lose, plain and simple, you lose. And you are embarrassed for losing when you should be embarrassed for having been embarrassed by what is just.
You will learn from this only such lessons as have been preapproved by prior ambition. And fools will follow.
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To watch from the convention floor was to watch from anywhere. I tested this premise on the second night, defecting from the security perimeter for free food and drink at the prismatic tourist trap of a restaurant called Carnivale. The host was a think tank I was learning of in real time, reading a brochure on “radical pragmatism” over the salted rim of an admittedly well-made margarita. Two televisions streamed the convention, much as the babble cared to notice. The next night, I headed due north to the hip pocket of Wrigleyville otherwise known as Metro for Drag Night Chicago, a fundraiser and voter-registration drive on behalf of the newly formed Drag PAC (dedicated to “protecting LGBTQ+ rights though [sic] democratic action in 2024”) and coincidentally scheduled the night Pete Buttigieg was slated to speak. The collision of cultural idioms made better sense here, in which a queen named Sheeza Woman, painted in Baby Yoda realness, fought off stormtroopers in Trump-Vance merch and see-through mesh, backed by Whitney Houston’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight.” Willam Belli, in pigtails, pranced around in a crop top that read “Bleach Blonde. Bad Built. Butch Body.” The show concluded with a final word from our host, the bearded beauty herself, Lucy Stoole: “Free Palestine, bitch!” Later, I caught up on the convention the way most had been receiving it, and it didn’t feel as though I had missed anything. There was really only one seat in the house.
By then I was no longer searching for difficulty. It was where it had always been—outside. And among these consummate professionals, there was no permitting the outside atmosphere in. Not for lack of trying. It came from a movement taking the name “Uncommitted,” named after the box Michigan Democrats were instructed to check in their primary to protest the administration’s funding for Israel’s assault on Gaza, and for which they secured several delegates (in Michigan and other states). At the convention, the Uncommitted delegates asked for an immediate, permanent ceasefire and arms embargo and, relevant to the occasion, a Palestinian American speaker at the podium, for whatever time allowed. These asks were each received as equally unimaginable, despite the party going on and on about its big tent and inviting the family of an Israeli American taken hostage to speak. As the days wound down past what the campaign would call halftime, the Uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in outside of the United Center in the hopes that their proximity might be recognized.
The final night, I joined my colleague from another magazine who was reporting from the sit-in. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian state representative from Georgia, read the speech she would have given if permitted the floor, as sweet and tranquil as anything heard at the convention proper—“This historic moment is full of promise, but only if we stand together.” It was distinguished only for seeing room for Palestinian Americans among the former Trump voters and police officers already toasted by the party. After Romman and others were done speaking, the delegates linked arms in a forward march into the United Center to rejoin the convention proper. There is some awkwardness, the entryway of the building being specially designed to stymie mass movement. Another symbol, if perhaps not the right one.
Inside, we snag a floor pass, a rare and time-limited treat on any other day, passed out now like Halloween candy. We scoot our way into a prime view just behind stage right as The Chicks, once tarred for criticizing war under a Republican president, sing the national anthem. I am standing for having no place to sit. Over my shoulder, ruddy-cheeked boys with wine breath contemplate the possibility of a Beyoncé appearance, despite the fact that Pink is right there on the schedule. We’re being told to keep the aisles clear, making the tight space tighter. The candidate is not expected for well over an hour and the building is at capacity. A fellow critic, in town also on assignment, missed the window and can’t get in. He’ll be at a bar somewhere. I weigh my options and throw professionalism to the wind, a practiced gesture. Despite multiple warnings about the impossibility of reentry, I sail out into the night, in search of another party.
Photo credit: Peer van Agtmael, “Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention. Minnesota Delegates during roll call at the DNC,” 2024. © Peter van Agtmael / Magnum Photos.
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Read our dispatch from the National Conservatism conference with Gen Z’s Trump supporters, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” by Mana Afsari, and read the rest of issue 34 here.
The city itself was unenthused. “ngl I didn’t even know that was happening here,” from the group chat, in May. Lest one judge us removed from issues of the moment, especially that great big issue of whom the nation would afford its highest seat, consider that this selfsame archive, along with the rest of the nation, had been tracking, with alarmed amusement, the decline of the party’s best idea: an 81-year-old man running for reelection as president of the United States of America. The same day as the above dispatch, the internet, and therefore the friends, were batting around a clip of the man, who, after being asked about involvement in his opponent’s 34 felony convictions while exiting a press conference, halts and turns toward the camera with slow smile that could be wily or absent.
