In Chicago, Dems redefined what it means to be American, then claimed it

CHICAGO — With all eyes fixed on the stage at the United Center, Kamala Harris was accepting her historic presidential nomination from the Democratic Party with a forceful if somewhat familiar denunciation of her Republican rival and his dictatorial plans, asking, “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails!” Meanwhile, from the cheap seats near the rafters in Section 318, I watched as volunteers snaked through the packed convention floor with stealthy precision to make sure large American flags were planted in all the right places.

Moments later, those flags were fanning the last and strongest waves of euphoria at an unforgettable Democratic National Convention, as the vice president pivoted toward defining American freedom as the right to make family choices, breathe clean air, or cast a ballot, and she vowed to defend those rights through strength. The Democratic delegates kept chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” — as if they were watching Steph Curry draining three-pointers against France in this cavernous basketball arena instead of an acceptance speech — as Harris staked her claim to the red, white, and blue.

“It is now our turn,” Harris declared, “to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish, and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American!”

It took four days, a lot of building blocks, and a convention that was truly like no other for Harris and 4,695 delegates to get to this place where the Democratic nominee could make such a proclamation. Although the DNC hit all the necessary marks — introducing the 59-year-old Harris to casual voters who haven’t been paying attention, with a bold-sounding but vague agenda for an “opportunity economy” — the real game here in Chicago was much bigger.

The political party that’s been battered and bloodied in America’s culture wars since the end of the 1960s by not even really knowing how to fight them finally decided to stop worrying about churning out policy papers and pleasing newspaper nitpickers, and instead start playing to win — and on their terms. Backed by a pulsating soundtrack that jumped from the soul of Stevie Wonder to Lil Jon’s hip-hop to the Texas Americana of The Chicks, Democrats in Chicago successfully argued that their culture — a middle class full of hardworking Black and brown folks and strong women, seeking only the freedom to make their own life choices — is America’s culture. And that fighting for things like reproductive rights or against climate change should not be pigeonholed as progressive but embraced as patriotic.

What took them so long?! Ever since Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and their heirs started waving the bloody shirt of the 1960s, and portraying that generation’s fight for personal liberty — for women’s liberation, for LGBTQ rights, even Earth Day — as strange and un-American, Democrats have tried to pretend that politics was still about politics, and not about culture. It led to this weird dichotomy where progressive culture ruled in the free markets of Hollywood or the Billboard charts, yet Democrats struggled to fight to defend it at the ballot box.

Four days in Chicago changed everything. The key pivot came Tuesday night, when Barack and especially Michelle Obama — icons of the new post-’60s America who’d nevertheless refused to fight the culture wars by not “going low” — shifted gears to not just attack Trump, but do so in the muck where he resides, with a jibe about “Black jobs” and even a thinly-veiled attack on his manhood.

It contrasted sharply with the archaic tone of Monday’s not-ready-for-prime-time address by President Joe Biden, who showed why the Democrats’ old message that Trump is a threat to American democracy — and he is — was nonetheless falling flat. It’s been up to Harris and her inspired running mate selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to make the more cultural, less political point that the strange obsessions of Trump’s MAGA movement — like his running mate Sen. JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” — are what’s actually un-American in 2024.

It turns out MAGA Americans aren’t too scared by the political threat of dictatorship, but they are mortified by the cultural embarrassment of being called “weird.” Who knew?

On Thursday night, as hopeful onlookers fought for seats in the nosebleed sections of the United Center for a chance to witness history, Harris stuck the landing. Her perfectly timed, sometimes emotional, but often forceful 45-minute speech was almost as remarkable for what it wasn’t as for what it was. Eight years earlier, Hillary Clinton took to the DNC podium in Philadelphia as a vision in white, a full-throated embrace of electing the first female president as a fulfillment of her suffragette forerunners.

Harris walked out as the un-Hillary, making a political fashion statement in the darkness of her navy, 1980s throwback business suit. Rather than challenge America to imagine the symbolic power of electing a female president, Harris ended her speech by asking listeners to see how tough this particular woman could be as POTUS, with an aggressive riff that promised “I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.”

» READ MORE: Chicago’s DNC: a pulsating rave where the ecstasy is a vision of MAGA-free America | Will Bunch

A space alien reading the written transcript of her acceptance speech would have zero hint that the speaker was threatening to shatter precedent as America’s first female president, the first woman of color, and the first South Asian. Harris succeeded at her mission of liberating Democrats from the knock that they’ve become a mere vessel for “identity politics,” that instead it’s our shared identity as Americans that can allow a Black and Indian American daughter of a working single mom to reach for the very top.

Who gets to wave those American flags? In the race against a demagogue who outrageously claimed immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States, Harris went long on the story of her upbringing by academic scientist Shyamala Gopalan to show that her immigrant values of hard work and stressing education were as middle-class American as apple pie, even if the kitchen smelled of curry powder and cumin.

In the same vein, she continued to reclaim the notion of liberty from the party that wants to ban books and obsesses over school bathrooms. She warned that “our fundamental freedoms are at stake” and, describing Trump’s second-term agenda, said Republicans want “to pull our country back to the past. But America, we are not going back. We are not going back. We are not going back.”

“We’re not going back!” the DNC crowd thundered back. It’s the political chant historians will long remember from 2024 and the Harris campaign, and yet it also seems misunderstood. It might sound like a vow to keep Trump out of the White House a second time — and it is — but what it really expresses is a fervent desire to lock in the cultural gains of the 1960s and ‘70s, when the New Left’s radical ideas about individual freedom and authenticity empowered Americans who’d once been on the fringe.

Democrats may not want to go back to 2020, but the real passion is for not going back to 1959.

And yet, the messages in Chicago could be jarring, even discordant. The tightrope walk of this progressive patriotism meant hailing the power of immigrants while promising a clampdown on new immigration. I’m not sure how the moving and emotional appearance by four of the former “Central Park Five” — jailed and much later exonerated of a horrific 1989 Manhattan rape after forced confessions from New York detectives — jibed with a speech minutes later by Flint, Mich.’s uniformed sheriff who won thunderous applause by proclaiming, “Crime is down and police funding is up!” Harris’ tough-gal talk on foreign policy included a boast that America will have “the most lethal” military in the world — probably not a comfort to families in Afghanistan and elsewhere victimized by a history of U.S. drone strikes on civilians.

The failure to listen to the 29 uncommitted, pro-Palestinian delegates and allow a brief speech by a Palestinian American Democrat, or perhaps a physician about the horrific humanitarian crisis in Gaza — which would have been well-received by delegates who cheered wildly when Harris herself envisioned that “the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination” — was this DNC’s one unforced error. It could haunt Harris in a tight race if even a sliver of young voters or Arab Americans are disaffected. Team Harris’ message discipline is remarkable, but is that a feature or a bug?

But this week such doubts were largely drowned in the rapture that washed over the United Center, as Democrats found the notion that their ideas about freedom are the true American patriotism to be not just a political strategy, but wildly liberating.

While a suddenly lost GOP was scrambling around the Rust Belt babbling about everything from doughnuts to nonexistent crime sprees, Kamala Harris and the Democrats were capturing the flag.

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