Artemus Eden looked upon the queue for the Democratic National Convention with pity. In star-spangled shorts and a blue kippah, he stood beside the pavement about a kilometre from the entrance of the United Center in Chicago. “Look at them, queuing like cattle,” he told me. The line stretched back through car parks and past high-security fences. A self-described street healer who thinks the Democrats are a party for the super-rich, Eden walked along the queue with his dog, Travis. “My dog is smarter than all these people put together,” he said. “Some of us aren’t as insane as all of you.”
Those insane enough to brave the two-hour queue included party delegates, trade unionists and corporate guests. They were there to witness the coronation of the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris. There were plenty of foreign politicos: I spied the head and shoulders of the former Nato secretary general George Robertson, while Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s former shadow cabinet member, stood to one side looking daunted by the potential wait. Frank Luntz, the seasoned American pollster, was also in the line. He was emphatic about the Democrats’ chances of victory. He predicted they could win the so-called trifecta – the Senate, the House and the presidency – on 5 November. “The Democrats need to start thinking about what they do if they win everything,” he told me. “A three-way sweep is now conceivable. It is now a real possibility.”
Inside the convention, there was so much buoyant optimism that it felt as if the arena – the home of the Chicago Bulls – floated above the city’s streets. Since Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice-president Harris on 21 July, the Democrats have been celebratory. The convention felt like a victory party for a new president, not a new nominee. Delegates munched popcorn and slurped Coca-Cola throughout proceedings. The Atlanta rapper Lil Jon performed a rendition of “Turn Down for What” as Georgia’s delegates plumped for Harris. Social media influencers were given a special platform within the arena. Tears were shed in the crowd when Michelle Obama took to the stage on Tuesday night. (It could not have been further from the British equivalent: the most exciting moment at the Liberal Democrats’ conference in Bournemouth last year was a floor debate over local government housing targets.)
The high-profile speakers, such as Michelle Obama, were there to entertain, galvanise and inspire. Speeches did not begin until around 6pm each day in order to monopolise prime-time television across the country. These conventions only happen every four years and companies hawked tickets like corporate touts. During the day passes were handed over in hotel lobbies by young men in dark suits to old men in board shorts with a whispered “these will get you in”.
The schedule was tightly controlled. The B-list speakers at the convention were each supervised by a leadership-appointed writer, lest their three-minute speeches veered off message and Donald Trump was transported back into the Oval Office. On Monday 19 August, the first night of the convention, Joe Biden was scheduled to speak at 10.30pm, when many on the east coast would have gone to bed. The cynically minded in the crowd saw this as a snub. His speech – freighted with a pent-up aggression towards Trump that seemed to come from a desire to restore his wounded virility – confirmed to pundits that Biden lacked the tact necessary for an electorate weary of the political belligerence since 2016. As the New York Times’s David Brooks put it, “this was the speech that reminded people why he should not be the nominee”. Biden spoke about democracy like it was 1980. “Democracy has prevailed, democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved,” he said. Such Reaganite rhetoric does not appeal to a generation reared on ten-second dance videos.
Contrast that with Kamala Harris’s speech on Thursday night. She was joyous and light-hearted. She spoke about her mother, who immigrated from India, and her childhood in a middle-class family. She said Trump wants to be an “autocrat” and claimed “fundamental freedoms are at stake” in this election. There were promises to rebuild the middle class, build more houses and protect the right to abortion. It was a safe speech in which the Democratic nominee basked in the love from the crowd inside the arena.
The overall joy of the convention petered out less than a kilometre away from the arena. There, Tarek Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and attorney, was bellowing into a PA system in front of a crowd of more than 2,000 protesters. This is a protest movement that is desperate to make its voice heard at the convention. That the US government has funnelled $12.5bn in military aid to Israel since 7 October while around 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza has provoked fury among many young Americans. Biden has stood steadfast beside Israel. Although Harris has been more critical, she has not called for a halt to arms shipments, to the disappointment of activists. “The Democratic platform believes in ending poverty,” Khalil cried. “Yet 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced, dispossessed, ethnically cleansed from their homes, and some of them more than once, some of them more than twice, some of them more than three times, with US-made weapons and US tax dollars. That smacks of sheer hypocrisy.”