The mood was jaded, worn out, unwell, irony-poisoned. Saturdays, Sundays and some school nights were earmarked for dutiful, ever-peaceful marches against genocide. And though school was, technically, out, the overreach of chagrined admins the city over—and right up north, in Evanston—persisted. Music for the masses was suspiciously good; Bennifer was back, as well as: exhibited hip bones, casual homophobia, rabid Islamophobia, referendums on infidelity, a taste for Pepsi—suspect, all of it, because I couldn’t help but read these events as symptomatic of what critic Ayesha A. Siddiqi diagnosed as a “Bush Era Redux”: “More war, more violence, more denial and suppression of those realities by the ruling class of the United States, and subsequently more aesthetic trends formed by that suppression escaping in visual motifs, clues to the global mood.”
In truth, I had planned to make myself scarce for the convention, which promised more suppression of reality by the ruling class, this time drenched in blue. Still, when the occasion arose that I might take more than a resident’s interest in the thing, I wondered if I might be in danger of getting swept up, given my weakness for organized fandom, as so much concert merch and collegiate gear can attest. I wanted to be tugged, courted by the party that has, as everyone knows, made for lousy suitors for some time. But a week out, there was no feeling it, in whatever form. I failed to catch a vibe, nothing approximate to the frenzy in my phone. If there was anything the party had done, imbricated with the city I knew, it was too subterranean to catch a tread, or thinner than the air on the ground.
She’d lightened the mood, no doubt. On July 21st, 1:46 p.m. EDT—almost exactly a month prior to the convention’s opening ceremonies—the floodgates to alterity burst open with a tweet. “My Fellow Americans,” the Commander in Chief began. “Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation.” After two self-congratulatory paragraphs, the meat of the address announced that its author felt it “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” That was a funny way of putting it, “stand down.” Though it means simply to withdraw, I imagine that for at least a few it brought to mind a more martial meaning, the one Trump invoked when he urged the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” (The next day Trump told reporters, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. I mean you’ll have to give me a definition, ’cause I really don’t know who they are. I can only say they have to stand down.”)
For the Democrat who beat Trump, not yet known to be the only one ever to do so, standing down was, indeed, a withdrawal from competition, from responsibility, from an ambition whose doggedness finally submitted in the face of a nationwide cry uncle. Standing down was the least he could do after a debate performance in June that offended even liberal commentators otherwise inclined toward prettying up the donkey’s messes. Not every diehard died off, but a number greater than before were inclined to take the symbol—old man, lost among his words with nuclear codes and domestic policy at arm’s reach—as it arrived, foul off the platter. In his initial statement, the president praised the current VP as “an extraordinary partner in all this work,” inspiring confusion and perhaps panic and perhaps hope that this new juncture would present a race more open than had been permitted to be imagined these past three years. Then, as though doubling back to retrieve his spectacles from a room just left, the president returned within the half hour, bestowing “full support and endorsement” for the woman and politician by his side as nominee. The party, as far as anyone could tell, fell in line, much as it had those past three years. The gates stuttered, stopped and sped toward close.
She was an alternate mostly in name and charisma, not that there weren’t differences in her candidacy worth distinction. But what we knew of the candidate right then had not much changed from her first run, though now, at least, it seemed relevant that we knew how to pronounce her name. No more than before would the candidate make it personal. In her memoir, The Truths We Hold, childhood, adolescence and supporting characters therein speed past with as much coloring as a stump speech might allow. About those activist parents of whom you’ve heard, the daughter writes, “my parents and their friends were more than just protesters. They were big thinkers, pushing big ideas, organizing their community.” The lines bespeak a political inheritance as forceful as an awareness of other people and the promise of something better, expressed as an order of magnitude (“big”) that is left undetailed. By page 27, the protagonist has embarked on a legal career within the district attorney’s office, where, as left to be inferred, the relevant biography begins. Yet the recorded priorities of a prosecutor’s office, occupied with increasing jurisdictional capacity until 2017, followed by the up-down motions of a senator had still, in the run-up of 2020, yet to cohere into an idiom affirming anything other than affirmation itself.
