What we learned from the Democratic National Convention
The Democratic National Convention ended on 22 August, launching the newly minted Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket into a two-month-plus race to election day on 5 November. What did we learn from it?
1. The Democrats didn’t let genocide spoil their party
The most contentious issue surrounding the convention, as well as the main motivator for protests outside of it, was the Biden/Harris administration’s support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder and destruction of all elements of a functioning society in Gaza.
Thirty “uncommitted” delegates, chosen to represent a protest vote of 740,000 votes in the Democratic primaries, tried to win the party’s support for an arms embargo against Israel—a measure the United Nations called for six months ago. Harris made clear that the current administration opposes an embargo and that, if elected, her administration would, too.
The uncommitted delegates then proposed something that should have been uncontroversial: that party leaders allow a Palestinian speaker—who would endorse Harris while calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance to Gaza—to address the convention. A proposed speaker, Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman, submitted for DNC approval a short speech that read in part:
“Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue—from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can—yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars.”
The party leaders’ answer, delivered by phone on the second to last night of the convention, was “no”. Out of options, some uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in in the car park outside of the convention. After months of negotiations that looked more like a concerted effort to string the uncommitted delegates along than a serious attempt by party leaders to address their concerns, the uncommitted movement left Chicago empty-handed.
At this point, it’s unclear what impact the Democrats’ dismissal of Gaza will have on voters, even in the crucial swing state of Michigan. But the group Muslim Women for Harris, one of the Zoom-based rallying organisations like Black Women for Harris or White Dudes for Harris, announced that it was dissolving and withdrawing its support for the vice president’s White House campaign.
The Democrats’ swap of Harris for Biden generated hope among some uncommitted delegates—and among many rank-and-file Democrats opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza—that a Harris administration would adopt a less one-sided pro-Israel position on the war. Harris encouraged those hopes in a press conference after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 July.
“To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you”, Harris said at the time. Even during her nomination acceptance speech at the convention, she expressed a desire that “the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.
But Harris’s approach to Gaza amounts only to a change of rhetoric for public relations purposes, not a change in policy. She has done nothing to break from the administration she still serves as vice president. The positions on a ceasefire and humanitarian assistance she has reiterated are the same ones Biden has been promoting since May. It should also be noted that “her people” were running the convention.
A commitment to arming Israel and providing it impunity to violate international law is a bipartisan pillar of US foreign policy. On that, Harris is and will be no different from her predecessors. But many ordinary Democrats and activists—including many on the protest marches outside the convention centre—will be encouraged to believe otherwise. And many who are completely clear-eyed about what Harris represents will still vote for her as a lesser evil to Trump.
Even Abbas Alawieh, the main spokesperson for the Uncommitted National Movement, told the Washington Post: “I know that the choice in November is a binary choice, and if I’m in the ballot box and it’s a choice between Trump and Harris, of course I’ll vote for Harris”.
2. Democrats are courting conservatives
It wasn’t just the “USA! USA!” chants and the sea of US flags filling the arena at strategic moments. Or that convention planners made room on the program for several conservative Republicans, but not one Palestinian speaker. Or the deployment of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz as archetypical Midwestern white guy/military veteran/Second Amendment supporter/football coach to balance the ticket with a biracial woman from “ultra-liberal” Berkeley/Oakland, California.
It was about what this stagecraft was meant to communicate. Some of it no doubt reflects a Democratic Party version of what used to be called Popular Front politics, where everyone from “never-Trump” Republicans to “socialists” like Bernie Sanders is considered part of the anti-MAGA coalition. Another part of it is the Democrats’ obsession, since at least the Bill Clinton administration of 1993-2001, with inhabiting an imagined “centre” in US politics. In 1996, Republican candidate Bob Dole complained that he lacked a unique platform to campaign on because President Clinton had adopted so much of the Republican agenda.
In 2024, “capturing the centre” means reviving the “technocratic liberalism” that Barack Obama’s administration practised. Harris spent the first couple of weeks after she declared her candidacy repudiating her previous (and brief) support for free universal health care for all, pro-immigration policies, and Black Lives Matter demands for fundamental criminal justice reform. As she sketches out her positions, she touts an “opportunity economy” perfectly aligned with the capitalist ideology of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. She doesn’t talk about making health care or childcare a “right”, but “affordable”. Meanwhile, she and surrogates like former CIA Director Leon Panetta champion the US armed forces’ lethality and their intention to challenge China.
Democrats made a big play on the concept of “freedom”, tied to promises to pass federal guarantees of reproductive rights and voting rights. If Harris/Walz win the election, they will have to overpower stiff Republican, conservative and even Supreme Court resistance to keep these promises. Will Harris/Walz be up to it? Or will they end up like Obama did, reaching for an unattainable compromise that squanders whatever hope anyone put in them? With millions still reeling from the wreckage of the Great Recession, that hopelessness opened the door for a Trump victory in 2016.
3. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are deep inside the tent
Given Harris’s plans to run to the “centre” (aka, to the right), the Democrats will lean on some time-tested strategies to keep their more liberal base from getting discouraged. One way is their deployment of a type of identity politics to associate any criticism of Harris from the left with Trump’s racist and misogynist attacks.
Another is to deploy as surrogates people who have progressive bone fides. That’s where people like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) really show how they fit inside the Democrats’ big tent. Sanders and AOC both endorsed Harris at the convention. After slamming the “billionaire class” and Big Pharma and calling for the US to make health care a right, Sanders said: “I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda”. There’s no indication that Harris and Walz are interested in such an agenda.
AOC’s praise for Harris for “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home” was even more cringeworthy. As AOC left the stage, delegates chanting her name, the national press started churning out articles on her newfound comfort as a “rising star” in the Democrat “mainstream”.
Jacobin editor Matt Karp lamented that a generation of people younger than “the original Berniecrats” see themselves as Democratic partisans rather than scrappy fighters against the Democratic Party establishment. Karp worries that “some of our best young people have been bought cheap”. He and his colleagues, who have spent years as virtual PR reps for Sanders’ and AOC’s promotion of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social change—even “socialism”— should ask themselves if they also allowed themselves to be “bought cheap”.
4. Immigrant feel-good stories are a cover for anti-immigrant policies
Vice President Harris’s story as a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica was key for the biographical documentaries and endorsement speeches at the convention. Harris wove her mother’s life into a patriotic riff about how “only in America”, the “greatest nation on earth”, could such a story be written.
Yet while immigrants served as talking points in many convention speeches, the Democrats were selling themselves as the party of “border security”. Responding to the anti-immigration core of Trump’s appeal, they presented themselves as the only party serious about cracking down on the southern border.
“As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Trump] killed, and I will sign it into law”, Harris pledged. That bill, which failed to pass Congress this year, contained provisions to make it more difficult for people to seek safety in the US and allow for faster removals of asylum seekers.
The previous three Democratic conventions featured undocumented speakers describing their plight. And the 2020 virtual convention featured special condemnation of Trump’s policy of “family separation” at the southern border. This year’s proceedings could not have been more different.
The sheriff of Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas, spoke. Senior Latino politicians like Representative Pete Aguilar and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto vouched for Harris’s “toughness” on border policy and transnational trafficking. And all speakers who mentioned legislation touted Democrat support for the “toughest border bill” in decades, which conservatives largely wrote.
Unlike their counterparts at the Republican convention, Democratic delegates didn’t brandish “Mass Deportations Now” placards on the convention floor. But they’ve clearly decided to “counter” Trump by trying to steal his thunder.
