Two Thoughts From the DNC
Real hints at a better Democratic Party, and how they're fucking it up.
Hello from Chicago. I have been covering the Democratic National Convention for Defector this week. If you’re interested, you can read the two pieces I wrote for them this week: This one, published Tuesday, and this one, published Thursday. Most of my thoughts on the DNC are in there.
I’m not going to rehash all that stuff here, but I thought it would be worth dropping here my two biggest takeaways from this week. Pardon me for not making this one into a fully formed essay. I am writing this as I sit inside a media filing room about a mile from the United Center and about half mile from a big ass protest for Palestine that is infinitely cooler than what is happening inside the United Center. A good heuristic for your own place in life is that if you reach the point when you find yourself genuinely and without reservation super jazzed about any major party political convention, you have lost sight of some important things. I must remember this myself for the 2032 Democratic Convention when Method Man accepts the nomination. Anyhow.
1. There is a really promising coherent bloc within the Democratic Party right now that seems poised to, if not control the party, then to wield a level of policy influence that “the left” has not had in many decades. This bloc is roughly: The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Bernie wing of the party, the left wing state legislators of the blue states, and organized labor, in particular some of the most determined progressive unions with national scale, like UAW and SEIU. I saw this coalition surface again and again in various permutations at events throughout the DNC—not as outsiders, but as budding power brokers within the party. AOC and Bernie and Shawn Fain all gave prime time speeches. There was a very, very significant union presence on the main stage. I have covered presidential conventions since 2012 and this one was by far the most oriented towards this faction of the party.
This is very encouraging. Not just because it indicates a generic movement to the left, but because it indicates a step towards the labor left. It indicates an increasing consciousness that neoliberalism has failed and that the inequality that it produced paved the way for Trump and that the road back demands putting working class interests at the center of the party. For many years I have argued that the fate of the Democratic Party is tied to the fate of unions more closely than either side seems to realize. The expansion and empowerment of unions not only helps accomplish the economic agenda of progressives—it also has the powerful effect of transforming the electorate itself, injecting class war consciousness into workers and their families and opening their eyes to the political steps necessary to protect their own interests. Though the traditional arrangement has been for unions to bust their ass catering to the Democratic Party, it should be the opposite. Democrats need the labor movement to get stronger in order to lay the groundwork for the party’s own success. Otherwise it is doomed to be a piece of shit corporate party forever, which will only fuel Trumpism and its parallels even more.
Of course, this will all be wasted if unions don’t turn around the decline of union density. Organize!
I’m going on too long for this little note here. The point is not that the Democrats are now perfect or that organized labor as a whole is perfect; talk to any union leader off the record and they will tell you all the ways that other union leaders are sellouts, idiots, and trash. And in many cases this is true! The point is that the unwieldy whole of the party—which still cannot get enough of “former Uber executives” and private equity fuckos! I know!—appears to be settling, slowly but surely, into a new sort of conventional wisdom in which organized labor takes a bigger seat at a bigger table.
Biden opened the door for this to happen, on the party side. Nobody really truly knows if Harris will maintain the same trajectory but it sure looks like it from the DNC.
2. At the risk of using a trite metaphor, the Democrats have an Omelas problem. You know the Ursula K. Le Guin story where a seemingly perfect city owes its utopianism to the absolute misery of a single child kept locked away. Well, for the Democrats, the child is Gaza. The slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza with American weapons hangs over everything this party does right now. It is the drop of poison in the punch bowl. Seeing Oprah talking about the “joy” of the party juxtaposed next to photos of the corpses of children killed by US-made bombs is surreal and sickening.
The party is not dealing with this like adults. The moral path is to stop sending weapons to Israel. But even setting that aside, the party is politically behaving in a stupid and cowardly way. A well organized peaceful movement—of Democrats, who support the Harris ticket—asked the DNC only for a single Palestinian legislator to be allowed to speak from the stage. They were refused. The party is trying to cover its eyes and pretend Gaza doesn’t exist. That will fail. To do this at a time when the stakes of the election are so high is particularly galling. The intolerable specter of Trump on the other side is not a reason to say to people who have had family members killed in Gaza, “Shut up and vote for the vice president of the man who sent the bombs, who will herself continue sending bombs.” No. Wrong. That is too much to ask of anyone. The high stakes of the election make it incumbent on the Democrats to take tangible steps to change their stupid and inhumane policy and allow the people who want to vote for them to vote for them. It is astounding that neither the prospect of losing Michigan nor basic human decency has moved the Harris campaign to a minimally decent place on this issue. It is morally sick and politically stupid.