During her first campaign for president the candidate was thought to lean overmuch on the fact of her existence, allowing the historical production of race, ethnicity and gender do the work of crosshatching her intentions. She was not alone in, as culture writer Shamira Ibrahim wrote in a postmortem of the earlier campaign, “banking on identity,” but some identities are taken to be more conspicuous—and by 2019 even internet outlets showed signs of fatigue with that sort of thing. That fatigue, bordering on skepticism, foreclosed the Obama playbook, even if she could match him for charisma, which she couldn’t. The vice presidency, with a job description that may as well read “affirmation” in its entire, ironed out her image. She gave the appearance of being good at her job, and without any indication that the party would be auditioning alternates, the appearance was judged good enough.
Every candidate is an exterior; it is always the idea of a person to whom we’re obliged, which one supposes is the same in the case of any other person, but politicians are supposed to make us forget, like a good lover. Obama once described himself as a “blank screen,” but his real talent was for sweeping up his audience in emotions that obscured this blankness. There’s no escaping that electoral politics, like all politics, runs on feeling. This is what’s meant by “electability,” for all its claims to rational distance. That dreadful nominalization, raising shaky criteria to the status of innate character, amounts to little more than a feeling about the future. A feeling more material than material.
She was not there yet. We didn’t know her. Washington, it was rumored, didn’t know her. Her staffers, few long-haulers if any, barely did. As the campaign took the time to determine which candidate the candidate would be, dodging press corps, to the corps’ consternation, the internet, as they say, got to work. If debates over platform were being had, I admit, reader, I caught no wind of them. The one-out, one-in policy of the party had let in enough life-giving air for a million civilian-created memes, crowding the field and the field of vision with supercuts of the VP out in public speaking and laughing, speaking then laughing, then speaking again, for, as these videos contend, she cannot have one without the other. Though the videos predated this candidacy as an effort to discredit the candidate, the wider audience that emerged in late July was ready to view them in a different spirit. The supercuts, intended smears, became fan cams.
The candidate had done star turns in meme format before. Gifs still had currency back in 2020, when moving images of the then vice-presidential candidate making faces at her unskilled opponent roused those inclined to view the high drama of public figures as a parable for their professional lives. The Saturday following that year’s election, the then vice president-elect tweeted an open-captioned video of herself taking a call outside in the fall grass: “We did it. We did it, Joe.” The video was winnowed into a still, paused on the latter phrase for ease of transport, ready-made for the occasion of accomplishments such as grading papers and folding the laundry, or cleaning out the dishwasher filter that nobody talks about. The more mundane the better, toward the notion that incongruity yields comedy. This truism gave humor to the original too; dressed in gray athleisure, with corded earphones in hand, as though pulled from a jog, she appears utterly unserious. The video ends in laughter, sliding out from the final “s” in “states,” as in, “You’re going to be the next president of the United States…” Ha ha ha. The laugh presages wider use of the acronym IJBOL, for “I just burst out laughing,” which became glued to her vice presidency—“what has kamala harris given us besides ijbol memes quickly,” I apparently tweeted in March—and followed into her second presidential run. The memes became loud in the way going on the internet has again, in memory of flash video, become loud.
We remember that the artist Charli XCX, high on triumph, tweeted at some point, but do we recall that it was right that evening, not seven hours after the president’s breaking news, that she said, “kamala IS brat”? Who knew what was meant, but those in the know knew what to do with it. Certain longtime fans of Charli cringed at this millennial show of “cheugy,” a word without organic bona fides that I remain convinced an influencer made up for the purpose of receiving comment in the New York Times. Whatever was communicated in political terms, the declaration also worked as a sly bit of promo, waking up Stanley-cup moms who otherwise couldn’t give a fig about thirtysomething gays and ravers to the fact that they might be missing something. The evolution of “brat” and “kamala,” drawn into symbiosis by the unexpected capital “I-S” ontology of an English pop star, leveraged multimedia to odd ends: the candidate’s laughter pitched and patterned in a hiccuping recreation of the synth motif in “365”; neon and coconuts abounded, in “coconut-pilled” images after an adage that now lives on Wikipedia, transcribed as follows:
Pardon my being buoyed by an internet that could still be weird without going too far. I laughed a lot. There is one image of the candidate looking up from a downturned head, lips pursed as though damming that trademark laughter. The text pasted on top reads, “When a mf says something so contextphobic / You gotta hit em with the coconut tree stare.” I saved the image and uploaded it among a carousel of personal images on Instagram. I saved it because it made me laugh and I shared it because it made me laugh and in sharing it I conveyed that I was with it, I got it, I am fluent in this language that has torqued my grammar and thinking since AIM. But it would have been a mistake to call that enthusiasm. Memes are ambivalent artifacts. Some people just like a good party.
