The power demonstrated at the DNC

I'm loving the Dem fiesta in Chicago. How could I not?

And trying to think about what this happy turn toward looking forward might mean.

Lester Spence is a professor of political science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins. He looks at our society and polity from within a thoughtfully critical frame: 

Over the past 40-50 years we’ve seen a sharp rise in income inequality. Rather than being a natural function of cultural capital or education, with some populations being better able to adapt to post-industrial America than others, this sharp rise is a function of politics, of public policy that reduces the scale and scope of the US welfare state, of political rules that simultaneously increase the mobility and power of capital and reduce the power of labor to organize, and of political rhetoric that lauds the entrepreneur over the citizen. In short, the rise is the result of the neoliberal turn. And during this period, not only has inequality within black communities increased, there’s more inequality within black communities than there is between black and non-black ones.

In his newsletter The Counterpublic Papers, he wrestles with this happy, strange moment: 

... this election is about defeating Trump, but [also] about establishing better democratic conditions going forward.

If we don’t have two fully functioning parties, then we need to create the conditions that ensure the one functioning party continues to win at the federal level, to ensure the one functioning party wins at the state level, and that the one functioning party institutes policies that promote and extend democratic practice. Nominating Harris was the best way to create these conditions. It sends a signal that they trust Harris and the population she’s thought to represent. Further it pushes people like us past spectatorship and into something a bit more robust. This increased responsiveness has the potential to transform the party. Perhaps not radically…but just enough.

• • •

One of the ... aspects of the Harris candidacy pundits and scholars are likely to examine to bits in the future is how quick the rollout was. Her support among black women and men have to be accounted for here. Within days of Biden dropping out, a group of black women who’d already been doing standard political organizing held a zoom call that topped out at somewhere around 44,000 participants—so many that Zoom had to stretch its technical capacities to enable the call. The women were able to raise somewhere around $1 million dollars. Less than 24 hours later a group of black men held a similar event, organized by media personality/journalist Roland Martin. Approximately 50,000 people signed up for that call and raised around the same amount. (I was on that call, and even though I opposed Harris in 2020 I wrote a check.)

We can and should read this as an example of black elites mobilizing to ensure that Harris wasn’t discarded (and we don’t have to look hard to see examples of this—the same day women met on Zoom, Aaron Sorkin suggested in an NYT op-ed that the Democratic Party nominate Mitt Romney), with black men following suit. ...

The delightful DNC is about pulling together the many strands of buried hope and aspiration among us. This sort of coalition can be fragile, but it is immensely powerful in its moment.