Chicago deep dish: Democrats stage a triumphant spectacle — but where’s the beef?

CHICAGO — During Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention last Tuesday night, I witnessed a spirited discussion between an elderly woman in the Illinois delegation and one of the fluorescent-jacketed young volunteers known as ushers, who more strongly resemble pep-squad captains. That young man wanted to retrieve a vertical cardboard sign reading “VOTE!” — if you watched the convention at all, you saw those all week: “JILL,” “WE [heart] JOE,” “COACH WALZ,” “KAMALA” — which the woman insisted on hoisting aloft at unauthorized moments. To paraphrase the delegate’s argument, she was going to do her part to encourage people to vote whenever she damn well pleased, and was disinclined to submit to scripted choreography dictated by some whippersnapper.

I felt at the time that the encounter symbolized something, but I still don’t know what. For the most part, the Democratic Party’s propaganda exercise in the City of Broad Shoulders was expertly choreographed. Tiny bands of pro-Palestinian protesters, many blocks away from the United Center, had little or no impact on the proceedings, and there can no longer be any doubt that the abrupt emergence and anointment of Kamala Harris — who now looks less like an accidental candidate than a decisive twist of fate — has fundamentally transformed the dynamics of the 2024 presidential contest. 

All the usual caveats apply regarding the outcome of this election and all other confident predictions of the future: God knows, anything could still happen, et cetera. But for the first time in Donald Trump’s nine-year escalator ride through the whirling inferno of American public life, he finds himself on the margins and on the defensive, deprived of the mildly toxic media oxygen that gives him undead life. 

Trump presumably believed that his bizarre negative charisma would carry him through all possible storms, and why not? It had certainly worked so far. But in a campaign that, somewhere deep down, he probably didn’t want to run, he bet everything on cake-walking over an older and visibly weaker opponent, only to find himself upstaged by a last-minute coup de théâtre that (again, somewhere deep down) he must have appreciated as a masterstroke.

Our felonious ex-president’s stream-of-unconsciousness rants in Truth Social posts and public appearances over the last couple of weeks, which are unhinged even by his standards, offer a familiar argument: My greatness and benevolence are not universally appreciated, and it’s not fair. He surely feels, to paraphrase his own memorable words from 2020, that frankly, he did win this election — that is, he had pre-defeated Joe Biden so conclusively that the radical Marxist liberal fanatics had to stage a profoundly unfair and unconstitutional election-interference coup in order to snatch away his rightful victory. 

There’s something to that, in the usual Trumpian sense that his perceptions of reality are about 3 percent true but filtered through the distortion field of his limitless narcissism. (A process, let us note, that closely mirrors the degraded worldview of his black-pilled supporters.) The Democratic Party did indeed defenestrate its notional leader, at nearly the last possible instant and in dramatically successful fashion. 

Last week’s convention in Michael Jordan’s former arena can carry most of the adjectives media professionals have attached to it: It was triumphant, exuberant, professional and disciplined, with both a text and subtext of powerful emotion. As I wrote after the first night, it seemed like the Democratic Party’s long-suppressed id was escaping containment for the first time in decades. It was as if Brutus and Cassius, after disposing of Julius Caesar, had avoided fratricidal warfare and instead linked arms for a week-long party amid dance hits of the early Roman Republic and manufactured rumors that Cleopatra might show up at any moment. 

Exactly how much Vice President Harris desired or anticipated this dramatic plot twist — and how much, perhaps, she actually engineered it — are questions that for the moment must be left to history. But history, folks, is absolutely what we are witnessing, well beyond Harris’ pioneer status in racial, ethnic and gender terms: Other incumbent presidents who intended to run for re-election have backed down, but never this late in the game or for anything like Joe Biden’s reasons. Other presidential elections have seen unexpected shifts in momentum — the 2016 and 1988 campaigns offer obvious examples — but never because a brand new nominee seized the spotlight just before Labor Day. 

Perhaps the most dunderheaded thing you can say about modern political conventions is also true: They are judged as imagineering spectacles or theatrical performances because that’s what they are. It was 36 years ago that Joan Didion described an earlier Democratic convention as closely resembling the domestic political pageantry staged in the Soviet Union, and the only decisive difference between then and now is that we’ve stopped fretting about it. 

Everyone (or “everyone,” wink wink) is a media insider by default. Everyone understands that the rhetoric of convention speeches is not to be taken literally but as simply another aspect of the stagecraft, neither more nor less important than the DJ sets (which were admittedly, if I’m using this term correctly, fire), the comedy routines or the appearances by gawky and/or adorable political offspring. We evaluate that rhetoric through a dense thicket of perceived context and self-congratulation, either by how we claim it makes us feel or by our semi-informed guesses about how it makes other imagined listeners feel, those of course less savvy and more easily swayed than ourselves.

If we accept that framing, then the professional theater criticism you have likely encountered elsewhere is highly adequate. Michelle Obama, who has the great advantage of never having held public office and thereby serving as the party’s unofficial zeitgeist, was without question the star of the Chicago show. (OK, not counting Gus Walz: I am myself the parent of a neurodivergent adult, and Gus freakin’ destroyed me.) Michelle’s husband did a fine job too, despite the very slight undertone of sentiment in the room that this was the guy we had really liked who sold us a minivan that coughed up its transmission after 60,000 miles.

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Kamala Harris and Tim Walz successfully presented themselves as a wholesome, centrist enterprise devoted to reclaiming such Republican-branded topics as patriotism and “freedom,” and thereby consigning the Trumpified GOP to the margins of “weirdness.” (To be fair, this task has been made many orders of magnitude easier by the Trump-Vance ticket’s actual behavior.) Their notional policy agenda was almost universally unobjectionable, if also highly unspecific. 

It’s nearly impossible to say anything useful about Harris’ acceptance speech on Thursday night, except that it was delivered in confident style, running several laps ahead of Trump’s dreary, doleful Milwaukee meanderings (again, not a difficult standard). It also, with only minor variations, could have been delivered by almost any actual or likely Democratic candidate of the last eight or nine electoral cycles. It may be true, as many progressives hope, that Harris is less afflicted by quasi-imperialist American exceptionalism and less wedded to the neoliberal consensus than Biden or the many Democratic moderates who preceded her. (I imagine Harris has read James Pogue’s essay about the road-to-Damascus conversion of Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, whom she knows well.) But there was no way to discern that amid the flag-waving, military cheerleading and Israel-first sloganeering of her actual speech.

Questions about whether the Democratic Party will someday be forced to reckon with its cognitive dissonance — an unstable rich-poor coalition, coupled with a set of baked-in policies on economics and foreign policy that most actual Americans oppose, and most people around the world actively despise — have once again been set aside amid the powerful desire to vanquish Trump once and for all. That desire is now being expressed as hope and overflowing confidence. Pride goeth before the fall and all that, but maybe what that lady with the “VOTE!” sign was trying to tell me, along with the youthful usher, was that her spirit was undiminished and she was embracing this fight.