The relief was real, I think. An eerie sort of collective, especially amid ongoing reasons to feel alternately dismal and bellicose, especially as the candidate seemed unattuned to those reasons, proving herself jerky and brash on the issues the last guy had been jerky and brash about, slipped into a pantsuit of another color. In Michigan, she sicced her sista girl catchphrase on the voices doing what unconvinced voters are supposed to do rather than wallow, which is pull their candidate in the correct and moral direction. But the candidate was speaking, she said. She told them not to pull, not to try. Trying, she implied, is what gets you the other guy. Her supporters shrugged and, if a little sheepishly, agreed. This felt decisive, though the candidate did try and massage the blunder in subsequent days and weeks, strumming the trusted notes, “ceasefire” and “hostage deal” (but never “arms embargo”). The party, as it must have been decided, would alienate a cause before letting its candidate feel the chill. Relief would turn over into dread given time, but for a time it was as though we—yes, “we,” they insisted—had already won. If there was any felt déjà vu regarding the last time a candidate distinguished primarily by the professionalism of her record—weighted against the faux pas of a buffoon—aspirant constituents comforted themselves with the knowledge that this time everyone knew how bad the bad man was. (He had been convicted, which must mean something!) It was going so well, they thought. Even race, for once—finally! they couldn’t bring themselves to say—was taking a back seat in messaging, as though the other side would ever forget. A savior, yes, but let no one mistake her for Mammy. If she did it right, this historic candidate would have rendered history impotent.
We didn’t know her. What an opportunity. She could have said, been, anything.
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Blue to Green Line on Monday morning. Monitoring excitation, finding none. The stretch between the Cermak-McCormick Place stop and McCormick Place has been cleared of traffic, lending an unnatural silence to this interminable length of pavement. An appropriate precursor to a destination that should not exist. McCormick Place is as ugly as a designated “convention center,” monument to bullshit capital, should be. Just south of Soldier Field, just west of the lake, not that one would ever know it. What passes for scenery, aside from potted plants, decorates the glass overhead. This provided whatever holds one there affords the chance to take air in the cavernous walkways between windowless rooms at regular intervals.
The Place teems with a motley trained on one thing. Suits and slogan tees, badges in various colors—“Some credentials are yellow, blue, money green,” an army vet announces as we queue up—vendors towing boxes through security and volunteers looking for lost-seeming faces, and many, many, many milling military and police, torsos thick with Kevlar and paid-for toys, leaning against concrete barricades courtesy of Lorig Construction. At one end of the building, media has been corralled into a blank conference room. The nearest coffee, for those not staffing the campaign, I was told, could be bought at a Starbucks about half a mile across the building. There is WiFi: “DemsWIN24. No password.” (I decline to connect.)
There is confusion about the morning press briefing, scheduled for nine o’clock. There was an email that went out, did you receive it? The cameraman to my left did not—nor did many. This process would smooth itself out in the coming days, by which time it became apparent that these briefings were the opposite of a hot ticket. With halting enthusiasm, a parade called “Harris for President,” made up of committee members, senators, a governor and the campaign’s communications director, Michael Tyler, previewed the night show for the day crowd, following public-speech advice to the letter, telling us what we’re going to hear right then, what we’re going to hear later and what we have just heard about what we’re going to hear later. The room seemed content with this, if hungry for further detail for that which had yet to occur, with questions geared toward what I assumed were write-ups due yesterday such that readers may be informed of what will have happened by tomorrow.
“On the subject of the speeches,” Jackie Koppell, of NewsNation, asked the comms guy during one briefing, “do you have—can you talk about any details in terms of the policy we’re going to hear specifically, not just the autobiographical information?” The response, like those before it, kept to form, shuttling from “what you’ve seen” to what “you’ll see” in lieu of a set agenda. We had seen, said Tyler, “both the vice president and the governor fan out across the country, introduce themselves to the American people, to the voters that are going to decide this election, that’s included rallies, it’s included, uh, you know, the bus tour that we’ve done across Pennsylvania.” And we would see—“the vice president and the governor as they continue to fan out … continue to expand on their vision, expand on their agenda, including policy details, and we’re excited to share those with the American people. Whether it’s on the economy, whether it’s on our fundamental rights and freedoms, I think the contrast is going to be very stark and very clear for the American people to see.”
