Behind Kamala Harris’s megawatt smile at the convention, I saw a ruthless machine at work

The thin blue line suddenly got a lot thicker. The Democratic Party is all that stands between the world and the triumph of autocracy in the United States. Just a month ago, it seemed a slim and fraying thread. Last week in Chicago, it felt like an electrified fence.
Donald Trump’s fans chant “Build the Wall”. Maybe his enemies have just done that – erected a strong enough barrier along the border between democracy and authoritarianism.
I spent last week at the Democratic National Convention, covering it for the New York Review of Books. It was like diving into an ocean of euphoria. The vast United Centre rocked as it must have done when it was Michael Jordan’s home turf or when U2 were playing in it.
At times, you had to remind yourself that this was not just a great game or a spectacular show. It was a key moment in democracy’s struggle to survive in the 21st century. The disjunction between the almost unalloyed joy of the occasion and the immense seriousness of what is at stake was, at times, quite vertiginous.
The energy was the rapture of reprieve. This is a party that was locked in paralysis throughout the first half of a crucial election year. It was sitting quietly in the corner, reading the chronicle of a death foretold – the coming demise being that of the American republic.
Even as Trump was openly using Nazi rhetoric about immigrants poisoning the blood line, even as his allies were publishing their plans to carpet bomb the rights of women and workers, build concentration camps for “illegal” migrants and replace the civil service with loyal apparatchiks, Democrats could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. They could not say what Joe Biden, on Monday night, finally said out loud: “I’m too old to stay as president”.
But history moves in mysterious ways. If Biden had not pushed for an unusually early debate with Trump in June, if Trump had not accepted that challenge, if Biden’s meltdown had not been so total, what would Chicago have been like last week? A gallery of rictus grins and brave faces, falsely frenetic speakers shouting about how Biden was going to win in November while they, and their audience, knew he wasn’t.
What can be said for the Democrats, though, is that they have generated an equal and opposite reaction to their own culpable inertia. The last month, after Biden agreed not to run again, has been an extraordinary example of what it means to seize the day. What I saw at the convention was a ruthlessly efficient display of single-mindedness. Behind the relentless drumbeat of optimism, behind Kamala Harris’s megawatt smile and Tim Walz’s avuncular charm, there is a ferocious resolve.
This is monomania. Nothing – and nobody – will be allowed to get in the way of the one, holy and apostolic mission: beating Trump. There must be no deviation or distraction. It was obvious in the convention that this is not a top-down command. It is the almost universal mood.
Such all-embracing unanimity generates ecstasy but is not always pretty to watch. For it means, in effect, defining the horrors of Gaza as an unwelcome distraction. Protesters reading the names of dead children were kept well out of shouting distance of the arena. Tiny protests from the convention floor were silenced – not by heavies but by fellow delegates.
No pro-Palestinian speaker was allowed on the main platform. Even more strikingly, critics of Israel’s actions such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez kept those criticisms in check, airing them briefly and without too much deviation from the official line, which is that Gazans are to be offered sympathy but nothing more.
Ironically, the Democrats’ overwhelming unity of purpose has made them, at least in this respect, much more like the Republicans. They are nothing like Trump’s cult of personality – Harris shared the limelight with (and, rhetorically at least, was outshone by) stars such as Michelle and Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Trump would never do that.
But there was, in Chicago, a parallel show of unquestioning loyalty. The tribal dynamic is driving the Blues as much as the Reds. The rallying of the troops often felt literal – a parade of speakers brandished their military records and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, both orchestrated and spontaneous, punctuated each night’s performances.
And yet, they do have to win. And win with a black woman. Which means triumphing over forces of racism and misogyny that have been built up over centuries of American and human history.
Racism and misogyny are in a funny place in contemporary culture. Openly expressed, they alienate more voters than they galvanise. We’ve seen this already – Trump’s attempt to revive against Harris the Birther strategy he tried to deploy against Obama (“I wonder if they knew where she comes from”); JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” – put off swing voters.
What, though, about the less open substratum of prejudice? How deep does it go? I got the feeling in Chicago that nobody really knows. Nor do they quite know where it lies. If it’s contained within the existing Trump territory, it will not matter to the election. But if it stops, say, enough white working-class men in Michigan or Wisconsin from following the urgings of their labour unions to vote for Harris, it could matter a great deal.
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So: eyes on the prize. This is a brutal fight and it will get ever nastier as Trump’s panic becomes more and more hysterical. His only strategy will be to delegitimise Harris, not only as a person, but as a kind of person. Her type cannot be American. Which means, of course, that most actual Americans (who fail to be straight, white Christian men) are not American either.
It would be nice if, in the face of this threat to deny so many people their right to belong, there were room for more openness. But in a defensive wall, gaps that let in light are also potentially fatal vulnerabilities.