...And Secretly Made of Powdered Bones

Last week's DNC was big on vibes, light on details, and had one HUGE blind spot.

Last week, Democrats from each of the fifty states and the territories gathered in Chicago for their 2024 national convention. The event was a raucous celebration, culminating in the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s nominee for the nation’s highest office - only the second woman, and first woman of color, to claim a place at the top of the ticket in one of the United States’ two major political parties.

This scene seemed unlikely less than sixty days prior. In the wake of President Joe Biden’s blundering debate performance against Donald Trump in late June, Democrats descended into panicked disarray. The faltering 81-year old commander-in-chief and his surrogates tried their best to put on a good face and spin the debacle into something less than an unmitigated disaster, but behind the scenes, party elites scrambled as Biden’s poll numbers began to crater.

Power players in the Democratic machine largely divided into three camps - die-hard Biden loyalists who would ride that ship to the bottom of the ocean, those who wanted Biden to forego renomination in favor of a mini-primary or open convention, and those who saw the need for Biden to withdraw in favor of Harris - the obvious next-in-line. For what it’s worth, I fell into the latter camp, which ultimately won out - not that anybody asked my opinion.

The sense of despair in Team Democracy’s dugout in the three weeks leading up to Biden’s eventual withdrawal announcement weighed on the party, and much of the country, like a lead blanket. But the spark of that moment ignited an explosion of hope that has completely shifted the dynamic of the race. Party faithful coalesced around Harris with surprising speed, little pushback, and a whole lot of money. The selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz kicked the excitement into overdrive, the personable Midwestern dad bringing with him the most effective attack on the MAGA right to date, a killer hot dish recipe, and a level of infectious joy that has yet to subside.

And while I’m not here to shit in anybody’s punchbowl, I can’t help but feel a little empty.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump is a criminal, a threat to national security, and a danger to democracy. He must defeated, and I’m going to do everything I can to see that the Vice President sticks a proverbial fork in him this November. Harris’ quickly-assembled campaign team has hit all the right notes and she has rocketed past the disgraced former president in the polls. Convention speeches from Biden, Raphael Warnock, Michelle & Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, and so many others soared with lofty rhetoric of hope, joy, and togetherness before Walz and then Harris nailed each of their addresses.

Where were the policies, positions, and plans? And how are we going to achieve those goals? Where was the substance?

I think I watched just about every primetime speech last week and liken it to eating a whole bag of marshmallows - sweet, fluffy, mostly air. I said as much on the site formerly known as Twitter. That’s when friend of the pod and Eugene V. Debs Museum Director, Allison Duerk hit me with this response:

That’s not a tummy ache from consuming 1200 calories worth of Jet-Puffed, that’s a gut punch!

Marshmallows, of course, are made with gelatin - a natural protein derived from animal collagen and procured by cooking down bones, cartilage, and skin, typically pork.

Marshmallows. Cloyingly sweet. Pillowy and weightless. Made by extracting every last ounce of usefulness from a poor creature that likely lived its entire life in small, cramped, inhumane quarters.

And definitely not halal.

Allison’s razor-sharp, incisive, quip immediately called to mind the giant elephant that wasn’t allowed in the room.

The pro-Palestine movement had been been hopeful a change at the top of the Democratic ticket could lead to a break from Biden’s hard-line pro-Israel policy. There were positive signs. From Vox,

The “uncommitted” delegates initially indicated that the Harris campaign was much more open than the Biden campaign to discussing their concerns. And in the weeks since Harris became the nominee, the Democratic Party has made a handful of gestures to show that they’re listening to voters’ concerns about Gaza. The Harris-Walz campaign manager, for example, met with the Uncommitted National Movement. And the Democratic National Committee gave Palestinians a space to hold a panel in which doctors who worked in Gaza during the war spoke about the horrors they witnessed.

Representatives from the Uncommitted National Movement haggled with the Democratic National Committee all week, hoping to secure nothing more than a token speaking slot from Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American and Democratic state representative from Georgia. She had prepared a short, inoffensive, three-minute speech, in which she was to criticize Trump and encourage support for Harris. Yet in the end, the DNC refused, trying to brush a brutal, months-long, ethnic cleansing campaign - that has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children - under the rug.

Now, I know the party was trying to convey a message of unity and joy. I know Democrats are trying to pick up Republican voters who cannot bring themselves to pull the lever for Trump again, but did we need SEVEN current or recent GOP officials to speak in primetime at the DNC? We couldn’t bump one of them? We couldn’t find three minutes somewhere? And who the hell is asking for LEON FUCKING PANETTA?!?