One thing that the DNC drove home is that the Democrats are fully capable of leaning into controversial moral issues, when they poll well. Abortion is the proof. Abortion was featured prominently, and appropriately, at the convention. The life and death stakes of the issue were highlighted by having women who had been raped, or had suffered through dangerous pregnancies, appear on stage and give a human face to the fact that getting this issue wrong will cost lives. There was no moral cowardice in the party’s approach to abortion. Yet Gaza was the precise opposite. Clearly, it is a judgment call, and the wrong one. Gaza—and Israel policy more broadly, as long as Israel is governed the way that its governed now—will hang heavy around the neck of this party until it stops acting monstrous. And it is a real, real shame. If you set aside Gaza, even I could perhaps find myself legitimately excited about where the party is headed now. But there is no way to set aside thousands of dead children who are just like your own children. We can’t do that. So the project of unifying the party around working class interests will remain hobbled by our foreign policy. It’s very fucked up.
These are the two most important thoughts I walked away from this convention with. Other than “political conventions should be one night long and they should just have one camera in the room to show the speeches and the 15,000 reporters should all go somewhere else.” I will go back to writing more coherent things next week.
More
Defector is a fine worker-owned publication that I encourage everyone to read. My DNC stories for them: “A Night With the Party Animals,” and “Patriot Games.”
I published a book this year called “The Hammer,” which is about the centrality of the labor movement to America’s success, and why it gets fucked up sometimes. It is relevant to the discussion above. And hey, I’m still on book tour! Here is a list of upcoming events—I will update this list as more info comes in:
Saturday, August 31: Wheeling, West Virginia. I’ll be speaking at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium at 11 a.m. Tickets and event info here.
Thursday, September 5: Las Vegas, Nevada. At The Writer’s Block at 7 pm. In conversation with Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union. Event link here.
Wednesday, September 25: St. Augustine, Florida. I’ll be speaking at Flagler College in the evening. Event link to come.
Thursday, September 26: Gainesville, Florida. At The Lynx Books. Event link to come.
Sunday, September 29: Brooklyn, NY. At the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Finally, let me say thank you to all of you who read and share and subscribe to this publication. At the DNC, I met a number of other independent journalists who are making it work out here in the land of independent media. This is real. How Things Work is 100% supported by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. If you enjoy this publication and want it to continue to exist so that you don’t just have to read Yahoo! News for the next four years, please take a moment right now to become a paid subscriber (at a quite modest cost!). I appreciate all of you. We are only getting bigger and better.
What's frustrating politically about the Democrats' trying to pretend the genocide doesn't exist is that the "military action" in Gaza is unpopular, and extremely unpopular among Democrats (23 percent support it according to the most recent Gallup poll) and independents (34 percent). This isn't to say that policy should be driven by polling but the centrist argument of "shut up! you're going to alienate everyone and they're going to stay home!" is utterly backwards. I care first and foremost about the lives of the Palestinian people and would support them and the people protesting on their behalf even if 95 percent of the United States agreed with the genocide and it was a ballot box loser. But it isn't! The centrists clutching their pearls about how this issue is going to lose this election have it all backwards. They should be pushing the Democratic Party to change their stance because it is an unpopular one, not imploring voters to shut up and abandon what is a mainstream viewpoint within their base.
Spot on takes here. I was just thinking about more or less this contrast yesterday because I walked into my office to CNBC on TV where the hosts where in full cope and seethe mode about Kamala’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains for high income earners and it immediately occurred to me that I would be absolutely over the moon about this from the democrats in any other circumstance but it was impossible for me to come away from this week feeling anything other than disgust at the contrast between the celebratory atmosphere at the DNC and doctors breaking down in tears at the uncommitted press conference taking about what they saw in Gaza. Decided I need a break from social media for a couple weeks because the faction of democrats who not only has decided to totally ignore Gaza but shout down those who have the moral compass to continue highlighting Gaza was making me see red every time I logged on.