Were an obviously enfeebled Biden accepting the nomination last week, the place might have been a tinderbox. Instead it was a dance party.
The Democratic National Convention has departed peacefully from Chicago, without event. We didn’t get a rerun of 1968 here in the Windy City — heck, we didn’t even get a rerun of 1996 in Chicago, where Americans were cruelly tortured by the sight of Hillary Clinton and delegates doing the “Macarena” on the convention floor. And in retrospect, you really have to laugh at the nervous-Nellie fearmongering and apocalyptic hyperbole that spewed forth from so many right-wing commentators prior to the DNC. A mere recitation of some of the more hysterically sensationalistic headlines leading up to last week says it all: “Chicago Announces Potential New ‘Pop-Up Street Crime Hotspot’ for August,” went one. “What Began at Columbia May Climax in Chicago,” bleated another. Note the frothy tone of “In Chicago, the Most Predictable Disaster in Civic History Beckons.” Finally, “DNC 2024: Won’t You Please Not Come to Chicago?”
Wait a second <checks earpiece> . . . well, this is a touch embarrassing, folks, because I am being informed by my editor that as it turns out, all of those headlines were mine. So before I go any further, I want to tell you how surprisingly delicious this giant plate of freshly stewed crow is; I commend its raw, unpleasantly gamey flavor to you. After all, why wouldn’t I be relieved that nothing unfortunate happened to my city? I think I understand why; it’s easy enough to find people vicariously rooting for terrible, violent things to happen in blue cities, to “punish” them for their terrible politics and the economic power that forces that politics upon the rest of a state. But I live here, and I was genuinely worried. Perhaps overworried, but authentically concerned for my family — so much so that out of precaution they took a train to the suburbs the Sunday before the convention began.
And though my son got to explore some delightful new playgrounds while out there, there was no need for any of it whatsoever. The convention was a complete nothingburger, a minor traffic issue at best for non-attendees. The pro-Palestinian protests began as sedate anticlimax (as I wrote about last Monday) and deteriorated from there to pathetic farce. A day later, 40 or so pro-Hamas activists meekly submitted to arrest outside the Israeli consulate for publicity’s sake if nothing else, and there were easily three times as many journalists and four times as many police as there were protesters.
So why did the promised protest fury dissipate completely? What took the wind out of their sails? Everyone’s going to have their own proposed theory to explain this — my editor Phil Klein wants me to remind readers that he was completely correct when he said, “It’s never the riot you’re expecting” — so I’ll offer my multifactorial one: a combination of “protest fatigue” and the big Biden-for-Kamala switcheroo.
To be sure, police presence last week was overwhelming and professional; they were always present in numbers wherever protesters were. And yet this is not sufficient to explain the lack of attendance: What was vastly more noticeable than the cops on the ground was the total absence of protester manpower. Protest organizers publicly predicted 32,000 would attend the pro-Palestinian rally at Union Park last week. Maybe 1,200 actually did, and then only if we’re counting people like me and the hundred or so other journalists I saw there as “attendees.”
But the actual protesters who made it to the rally? They were clearly True Believers, and it’s telling that they were overwhelmingly affiliated with (at least if one goes by eyeballing crowds of people with matching T-shirts) radical fringe political organizations, primarily socialist and Communist ones. These were the ones I described last week as being joylessly and implacably opposed to Kamala Harris for the same reasons they hated “Genocide Joe”: They are the committed ideologues.
Everyone else was missing. Mass movements are, in general, composed of two distinct elements that — if a movement is successful and truly picks up momentum — eventually blend together: First, there is the core cadre of activists, the true believers as mentioned above. Second, though, are the unattached or only marginally attached crowds, who provide a movement with its true strength in numbers. When people were still “protester-curious” during the early post-10/7 days and the height of the Gaza War, these protests became social scenes, places where “the heat” was, swelling their numbers temporarily. (It also didn’t hurt that most protests took place on college campuses and were sustained by university activists with an enormous surplus of free time and a ravenous hunger for self-actualization.) By mid August, “protest fatigue” had truly set in. The wild, vaguely surreal party atmosphere of protests and encampments from earlier months was completely gone, replaced by a mood of sullen truculence.
Which brings us to the biggest reason of all for the mildness of the protests last week: Joe Biden is gone from the race. In the throes of a senile, helplessly mute implosion, Biden’s suicidal stubbornness was pushing Democrats — and thus the entire progressive agenda — toward guaranteed destruction in November. That made a lot of left-wing people quite angry, as one might imagine, and therefore also willing to get out there and complain in any convenient way. Harris has completely quelled those discontents. I understand that you, the reader, may have strong and deeply felt opinions about how awful Kamala Harris is, but as someone who was there in the flesh last week, the United Center might as well have been an enormous Democratic hopium den. The enthusiasm for her among attendees was real, almost bizarrely so: real to the point of delirium, to the point of being unreal, in eerily perfect accord with my own conception of her campaign as being driven entirely by self-sustaining fantasy vibes. The people inside the building were, of course, never going to be manning the barricades opposite them in protest; that is not the point. The point is that the enthusiasm on display inside was reflected on the outside — by those angry and discontent — as being too difficult to overcome. Were an obviously enfeebled Biden accepting the nomination last week, the place might have been a tinderbox. Instead it was a dance party.