The campaign had found a way to avoid conveying the present-tense commitments of their candidate: contrast, expressed in declension. What she wants done, in terms of emphasis, pales in comparison to what he has done and will do. It was the line of defense against a deleterious return to the past embodied by the opponent’s future plans. If we could be assured there would be no going back, the now was left to inference.
Will there be a Palestinian speaker, and if not, why not?
On day two, they don’t know. By the fourth day, they won’t answer.
At the other end of the building, euphoria spoke in the love language of screen printing. Typography and portraiture were undeterred by the memory of what “Yes We Can” had become, or else recollected those eight years in power differently. For some, the years since have intensified their fondness, memories of a respectable politics in velvet packaging, a put-together family man who kept the world out of sight for anyone who didn’t want to think about it. Despite every evidence of how conciliatory the man was to enemies of hope in America, they would, to resurrect that threadbare joke from Get Out, vote him into a third term if they could. The party was betting on it. And yet, despite the premised continuity between his slogan and hers, attendees did, indeed, have some hope of going back. They wanted to feel again now what they had felt then, and you could blame them and understand them at the same time.
On cue, leftovers from the prior campaign were available for purchase: a white tee bearing a polyptych of the party’s past presidents labeled “SQUAD GOALS”; a gray tee with the current president’s résumé, as if they were stops on a concert tour. A purple, female-cut tee reads “Trust DEMOCRATIC WOMEN” in three different font styles. But as is usually the case, fan-spun merch surpassed the official selection for cleverness; one woman’s bosom spelled out the candidate’s name as the Tide detergent logo (“removes nasty orange stains”). A pair of black women in white pantsuits sported sashes with the candidate’s name lined in red and blue, referencing Beyoncé’s bid for Americana earlier in the year. At the LGBTQ+ Caucus meeting, because where else, I spotted the candidate’s name on a t-shirt in Brat green. Those who found the contents of their suitcase wanting could seek out third-party vendors at DemPalooza, referencing the Grant Park festival. There I watched two women maneuver a cardboard cutout of the candidate fashioned as a hybrid of Supergirl and Wonder Woman, with a dash of Captain Marvel. It strikes me now how much of this relies upon the charisma of other brands. (Even the convention logo kept reminding me of DNCE, the short-lived venture fronted by Joe Jonas, known for a song that may or may not be about eating ass.)
Black or Hispanic? a woman with a clipboard asks. I indicate the former, privately amused by the inadvertent confirmation as I follow the woman’s directions toward the Black Caucus meeting, which was, indeed, black on either side of the microphone. “Are there any black people in the room?” opened Rep. Maxine Waters, introduced by chair Virgie Rollins as “Auntie Maxine,” initiating call-and-response for a room well-skilled at it: “Say it loud!” (“I’m black and I’m proud!”) She, as an auntie would, still has some trouble pronouncing the candidate’s name; the first vowel sounds more like “eh.” Rollins brags that the Black Caucus made the party “accountable to black folks” and that the caucus “is the conscience of the Democratic National Committee.” Rep. Barbara Lee invokes, as would be often done across the days, the spirits of Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer and the still-living Jesse Jackson, “bookends,” she says, to the achievement of “our candidate,” who is, as we’re reminded, a black woman. That difference “is different,” asserts the candidate for vice president, whose surprise appearance is met with praise worship and phone cameras. He knows he is “preaching to the choir,” he says. “But man, the choir needs to sing.” After his departure, the caucus proceeds with a panel called “Seat at the Table,” dedicated to “normalizing black excellence.”
