I asked my partner to assign me prompts to grease the wheels of my creativity.
Her first assignment: how would you have improved the DNC to make it enjoyable?
Alright, good one. Let’s get started, shall we.
So, I don’t know how many of us watched the 2020 Democratic National Convention, the first completely virtual convening of the supposed party bigwigs in the name of presenting their vision of the nation. All-in-all it was a quite humdrum affair, the typical platitudes pontificated from living rooms and offices across the nation into our homes that we’ve heard since inauguration day, about the horrors of the presidency unleashed on our nations, how we need to vote like our lives depend on it, because they do, democracy depends on it, yah yah yah.
The first thing I would have done is play it less safe. It is 2020, we are beyond comfort food. The Democrats assume an innate fear of Donald Trump can drive the election, the need for their stable hands upon the wheel to right the course of this ship, this ship that all parties now agree was on the wrong course to begin with, a wrong course the Democrats planned on continuing in 2016. Donald Trump offers the biggest aberration to things continuing as they were this country has ever seen, he is enacting real change and pushing down on all the pressure points the nation offers him, exploiting our divisions to enact his own agenda. Just because so many of us reject the direction he is pushing, does not mean people want to go back to the before. The Democrats should have attempted to convince us in a more inspiring way of their vision. Less infomercial, more dialectic.
The current leadership of the Democratic Party is representative of the well-to-do branch of liberal politics that has long held the leadership, and decidedly not of the newly dominant progressive wing, and it showed in the convention’s narrative. Boring old platitudes, nutritionless wordmush typical of conventional politics, and utterly unworthy of the moment. AOC got only a minute, and those who spoke said little of optimism and hope and a reason to pick them, they spoke instead from fear and loathing of the specter on the other side. Nobody wants Joe Biden, and it reeks, they’re just betting you don’t want Donald Trump more. Biden is “exceptionally decent” after all.
I wish someone had said something unexpected and authentic, from the heart, something grand and depicting a vision of a life worth the living, instead of speaking so coweringly from the gut. Kamala Harris spoke for what felt a good while, I couldn’t repeat back four days later any line that she said other than the required “I accept…”
Where are the voices of launching grandeur and something beyond this transparent ambition? Where are the wordsmiths creating a utopian design, the do-gooders who seek a genuine change in the hearts and the minds and the soul of the nation? These politicos have grown so accustomed to holding the microphone they no longer respect its power, and instead continue to feed us down this bland garbage. Joe Biden thinks a wink and a smile and coherent speech are enough to award him his crown. It turns my stomach. It should turn all our stomachs. They know it turns our stomach, they just hope Trump turns it more. For a party so packed to the seams with cutthroat ambition, they do not campaign with any ambition but only negation. The Democratic language around racial animus is insulting. The Democratic language around climate action is insulting. The Democratic language as it spoke out those four nights to the attentive American people is insulting to our intelligence and state.
The nation was treated like children for four nights in a row, spoon-fed paternalistic moral language that got lauded as a moment of national healing and resistance, or some such inanity by the weavers. No wonder half of the country turns to Trump. The “resistance” so loathed the man from the beginning that he never stood a chance at a fair shake, his every utterance and movement torn apart as horrendous that there is no sense of scale, no proportion, and no sense of history. School shootings, costly healthcare, black oppression, southern neglect, border detention, class division, massive drug abuse all, sexual crime, these all existed and thrived in Obama’s America, but these are the problems his legacy will solve, Uncle Joe and California’s “Top Cop”?
We’ve become too divided to have any real hope at a good dialectic, but we certainly have not become, as of yet, so dumb as to be worthy of a convention like this. The Democrats depend on the fact that in an effort to negate Donald Trump’s policies voters will swallow Democratic Party policies. They are using Trump’s racism to put themselves into public office while offering only state intervention as the active policy to most issues. I wish there was a place for small government progressivism, but not in this country, not in this two-party land. A racist nationalist who takes a sledgehammer to the machine, or a smiling statist who is happy to keep the machine chugging along plowing up native lands. Before Covid we faced a time of unprecedented international crisis that has nothing to do with populism and Trump, and now we face a crisis on two fronts, both our external, planetary environment and our internal, bodily environment at the mercies of threats to which we have no strength to combat and pause.
I heard no rallying cry about how to answer existential injustice, I saw only political shibboleths and a cue for applause. I think about what I would say if I had five minutes of the nation’s attention, if I had even one minute at that. I like to think I would say more than this. I like to think we could achieve more than the bland. What happened to American can-do? What happened to liberal exceptionalism? Were all the heroes of the past only villains in blackface?