Democrats this week in Chicago almost pulled off an impressive, arena-sized trick. They told us so very many times during their quadrennial nominating convention that Americans were reacting to the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency with “joy,” that many of our fellow citizens watching the proceedings from far away likely convinced themselves that such an improbable outcome was true.
I do not doubt that the professional Democratic delegates on the United Center floor—elected officials, union reps, celebrities—experienced the full-body euphoria of no longer having to feign enthusiasm for an octogenarian slipping both mentally and in the polls. They have, in the building, thrilled to the charismatic words of Barack and Michelle Obama, the American-music beats of DJ Cassidy, and above all the polling spread opening up between Harris and the GOP nominee Donald Trump.
But you can count that number in the low thousands. There are 345 million more of us. Here’s what Thursday’s DNC climax looked like to one of them.
At Union Park, the biggest non-barricaded public space within reasonable walking distance of the house that Michael Jordan built, a low-energy gathering of a few hundred protesters and petitioners held up banners and sporadically barked in bullhorns, mostly about the plight of Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war. Between them and the DNC idled a roughly equal number of heavily equipped riot cops—with bikes, face masks, face shields, and guns.
The perimeter security entrance a few blocks away saw more than 1,000 DNC attendees sweating in the hot sun in a line that bent around not one or two but five street corners. At the end of that line, after enduring sad-trombone protests about Palestine, Jesus, abortion, plus the marvelousness that is Vermin Supreme, delegates only begin the process of traversing temporary fencing and concrete barricades, showing badges—both sides now!—to literally dozens of checkpoint credentials checks.
At some point this week I took a har-har picture of a flier on a nearby tree warning about “tech fascism.” When I look at it now I see a few feet behind the flier some temporary black anti-riot fencing (complete with a “DO NOT ENTER” sign), backed by low-slung concrete barriers, bracketing an unused vehicle lane from yet another barrier/fence layer, behind which patrols an armed guard. Behind him is a parking lot with buses, and eventually (because I made it to the other side) more barriers, more fencing, many more armed personnel, then, eventually, in the distance, the United Center.
This is not a distinctly Democratic security principle. This is my 10th major party political convention (I skipped the RNC this year), and the trend line from 2000 Los Angeles and 2024 Chicago is obvious: Rabble pushed ever farther to the outer edges, hyper-max security ratcheted up to degrees that defy description. And it’s not just logistics, it’s metaphor.
While delegates were preparing to crank up ersatz joy for the Democratic nominee’s decidedly tepid speech, I bodied myself through the checkpoint phalanxes and last-night swollen crowds, only to discover that there were no available seats in the arena, and that the only speaker I would see in person on this final and most important day of the DNC was…one of the biggest public policy villains in modern American life, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
“One of my first lessons I taught my students,” Weingarten said, “was about the social contract, how both individual freedoms and mutual responsibility are essential in our democracy. This covenant underlies our commitment to public schools.” Weingarten’s COVID-era commitment to public schools was arguably the single greatest repellant driving families away from the “free” education system.
Down the stairs near the beginning of the endless exit gauntlet was another Democrat who was no doubt feeling joy this week: Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
These are the grotesque hacks who actually comprise the nuts and bolts of “democracy,” not the shiny millionaire authors and six-figure public speakers like Barack and Michelle Obama, nor their Chicago pal Oprah Winfrey. So much joy, so much empathy, and yet the workaday product of Democratic-led governance is the real-world policy catastrophe of places like, well, Chicago.
In the face of a truly challenging and erratic Donald Trump, Democrats have spent the past eight years positioning themselves as the defenders of democracy. And now, in Chicago, they have christened a nominee who won zero primaries, fielded zero interviews, and couldn’t even come close to winning her home state in the 2020 primary. In the absence of testing her against the voting public or the adversarial press, Democrats are attempting to incept her candidacy as a fait accompli, a feeling of joy you didn’t even know you were experiencing. I do not begrudge anyone succumbing to that sensation. But I won’t be joining them.