Whereas the Black Caucus made window dressing of civil rights-era motifs, the LGBTQ+ Caucus leaned upon the template sourced from corporate Pride, pronominal introductions included. LGBTQ people “have always been at the forefront” of social change, one speaker asserts, and today’s fight, says another, is “not just the stigmatizing of trans kids or taking health care away from the trans community.” (“Just” as in: “simply, merely”; also, “used to weaken the force of the action expressed by a verb, and so to represent it as unimportant.”) During her 2020 bid, the candidate recanted her former office’s argument against the continuance of gender-affirming care to a woman placed in a male prison; this time around, she had yet to confirm, or affirm, much of anything on the subject—as a once-niche performer, Chappell Roan, made headlines for noticing. Even as bills with the express purpose of criminalizing trans lives have crowded state legislatures in the interim, the party, having invited trans people into the big tent, has come to see defending their civil liberties as a losing issue. As if to put a fine point on it, a speaker out of West Hollywood put forth his municipality as “a shining example of progressivism.” At one point, a “USA!” chant, such as I hadn’t heard since college, broke out. There were fewer shows of jingoism at a Chicago Bears game I attended the weekend before. The vice-presidential candidate made another surprise appearance, toning down the sermonizing aspects of what was essentially the same speech from before, spurring on another chant. “Not going back!”
I write this down: “I am looking for a difficult idea.” By “difficult” I mean defensible, as in “capable of being defended,” as in that which “can be defended by argument.” I am new here but not so wet behind the ears to think this is a space affording political radicalism, as in an idea that could be called dangerous. This is a pep rally among many, a stop on the tour, in pursuit of infectious enthusiasm, priming us for uniform action. The work to be done takes a single verb: vote. That purpose took its purest expression in the evening showcases at the United Center, known to me as the place to pay Bulls ticket prices to watch pop stars twirl. This time the place was busting with too many somebodies to distinguish anybody, though the real stars reserved their presence for the perimeter of broadcast news programs occupying the box level and, of course, the podium, which slid up and out from the stage like a reverse turd. On the first night, I arrived just in time to see, clad in stark white, Lauren Underwood, a former nurse who flipped my hometown district in 2018. As I took a seat somewhere in the back of the arena, a young woman seen from the corner of my eye was doing the “Apple” dance, the convention her backdrop.
I have dragged us this far without a single word on the speeches, perhaps, in a generous read, a testament to their vapor. I have notes, but what are the particulars compared with the formatting by which many spoke as one? The elasticity of the script fit all manner of personality inside. Shawn Fain sounded like Kathy Hochul sounded like Jim Clyburn sounded like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sounded like Hillary Clinton sounded like, yes, the Obamas, whose departure from the face of the party in favor of a second life in media production hasn’t dulled their political magnetism. Yet even Barack and Michelle, distinguished for their cadence, spoke the same seesaw of past and future, of worse and better, professionalism and crackpottery, a contrast whose revelations must be expressed in negative, in terms of what—and who—the candidate is not. Diversity testified to sameness. That this collection of people found their way to a coherent script, changing pronouns like that, in a matter of weeks is remarkable. If not for the hosannas collected by the old candidate, the man who was still president, you would think she had been running all along. “Let’s salute President Biden—he has been democracy’s champion at home and abroad,” Clinton said that first night. You could tell she believed it. The woman next to me, from Alaska, was wiping away tears. I think she believed it too.
The rainbow has long been captured, but the room showed no knowledge of what this might augur. There is no missing that the average American, however one presumes that to mean, has had their fill of diversity in both name and presentation, for reasons both bratty and shrewd. Corporations took the notion of difference in hand, working the appearance of coalition toward profit. There was one joke I liked from that regrettable Chris Rock special from 2023, swinging at the convolutions—or rather, appropriations—of corporate speech in a moment of marketable inclusivity, already on its way out by the time he hit the stage. He parrots the Lululemon credo against “racism, sexism, discrimination or hate.” And yet, Rock adds, “They sell hundred-dollar yoga pants. Hundred-dollar yoga pants. They hate somebody.” The poor, he means. They hate the poor, yet have the nerve to hang their shingle for blacks, browns, queers. Identical hypocrisies litter the Obama years; an entire generation of intellectuals have vented their indignation at becoming declassed at the behest of race, seeing only one of these categories as needlessly punitive. More see through it now, but then, I also said “bratty.” As DEI is legislated away, liberals and conservatives alike have taken to suspecting any cry of oppression of being a cry wolf, sympathy gone with the bathwater of the girlboss and Antiracist Baby. They that call themselves moderates have awaited their moment, ready to blame the party’s depleted people power on the people. They have already tsked at identity politics gone too far, but there is ground yet left to cover in blaming minorities for having interests at all. They will spin scraps into a feast, spurn the sin of gluttony, and push for a middle that so happens to entail rightward movement. The party, as one corporate body, will confess they are correct and race them there.
