Last week’s Democratic National Convention did not give us a vague or gauzy vision of America — it got right to the business of promoting equality, freedom, diversity, solidarity, patriotism, and an open-ended future. By offering up such a vision, the Democrats presented themselves as the party of normalcy, and unapologetically asserted their status as America’s majority party, open to all. The overall effect was to showcase a nation that is vitally alive and ready to move forward.
This was a convention that also took pains to remind viewers that democracy is not a spectator sport. It took a politically astute non-politician drive this point home most spectacularly, as Michelle Obama spoke in no-nonsense, evocative language about what much of the Democratic base has been fearing as well as hoping for. In acknowledging worries that festered as Biden seemed doomed to defeat, she helped her audience process those fears, let them go, and embrace more fully a spirit of hope. In turn, she tempered this hope with a fundamental sense of reality and agency, essentially reminding everyone that our political future is in all of our hands, and that we should be resilient in the face of inevitable down days ahead.
But it was Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech that most thoroughly tied together the thematic threads laid out over the preceding days. Most strikingly in my opinion, by so explicitly identifying herself as the child of immigrants, she took direct aim at what Donald Trump sees as his greatest electoral bludgeon — the incitement of hatred of immigrants that he is betting is shared by sufficient numbers of Americans to put him in office. Harris was not just saying that he is wrong to do so — she was essentially putting her own example forth as a way to identify how Trump’s stance would have us collectively erase vast swaths of contribution and vitality on the basis of, when all is said and done, a repulsive white supremacism that would see the U.S. deprived of its greatness in exchange for plainly sick ideas of racial hierarchy. In doing so, she asserted ideas of American identity and freedom that are foundational to a liberal vision of America: the concept that we are all equal, that we should be free to follow our dreams, and that being American is not rooted in blood and ancestry, but in adherence to certain ideas and solidarity with the American community.
At the same time, Harris leaned full into her prosecutorial past and persona, but in a way that tied it to commonly held values, middle class roots, feminism, and service of the public interest. In other words, she didn’t just come across as tough, she came across as righteously so, in a way that ordinary Americans would respect and admire. She left us with the idea that this is the sort of person who should be president — all the more so when contrasted with the documented lawlessness, immorality, and fundamentally self-serving nature of her opponent.
As others have noted, Harris’s speech aimed not only to rally the Democratic base, but to appeal to swing voters and even those who would not typically vote for Democrats. But as Greg Sargent crucially notes, her talk about border security, the January 6 insurrection, and the U.S.’s role as an advocate for democracy in the world made no concessions to Trumpism; indeed, as Sargent puts it, “In numerous ways, Harris portrayed the broad MAGA worldview as something in need of comprehensive repudiation.” For me, her sternest signal of this was the way she held the line on Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, making clear that the attack on the Capitol was simply unforgivable. Given that Donald Trump has placed the rightness of January 6 at the center of his campaign, including his extremely unpopular promise to free the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building, reinforcing this red line regarding Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office was crucial for Harris, and for the nation.
For a long time, I’ve argued that the Democrats should embrace the reality that they’re not in normal democratic competition with the authoritarian MAGA movement, and need not just to defeat it at the polls but to destroy it as a political force. After all, when you’re always one election loss away from your opponents using their win to overthrow free and fair elections, you really can’t call the situation normal or tenable. This is easier said than done, of course, and I’ve never been able to settle on a fully satisfactory strategy for how this could happen. After all, what does it mean to “destroy” a movement whose power ultimately comes from (awful) ideas? So I have over time settled on figuring out ways to delegitimize Trump and the GOP in the eyes of the American public. Watching the Democrats assert values like community, freedom, and equality as normal and mainstream, claim the mantle as the defenders of these values, and paint the GOP as abnormally opposed to these values, I think we all witnessed what such a process of delegitimization can look like in action.
Finally, in the wake of the convention, we’re in a phase of American politics when Democrats and pro-democracy voters need to studiously ignore media narratives that try to fit what’s going on with the Democratic Party into a box, such as the eager insistence that Harris’s momentum will soon stall. If you are feeling excitement that you are part of something far larger than yourself, then that is a precious thing that you should hold onto, share, and encourage in others. That feeling is in fact a completely legitimate and necessary part of conducting democratic politics. Likewise, the sense of possibility that many millions are — collectively — feeling is close to the essence of democracy, the idea that in some immeasurable way we can all get to somewhere better if we stick together. A case might be made that part of our ongoing political crisis is in part due to too many people unconsciously adopting a sober-minded, analytical perspective that too closely mirrors the political media, but that really fails to capture what democratic life is about in its entirety.