DNC 2024: Won’t You Please Not Come to Chicago?

I’m thinking of an annoying old song you might remember. It begins with a mid-tempo clomp backed by two-fingered organ stabs, and then a voice that sounds like it belongs to the loneliest, most neglected stuffed animal from your childhood closet sings: “So your brother’s bound and gagged, and they chained him to a chair / Won’t you please come to Chicago and sing?” Yes, it’s Graham Nash, the only recognizably human member of ’70s hippie supergroup CSNY, warbling “Chicago/We Can Change the World.” And I better not be hearing a variant of it come next spring, dammit.

For it is mid-August now, and readers who lived through the late ’60s (while retaining their personal memories of it — impressive given the circumstances) are perking their ears once again toward the faint echoes of a familiar tune. Maybe you too have heard the beat and the basic melody: Amidst civil unrest, assassination attempts, and international instability, the Democratic Party is gathering together this upcoming week in the city of Chicago to nominate a replacement candidate to step into the shoes of an incumbent president who shocked the nation by retiring in the middle of his reelection campaign. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe everything, maybe nothing at all. As some of you already know, I have been dreading the arrival of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago ever since it was awarded to the city in April of last year, a few days after Brandon Johnson was elected mayor. Back then, my dread was related mostly to the sort of complaints any urbanite has when their town suddenly becomes artificially swollen with tourists who ask you, as they are standing on the street with the Sears Tower directly in their field of vision, “how to get there.” (This has happened multiple times to me during my years here.)

But April 2023 is practically the salad days compared to August 2024: It’s all been downhill since, both for my city and for the nation at large. That was before Johnson demonstrated that, even in a nation with utterly terrible political leadership on the urban level, he is the most tragically stupid, self-defeatingly incompetent big-city mayor in America. Johnson’s relationship with the Chicago Police Department is positively Balkan in terms of its ancient and implacable hatred — he loathes them, they loathe him, and both sides are entirely willing to act on those feelings when it comes to one another, forgetting about the city they’re supposed to be defending in the meantime. And while Johnson has time to hate the cops, he has no time whatsoever to condemn either violent youth street crime or even violent political protest for that matter.

What else has happened since April of last year in the world of politics? Nothing of note, really: Hamas launched its surprise massacre against Israel on October 7. Donald Trump was shot in the head in an assassination attempt. And President Biden dropped out of his own reelection race to be suddenly exchanged for Kamala Harris. In fact, I’m glad that Biden dropped out of the race, not merely because he was unfit for the presidency — which, absurdly, he still occupies — but for the purely selfish reason that the manic delirium of Harris’s reality-free vibes campaign has everyone in the party desperate to keep the fun going in Chicago. I predict few if any ructions inside the building or even the police perimeter surrounding the United Center, outside of maybe a Code Pink lunatic or three.

Instead, it’s the Hamasniks who everyone in the city is worried about. They’ll be “marching” on both Monday and Thursday — to open and close the convention — and they’ll be going more or less past my front door as they do so. I’ll be doing official convention coverage for NR next week, and I can already guarantee you that I’ll be writing a dispatch from the ugly, unwashed, keffiyeh-clad underbelly of the Democratic coalition. I hope to merely be appalled, and not assaulted.

My editor Phil Klein has consoled me in recent weeks with his theory about catastrophic outbursts of political violence: They never happen when you expect them to. The protesters and I are not the only ones who have had our eye on the calendar ever since October 7, after all. The CPD may have no love lost for Mayor Johnson, but they still care deeply about the city they live in, and 1968 is in their heads every bit as much as it is mine.

So with that in mind, I beseech you: Please, stay the hell away from my city next week. Even if you mean well, we’d appreciate it if you simply wish us well somewhere else, far outside of city limits. I know I can’t change anyone’s mind — forget about delegates and politicos, even the pro-Hamas protesters arriving by the busload right now made their plans well in advance — but it’s the thought that counts.

National Review will have a convention liveblog all next week — and be sure to tune in, because we become far more irreverent in that format — but meanwhile I’m going to be fireproofing my home and staying as far away from tear-gas canisters as I can. Do not come to Chicago — you cannot change the world.