But right then, it was about “Not going back!,” repeated at every opportunity. You could be forgiven for wondering just how far back they meant. The city had done everything it could to keep history at bay. Who didn’t have 1968 on their mind? Yet the spiritual verdict on what went wrong on Michigan Avenue as a record of what oughtn’t be repeated remains segregated along immiscible planes of political reality. What radicals understand as a case study in the high expression of the billy club and its holder, the party records as a blemish caused by internal fractiousness and too much indulgence toward activists. A friend, a local politician who happens to hold the minor seat left behind by a man who went on to become president, joked about the potential for another round, which a colleague did not appreciate. The colleague suggested a better and more recent model in the last time the show came to town, 1996, when Clinton touted his abandonment of welfare (“a quiet revolution”) and an additional hundred thousand new cops “on the streets.” The party would prefer politics be anything—ineffectual, genocidal, even—but embarrassing.
Conditions were ripe for a repeat calamity—although, let’s be honest, the euphemistic “law enforcement agencies,” putting officers through their paces weeks earlier, had fresher memories in mind. They were thinking of another day on Michigan Avenue, during a nationwide uproar in the name of George Floyd, damages collected from a city with its branded technique for dismissing its black and poor under the right politics. They were thinking of campuses, not just here but in New York and California, at the University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University and Emory, where students, Palestinian and not, protested their nearest institutions, joining a worldwide cause at every turn flouted by the party with the purse strings.
For not everyone who watched, witnessed or learned of ’68 saw the end of something. I am always thinking of Lauren—Lauren Berlant, a student of Marxist criticism (among much else) who gifted me, and us, an interpretation of the present as historical. Decades ago, they wrote of getting called “so ’68” by colleagues for refusing the usual lessons of that era’s social movements—that is, a refusal to get over the politics that formed those movements. Their essay “’68, or Something” lingers on the insult as ’68 itself lingers, “an event whose history is still unfolding, still cluttering the way with little piles of waste and inspiration” despite a certain propriety, posited as the requisite professionalism of an intellectual, that would wave away insurgent freedom dreams in language akin to a bad trip, “a blot, or a botched job,” a blemish. Goodbye to all that. Yet, wading into that perceived failure, Berlant invites a present-tense attempt at radical political imagination—writing not about but from the vantage of that period—that might keep our memory of ’68, of social change, of history itself, “open, animating, and vital.” Askew from “pragmatic, possible, or useful politics,” the “something” in the essay’s title denotes a placeholder for the as-yet language—“novels, songs, lyrics, histories, letters, criticism”—commensurate with domination and its violent trespasses. It is a figure in the way that ’68—or 2020, or a scene of the encampment—is itself a figure, if “ill-fitting,” standing “for something like the risk of political embarrassment,” what also might be called trying.
The manicured insides of the convention reflected forgetfulness of ’68 and its untidy strivings. The party, and the candidate by extension, took itself for the culmination of that decade’s wildest dreams. “I grew up immersed in the ideals of the civil rights movement,” the candidate (b. 1964) said upon accepting the nomination. “So, at a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work.”
The concluding speech was not bad, as in, it was surefooted and stately. It was the sleekest expression of liberal politics we have seen in this century. (I hear you, but Obama was, rather, smooth.) “Prosecutor” acquired the ring of “protector,” a job ballooned to the height of a vocation, a life pursuant to the rule of law taken for granted as the arbiter of justice. “As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim, but in the name of the people, for a simple reason. In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.” This is how the speech and the person giving it can recuperate the police from within a party that trumpeted its sympathy for families whose lethal evidence of what police do was flashed to the world; but here they are not “police” or “cops,” they are “law enforcement officers,” precious victims of January 6, 2021. But snark wields weakly. Whatever can be said to have happened here, in language and signage, it was not sweaty or mussed. It is only the affordances of a postmortem that might fixate on, say, the word “abortion,” too often unsayable, and still only in reference to its prohibition. In affirmative terms, the candidate supports “reproductive freedom.” She supports “a nation of immigrants” and “earned” citizenship, reinforced with a border that is, before anything, “secure.” She supports “Israel’s right to defend itself,” so nice she says it twice, and “self-determination” for “the Palestinian people.” I want to point out that, even in grammar, Palestinians cannot get separation from the apartheid nation threatening their existence. But these contradictions are not an affront to liberal sensibilities; they form the ambivalence constitutive of their worldview and rhetoric since last October, and before. People liked this, in other words. The speech pleased a lot of people, maybe even moved them. People—but not enough.
