DNC

 

 

The highlight of the Democratic National Convention for me so far, has been seeing Aliyana Koch-Manzur, a 2024 graduate of Phillips Exeter, and a student in my class, American Politics and Public Policy, announce the NH delegation's vote count for president.

 

The most insightful analysis of the convention that I've read so far has been Franklin Foer's in the Atlantic: "Kamala Harris Settles the Biggest Fight in the Democratic Party."  Since the rise of Trump, Foer argues, Democrats have been vacillating between two possible ways of responding to the rise of the populist anti-establishment mood: "the spirit of Occupy Wall Street or that of Black Lives Matter."  

 

Or, more to the point, class poltics versus identity politics.  Identitarians seemed to be winning, first with Hillary Clinton's defeat of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. Then in 2020, Sanders made appeals to various identity groups in his second bid for the nomination, and after the killing of George Floyd, the Left came under the spell of race-ID gurus Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi.  

 

Foer's analysis of this week's DNC, however, suggests that the Sanders of 2016 has won over the Democratic Party after all. Harris's campaign, he writes, "is far more economically populist than that of any other Democratic nominee in recent history."

Here's a link to the article, but you need a subscription, so here's a more extended excerpt: 

Based on the initial evidence, Harris better understands the political necessity of populating her economic narratives with bad guys.

This understanding has been on display at the convention. Her surrogates have portrayed her as the implacable enemy of corporate greed. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described her as a “woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life.” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a figure associated with the economic center, promised that a Harris administration would continue to break up monopolies.

Whereas Clinton and Obama seemed to choke when paying obligatory obeisance to the labor movement, Harris’s convention has felt like a union hall. In prime time, United Auto Worker President Shawn Fain strutted across the dais in a Trump is a Scab T-shirt. Fist raised in the air, he bellowed, “Which side are you on?” Fain wasn’t an outlier.  

To that I would add that VP candidate Tim Walz in his Wednesday night speech spoke of making health care and housing a "human right," which sounded like Bernie Sanders to me. 

The following passage reflects the analysis of Dem-Party class-politics advocates John Judis and Ruy Teixiera in their recent book, Where have all the Democrats Gone?

The emphasis on populism is also a response to the failure of the emerging Democratic majority to, well, emerge. Despite the party’s embrace of criminal-justice reform and its opposition to mass deportation, its share of the Black and Latino vote has diminished.

The phrase "Emerging Democratic Majority," was the title of Judis and Teixeira's 2002 book (and the first thing that comes up on a Google of that phrase). Their latest book explains the failure of the prediction embedded in that title. 

Teixeira himself is doubtful of Foer's thesis, calling the Harris campaign's outreach to working class voters mild-mannered, scattershot, "Brahmin populism," and citing polls showing Harris and Walz doing well with college educated voters but running way behind Trump (and Biden in 2020) among voters without college degrees. 

He also suggests that Harris's selection of Walz shows that she is not serious about backing away from the party's identity politics.  Teixeira quotes a conservative observer: "There is nary an enthusiasm of contemporary cultural progressivism that he has not indulged to the hilt." 

Teixeira's article is freely available.