I understand the strategy. Pivot to the center. Convey to hesitant conservatives and independents that they can feel safe and confident in voting for Harris. See, we’re not those crazy leftists outside the arena marching in the streets. To twist a 2016 Chuck Schumer quote, for every Palestinian human-rights supporter we lose, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs, right? But at what cost?

The price of our humanity was an unobjectionable three-minute speech, a sum the DNC could not pay. This will leave an indelible stain on an otherwise well-executed convention.

And in purely political terms, I fear it may cost the election, and consequently the republic. It’s not like Schumer’s strategy worked eight years ago. I know the polls are encouraging now, but it’s still an incredibly close race, and we can’t afford to alienate whole blocs of voters. What if the whole election comes down to a few thousand votes in Wayne County, Michigan? A Harris win MUST be overwhelming, because Trump and his MAGA goons are already planning to steal this election.

And this brings us back to the lack of detail put forth last week.

Let’s say Harris wins. Even then, I’m worried that a campaign based mostly on vibes, without a concrete plan for accomplishing her policy goals, sets us up to repeat the mistakes of the Obama years and unable to actually deliver the systemic change people are yearning for.

It is that very yearning which fuels the vibes. The people of this country have been desperate for a major transformation in our politics, desperate to root out corruption, desperate to break the gridlock, desperate for government to work for all of the people, not just the wealthiest few.

Forty-plus years of neoliberal hyper-capitalism have us beat down, looking for saviors, willing to try anything to dislodge the entrenched economic regime. First we tried Obama. He was a Hail Mary that connected, but we missed the extra point. His administration did a lot of good things, but fundamentally nothing changed. Rising inequality carried on apace.

For the people that supported him, Trump served a similar role. Drain the swamp, right? Tear down Washington and build something new in its place.

For their vast difference, Obama and Trump were similar in that they promised major structural reform, but for working people nothing really changed. And now, you can feel their neglected hopes and aspirations coming together behind Harris.

Will she be the one to finally deliver us?

It’s the wrong question and most people don’t understand that it’s the wrong question. An embarrassingly high number of Americans don’t actually know how our government works. This anecdote from another friend of the pod, the brilliant Jess Piper, who wrote on her Substack the other day:

I was talking to a professional acquaintance a few weeks ago. She likely knows my politics because I ran for office, but I don’t know hers. We have never visited about politics. After nearly a decade of working together, she asked me why I am a Democrat. She said, “they’ve been in power for four years and things just keep getting worse in Missouri.”

Yes! This is the invitation I needed. I told her that everything awful and unholy in our state was coming from the Capitol. That Jefferson City defunded our schools and roads and hospitals and banned healthcare and books. She looked at me and I could see the shift in her thinking. She said, “That makes perfect sense.”

I have to constantly remind myself that most people are not sickos like us. They don’t keep abreast of all things politics like I do, and they don’t read some big-mouth Hoosier’s political blog like you do. Most people just don’t pay attention. And I get it. Politics are toxic, anxiety-inducing, and require a ton of bandwidth. Working people don’t lack in-depth knowledge about civics because they’re stupid. Piper again,

It’s because you have to have the time and resources and head space to really dig into a huge and disorganized mess like politics.

Like Jess’ acquaintance, most Americans know the president. And that’s it. Not their congressperson. Not their senators. Not their state legislators.

So all of this hope, this aspiration, this desperate yearning for change - these vibes - will be piled on Kamala.

And because people don’t know how our government works, if she doesn’t have majorities in both the House and the Senate - and is thus unable to deliver the systemic changes needed to improve the material conditions for people in this country - we’re going to wind up right back where we started.

And that’s how you get the next Trump (No, not you, JD. Nobody likes you).

I am heartened that the Harris-Walz campaign is beginning to put forward detailed policy proposals, but what I really want to hear from her every day between now and November is, “I can’t pass any of my agenda without a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, so I need to you to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. And if you give us that mandate, we will pursue every legal avenue to enact specific reforms x, y, and z.” And sending some of that $540 million war-chest to key races in an effort to secure that trifecta wouldn’t hurt.

We cannot let this opportunity to finally achieve a real, functional, pluralistic democracy slip from our grasp like it has before. From Gaza to Gary, decades of unrestrained oligarchic corruption has chewed up marginalized people, the gears of capital crushing them into a fine powder. It is long past time to put an end to the rampant exploitation, throw the crooks out, and replace them with leaders who will throw us a friggin’ bone.