NOT A TOUGH CROWD
Last month I went to Chicago to write about the Democratic National Convention for the London Review of Books. The piece is now online and will appear in the next issue:
After two hours on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention. The next morning she was due to have breakfast with Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and in the afternoon there was a tea for the Equal Rights Amendment prohibiting discrimination ‘on account of sex’, first proposed in 1922 and ratified by the required 38 states as of 2020, but still not officially part of the constitution because of legal and procedural obstacles relating to a time limit set by Congress in the 1970s for the amendment’s ratification. With the Supreme Court now tilting right and reproductive rights being curtailed in many states, getting the amendment in the constitution was more important than ever, she told me. Most other liberal democracies had constitutional provisions of this sort, ‘even Japan’. She didn’t mention it, but it was the 104th anniversary of the day American women won the right to vote, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in Tennessee. I was planning to attend a party that evening thrown by the Nation for Jesse Jackson. It was not to be. We waited on standby at the airport late into the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left without us and we went our separate ways. I caught an afternoon flight the next day.
With an extra night to myself before the convention, I returned to the literature of Kamala Harris. Her memoir, The Truths We Hold (2019) – an awkward title, the salience of the line from the Declaration of Independence being that the truths are self-evident, not the holding of them – is a campaign book, written in collaboration with a pair of Washington speechwriters, Vinca LaFleur and Dylan Loewe (‘You made this process a joy,’ Harris tells them in the acknowledgments). It makes for dreary reading (‘This is where I learned that “faith” is a verb,’ Harris writes about attending church as a child and hearing Christ’s injunctions to help the poor. ‘I believe we must live our faith and show faith in action,’ and so on) but it served as the blueprint for the biographical elements of the convention programme. There is the journey of Shyamala Gopalan from New Delhi to Berkeley in 1958, aged nineteen, ‘to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology, on her way to becoming a breast cancer researcher’; the love story of Shyamala and Donald Harris, a graduate student in economics, ‘while participating in the civil rights movement’ and despite her family’s expectations that she return to India and an arranged marriage; the birth of Kamala and her sister, Maya; the marches they went on with their parents, where Kamala first spoke her favourite word, ‘fweedom’; Shyamala and Donald’s divorce after the family spent a few years in the Midwest; the move back to Berkeley, and riding the bus to school as ‘part of a national experiment in desegregation, with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other’; the move to Montreal in middle school when her mother was hired at McGill; her decision to return to the US to attend Howard University and become a lawyer (‘I cared a lot about fairness and I saw the law as a tool that can help make things fair’); and, of course, Aretha, Miles and Coltrane on the stereo.
The convention leaned heavily on biography and family, a mix of relatability, struggle and aspiration. It had the feeling of a party thrown for the departing grandparents by the aunts and uncles, with an audience of cheering grandchildren. The Democrats have learned the lessons of 2016: no more will Donald Trump’s supporters be tarred as racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise ‘deplorable’. Instead, the opponents were Trump ‘and his allies’ or Trump and his ‘billionaire allies’, who are ‘weird’, selfish, narcissistic, tortured by their own inadequacies, ‘lapdogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves’. For the most part Trump wasn’t framed as an existential threat to democracy, as he was in the campaign playbook Biden was following until he exited the race. Instead, he was belittled as a ‘small man’, ‘not a serious man’, a ‘two-bit union buster’, a ‘scab’, a ‘bad ex-boyfriend’. Trump’s ideological destruction of the bond between the conservative movement and the Republican Party – previously united under the tripartite imperatives of free enterprise, Christianity and a strong military – and his transformation of the GOP into a personality cult with an atmosphere of white grievance and nativism have allowed the Democrats to open their tent to all-comers, from neocons to the self-proclaimed socialist left. It is now the party of labour and of capital; the party of debtors and of bankers; the party that mocks the Ivy League but is largely run by Ivy Leaguers; the party of anti-monopolists and of Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of insiders and of the marginalised; the party of the football team and of the sorority; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and of the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide. In Chicago, we were constantly reminded that it was the party of joy, whatever that means.
The rest is here.