So farewell then, Joe Biden, signing off from politics at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Scranton Joe’s speech was nothing spectacular and the 46th president was low on energy. There were a couple of stumbles and tangles, but nothing like the big fade-on he suffered during his first and only 2024 debate with The Donald.
His speech — a testament to his half-century career as a right-wing Democrat who ended up on the centre-left by forces of events, a man who did much good and fought for unions and women’s safety, who got the US out of Afghanistan while being a shameless advocate of the Delaware insurance, credit card, and chemical industry complexes — was rapturously received. Chiefly because its low energy confirmed to everyone there that the party was right to shove him out the window and move on to Kamala: he rallied at points, but had he managed to give a barn-burner, there would have been more than a touch of buyer’s remorse over the selection of Harris.
Also speaking on the convention’s first night was Hillary Clinton, passing on the torch, etc, but also hurried out early so that the memory of 2016 would not linger and Harris and Tim Walz could take centre stage. No sight of Bill, an ancient memory now of pre-9/11 America. Jimmy Carter was also missing, for the obvious reason that if he appeared on stage, the convention might nominate him by acclaim.
But the nominating is all done and over with, despite some grumbling that, in the absence of a real primary process, a contested convention should have been the go. No-one put that up with even the slightest hope it would be honoured. President Biden, in stepping out of the race, simply transferred his pledged delegates to Harris.
The party’s left don’t see Harris — a former big-city prosecutor who has thrown a lot of poor people of all colours in prison, for very long periods, for very minor crimes — as one of them. But she’s close enough to avoid a political blackmail run, and there’s no-one to do it. The optics of Bernie taking another tilt would be ridiculous, progressive figurehead Gavin Newsom is a Harris ally and too much like her in his politics, and the last representative of the schlub white left, Tim Walz, is now inside the tent.
Harris has made good on whatever deal has been made, with a series of economic left offers that might also be vote-winners, such as a rather Australian-style first-home-buyers grant of US$25,000. This is doable from the presidency, or so I am informed, but only by way of being even more inflationary and self-defeating than such schemes usually are. So it is symbolic politics, but symbolic by being practical and material and addressing issues of class.
That the convention is being held in Chicago, the scene of the great left rebellion of 1968, is a measure of how confident the party centre was that there would be no dissent. The convention of 1968 was jammed up too (though there was an actual ballot in that era), with Lyndon B Johnson pulling out after the upstart anti-Vietnam War campaign of Eugene McCarthy let him know he would be shellacked from the left, and then lose to the right.
His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the towering figure in the Minnesotan tradition of which Tim Walz is the current representative, was loathed by the left for his support of the war (and by LBJ, and possibly by Mrs Humphrey as well), and the huge protests were violently put down by Democrat Mayor Richard Daley’s thuggish police force. The event had unintended consequences. Nixon may have won the election — narrowly — but the Vietnam War was on the road to being unacceptable. “The Vietnam war was won in the streets of Chicago”, General Giap is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have said — a quote to remember whenever pounding the pavement seems both futile and vexing.
There is a brutal genocidal war going on now, as in 1968. But this time the US is merely backing it, not fighting it on the ground, so the intra-party left has not joined with the extra-party left in the small-scale protests. The Democrats are about eight parties, not one, and the internal unity looks like a party fusion, but it is really more like the French response to Marine Le Pen’s challenge, a popular front against the hard right. Or in the personage of the increasingly erratic Donald Trump, the gonzo yippie crazy right.
Trump’s increasingly free-form raves can be seen as the end-point of the long political arc or ark — and what a long strange trip it has been — that began with the Merry Pranksters and the yippies in the 1960s, which, for all their antinomianism, still drew on the promise of America for their legitimacy; the notion that if you didn’t consent, you could raise hell, and forming actual parties and traditions was a fetish and a pain in the ass. Trump’s third presidential outing, his longest and most jazz-inflected performance of “Dark Star” to date, is still viable in the polls — it is neck and neck in the swing state, decimals of points in it — because he represents to some that energy and promise. The Harris-Walz Democrats’ promise to progressives, who now form the ruling elite, is the imposition of order.
In 1968, the yippies elevated a pig — Pigasus — and nominated it for president. In 2008, the nascent Tea Party was formed around “Porculus” protest, at Obama’s new deficit (and not Bush’s old one), in which a pig (often a tofu one) was spit roast before idiots marched around Dunkin’ Donuts car parks in tricorn hats muttering, “Who Is John Galt?”
The current convention is a riposte to that spirit, an affirmation by the establishment left that “nothing ever happens” or should be allowed to. It expresses the mainstream progressive left’s fondest hope in our era: that politics should be replaced by administration. Nothing ever happens but something sometimes does. In any case, on exhibition now are two ideas of what politics and government should be, and we’ll see how they go up against each other in the months to come.
The bacon is bringing it all back home.
Are the left right to embrace Kamala Harris? Can she beat Donald Trump? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