Along the march, the Chicago Police Department lined up their bikes to head off wayward protesters. The police told me they let the activists marshal themselves. When a scuffle arose, they would retreat to let the organisers defuse the situation. The only violence I saw came from one policeman who smacked a protester off a concrete wall with his truncheon. When one belligerent officer shouted at me to scamper and I said I was a journalist, he screamed: “How many times do we have to tell you guys to get on the sidewalk!” The night before, the police arrested three photojournalists at another protest outside the Israeli consulate.
The protesters – different nights brought out different groups, from pro-Palestinians to anarchists to anti-imperialists – wanted to re-enact the anarchy of Chicago’s 1968 Democratic convention when Vice-President Hubert Humphrey became the nominee. Back then, students on the New Left, alongside civil rights activists and the Black Panthers, marched against the Vietnam War. The police responded with wanton violence; an investigation said it constituted a “police riot”. Norman Mailer wrote that the police were “like a chainsaw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of 20 and 30 policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing”.
Fifty-six years later, the comparison was too appealing for the media to ignore: a party leadership out of touch with the activist youth, an incumbent Democratic president who won’t stand, a right-wing Republican poised to win. On 18 August, the New York Post screamed that “100,000 far-left, Israel-hating protesters” would descend on the DNC. The National Guard were on standby and a defunct courtroom was brought back into use in anticipation of processing the detained.
But in an interview with CNN on 18 August, John Pritzker, the billionaire Democrat governor of Illinois and scion of the family behind Hyatt hotels, explained why 2024 differed from 1968. In an unexpectedly honest appraisal of the state’s capacity to control its citizens, he observed that modern technology gave the Chicago Police Department much more power than their truncheon-wielding forebears. Protesters had to contend with a police force so militarised that they make actual armies in other countries blush.
The protests, therefore, were never going to resemble 1968. They succumbed to heightened expectations, lacklustre numbers and political apathy. The Democrats’ left flank, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, stuck to the party line in their own speeches. In 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy was the protesters’ man on the inside who opposed the Vietnam War. In 2024, the protesters had no one. The spectre of Trump snuffed out dissent, forcing the party to come together to ensure he is defeated. The most they got was Biden admitting in his speech that the protesters had “a point” before briskly moving on – the presidential equivalent of a pat on the keffiyeh.
I caught up with Khalil at the front of the march to get his view on the president’s speech. Khalil is a broad-chested, fast-talking attorney and a board member of American Muslims for Palestine, whose baritone voice resonates with or without a megaphone. “To say that we have a point is actually an insult,” he told me, “because we had a point a month ago, we had a point five months ago, we had a point nine months ago.” One marcher wore a Hamas head banner and shouted, “I am Hamas.” When I asked Khalil if he thought sympathy for Hamas, a terrorist group, was helpful to the cause, he said his focus was on “Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism”, not its symptoms.
Inside the United Center the next day, the focus was on the pop star P!NK, who was singing “What About Us”. The demonstrations could not puncture the festivities. Twenty-nine delegates who didn’t support Harris staged a sit-in outside the arena after the campaign refused to let a Palestinian-American speak on stage. The group received support from several members of congress, such as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and, via phone call, Ocasio-Cortez.
The disillusionment and anger of the pro-Palestinian left could haunt the campaign in the weeks ahead. But inside the arena, all was overshadowed by events on the main stage, where Harris reigned supreme. The convention would not let pesky protests taint the woman who would absolve the Democratic Party of inadvertently handing the presidency to an anti-democrat because they almost let an 81-year-old run.
The polls are too tight for the Democrats to take victory for granted. But the party is unified behind making its candidate president and preventing Trump from entering the White House. In 1968, the world was watching a police riot. In 2024, it was watching Kamala Harris.
[See also: The coronation of Kamala Harris]
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