The candidate wanted to shake off the present as a record of the past. Her party was embarrassed of what came before, of all that brought us here. But the problem with taking leave of history is that you lose the good stuff too. You lose a record of trying, a record of what worked and what might have worked, of what would work if this one and that one had moved aside for a second, if this zig had been a zag, if the party hadn’t killed—momentum, a movement. You lose motivation, connection, attention. You lose the pulse. You lose, plain and simple, you lose. And you are embarrassed for losing when you should be embarrassed for having been embarrassed by what is just.
You will learn from this only such lessons as have been preapproved by prior ambition. And fools will follow.
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To watch from the convention floor was to watch from anywhere. I tested this premise on the second night, defecting from the security perimeter for free food and drink at the prismatic tourist trap of a restaurant called Carnivale. The host was a think tank I was learning of in real time, reading a brochure on “radical pragmatism” over the salted rim of an admittedly well-made margarita. Two televisions streamed the convention, much as the babble cared to notice. The next night, I headed due north to the hip pocket of Wrigleyville otherwise known as Metro for Drag Night Chicago, a fundraiser and voter-registration drive on behalf of the newly formed Drag PAC (dedicated to “protecting LGBTQ+ rights though [sic] democratic action in 2024”) and coincidentally scheduled the night Pete Buttigieg was slated to speak. The collision of cultural idioms made better sense here, in which a queen named Sheeza Woman, painted in Baby Yoda realness, fought off stormtroopers in Trump-Vance merch and see-through mesh, backed by Whitney Houston’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight.” Willam Belli, in pigtails, pranced around in a crop top that read “Bleach Blonde. Bad Built. Butch Body.” The show concluded with a final word from our host, the bearded beauty herself, Lucy Stoole: “Free Palestine, bitch!” Later, I caught up on the convention the way most had been receiving it, and it didn’t feel as though I had missed anything. There was really only one seat in the house.
By then I was no longer searching for difficulty. It was where it had always been—outside. And among these consummate professionals, there was no permitting the outside atmosphere in. Not for lack of trying. It came from a movement taking the name “Uncommitted,” named after the box Michigan Democrats were instructed to check in their primary to protest the administration’s funding for Israel’s assault on Gaza, and for which they secured several delegates (in Michigan and other states). At the convention, the Uncommitted delegates asked for an immediate, permanent ceasefire and arms embargo and, relevant to the occasion, a Palestinian American speaker at the podium, for whatever time allowed. These asks were each received as equally unimaginable, despite the party going on and on about its big tent and inviting the family of an Israeli American taken hostage to speak. As the days wound down past what the campaign would call halftime, the Uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in outside of the United Center in the hopes that their proximity might be recognized.
The final night, I joined my colleague from another magazine who was reporting from the sit-in. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian state representative from Georgia, read the speech she would have given if permitted the floor, as sweet and tranquil as anything heard at the convention proper—“This historic moment is full of promise, but only if we stand together.” It was distinguished only for seeing room for Palestinian Americans among the former Trump voters and police officers already toasted by the party. After Romman and others were done speaking, the delegates linked arms in a forward march into the United Center to rejoin the convention proper. There is some awkwardness, the entryway of the building being specially designed to stymie mass movement. Another symbol, if perhaps not the right one.
Inside, we snag a floor pass, a rare and time-limited treat on any other day, passed out now like Halloween candy. We scoot our way into a prime view just behind stage right as The Chicks, once tarred for criticizing war under a Republican president, sing the national anthem. I am standing for having no place to sit. Over my shoulder, ruddy-cheeked boys with wine breath contemplate the possibility of a Beyoncé appearance, despite the fact that Pink is right there on the schedule. We’re being told to keep the aisles clear, making the tight space tighter. The candidate is not expected for well over an hour and the building is at capacity. A fellow critic, in town also on assignment, missed the window and can’t get in. He’ll be at a bar somewhere. I weigh my options and throw professionalism to the wind, a practiced gesture. Despite multiple warnings about the impossibility of reentry, I sail out into the night, in search of another party.
Photo credit: Peer van Agtmael, “Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention. Minnesota Delegates during roll call at the DNC,” 2024. © Peter van Agtmael / Magnum Photos.
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Read our dispatch from the National Conservatism conference with Gen Z’s Trump supporters, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” by Mana Afsari, and read the rest of issue 34 here.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.