Purging the Demons at #DNC2024

After 8 years of being bullied by Trump, Covid-19, January 6th and fears of civil war, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are offering a catharsis.

The dictionary definition of catharsis says it is the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. Typically, this release is created by expressing it in art form. But at the Democratic National Convention this week, and especially last night, catharsis is coming in political form.

I’m not in Chicago this week. Severe weather in New York on Sunday caused my Monday morning flight to be canceled, and the next available flight that didn’t cost an exorbitant sum wasn’t until Tuesday evening. I got my trip costs refunded and decided to donate them to the Movement Voter Project, where the money will go to good use. Instead, I decided I would watch the convention on TV, the way it is intended to be seen by the national audience. I’m glad I made that choice.

I know that many grassroots groups are planning watch parties for this Thursday night’s keynote acceptance speech by Vice President Kamala Harris. I would like to humbly suggest that they start early with a replay of last night’s state-by-state roll call. I’ve been to a half dozen or so national political conventions in my lifetime, and I’ve never seen the roll call of the states—which is always a moment for each state to brag a bit about its star in the flag—turned into a dance party.

If you missed it, you can get a taste of the moment by watching this short clip of rapper L’il Jon leading the state of Georgia’s declaration of its vote for Harris. Don’t miss the moment when he high-fives Senator Raphael Warnock. If you have an hour or so, watch the whole thing. There are some lovely political Easter Eggs scattered throughout, like the state of Alabama choosing the Lynryd Skynryd anthem “Sweet Home Alabama” – a frankly white supremacist song – to back up its citing of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and the state’s seminal role in the civil rights movement.

What is being communicated, nay, generated from the floor of Chicago’s United Center, isn’t just joy. It is a release of emotions that have been pent up since 2020, and maybe also 2016.

For the wonks and junkies, politics is about the details of polling and policy. But for the average person, it’s mainly about two emotions: fear and hope. Trump won election in 2016 by appealing to people’s fears. He governed through domination, turning the bully pulpit into a bullying club. And when you live with a bully in your life, you get into a defensive crouch.

Trump wasn’t the only thing bullying us, of course. Covid-19 hit us even more deeply, driving everyone into unprecedented isolation. The nightly banging of pots and pans that spread across major cities in those early months, as frustrated and scared apartment dwellers tried to show some solidarity with frontline health care workers was no catharsis—it was just a salve, a momentary release of pain that immediately built up again as bad news piled up day after day.

Our political leaders, even the relatively sane ones, didn’t know how to respond. Displays of macho strength, like Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily live news briefings, began to ring hollow as the death toll grew and mistakes were inevitably made. More than a million Americans died, many of them quite unnecessarily, and their loss haunts us.

Some creative organizers led by Nelini Stamp and the Election Defenders tried to counter the fear and gloom around the 2020 election with “Joy to the Polls,” a nonpartisan get-out-the-effort featuring performances by the likes of Jon Batiste at polling stations during early voting. Moments like this one in Philadelphia went viral. But thanks to our famous “abundance of caution,” people dancing outside wore masks. One of the most contagious of human expressions, our smiles, were hidden.

Yes, a majority of Americans celebrated on Saturday November 7, when Joe Biden was finally declared the winner. People poured into the streets in hundreds of cities and towns. But that moment of release was not to last. It was trumped by the violent horror of January 6—a day that was such a shock that many of us couldn’t bear to look at it directly in the months to follow. Though news organizations and eventually the January 6 committee did an excellent job of reconstructing the days events and connecting the dots that led back to Trump’s complicity, I know many people who said it was too painful and scary to relive the experience. The dread of civil war has remained a constant backdrop to our times.

We also were denied a proper catharsis for Covid. The night before Biden and Harris were inaugurated, they held a brief memorial ceremony at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. This was not enough. There was no national commission formed to investigate how America handled the crisis. Nor did Congress even choose to create a national day of mourning, despite the efforts of Covid activists and long-termers.

Again, there were local expressions of joy and relief when the first vaccination centers opened (which I wrote about back then), but here too our leaders missed the moment, failing to recognize that without a ritual of catharsis, there would be no real relief of the emotional toll. Instead the Biden Administration chose to rush a declaration of Covid’s end by July 4, 2021. A few weeks later, a new spike of infections from the Delta version of the virus, which killed tens of thousands of Americans especially in the South, put the lie to that claim.

Of course, Covid isn’t gone even now. Though its treatment has become much more manageable, more Americans have died of it since October 2023 than have been killed in Gaza. Those American deaths have become invisible, like the many before them. We still need a proper accounting for how we as a country have handled Covid, but that is a discussion for another day. In the meantime, we’ve been deluged instead by the atrocities of October 7, committed by Hamas, and the atrocities since then committed by Israel in response. Is some of the outsized outrage we’ve been expressing over those atrocities a redirection of our own feelings from the Covid years?

Maybe; maybe not. Either way, it is emotionally exhausting to hold onto all this pain and fear. Until a month ago, if you were a Democrat, you were also terrified that your party’s standard-bearer, was not up to the task of keeping Trump from winning back the White House—which if it happens will undoubtedly bring down much new pain to millions. So when Biden chose to pass the torch to Harris, and she seized it swiftly and decisively, with confidence and laughter, the dam broke and defiant joy exploded. It’s not just that Democrats are putting up a prosecutor against a convicted felon; it’s that as a Black woman, a feminist, and an empathetic mother, Harris is in every way Trump’s antithesis.

Joy, like fear, is infectious. I haven’t felt this light in at least a year if not a decade. Yes, there are dangers to letting emotion rule politics. But right now I’m more hopeful about the future than in a long time. How about you?

P.S. There’s been an explosion of contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign, as I noted here last week. But according to the Movement Voter Project, the grassroots organizations that are the bedrock infrastructure doing year-round voter mobilization work, who will be crucial to getting out the vote in the coming weeks, still face a $200 million funding gap. You may be tempted to keep giving to Harris-Walz, but remember that most of that money will be spent on TV and digital advertising, not grassroots organizing. It’s not enough for Democrats to have dynamic new messengers and an infectious message. Since the decline of unions, local media and local political clubs, Democrats have faced a “last-mile” problem of ensuring that ordinary people hear from local and credible peers. That problem won’t be fixed in the next 75 days, but if you are wondering what to prioritize: give your money to MVP where it will do the most good.

(Also, local groups are far less likely to be fooled by high-tech data models about what is happening with local voters; in case you need a reminder of how badly that can go.)

P.P.S.: I suspect that one reason the pro-Palestine protests at the DNC has been much smaller than expected is that fury, especially the one-sided kind on offer from the hard-core anti-Zionist activists at the heart of this effort, is just not very contagious—especially when something much more hopeful is on the rise. I’m still furious at both Yahya Sinwar and Bibi Netanyahu, but both sides are so dug in (and benefiting) from the current stalemate that it seems unbreakable. Leftists who want to remind us that it’s all America’s fault or all Israel’s fault (which it’s not) aren’t going to get very far with that message—in the same way that not one of the delegates bragging on their state’s history last night during the roll call did a land acknowledgement.

Further Reading

—Anand Giridharadas on “The Rise of the ‘Brat Pack’- And a New Democratic Political Style,” August 19, 2024

—Rebecca Traister on “The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been,” New York magazine, July 24, 2024.

End Times

How to Dougie.