DNC Debrief

DNC Debrief

C. Philip Mills

4 November 2024

When the RNC comes to town everything turns into a Republican-themed anime-con. When the DNC comes to town everything turns into a police state.

I was at the DNC as a videographer for Sublation’s forthcoming documentary on this year’s election, so I got to experience a very wide swath of the entire week’s goings-ons.

A couple weeks prior to the convention, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Police Superintendent Larry Snelling gave a press conference laying out how the city was preparing for the DNC. Comparisons were already being made to 1968, where Mayor Daley’s CPD famously cracked down hard on protesters. In the midst of a failing mayoralship, Johnson and company wanted to avoid such a public relations fiasco at all costs. A zone around the convention in which every vehicle would be subject to a check was instated, including for Chicago residents within this zone. Public transit was diverted away from the area around the United Center, and police presence was amplified, while protest zones were marginalized and kept away from anything important.

The primary zone for protest was Union Park. The mood here was boring, gloomy, self-deluding, nihilistic. On Monday, all the protesters were making comparisons to '68. By Thursday, no one was. Few people were arrested the whole week, and the protesters failed to receive the violence from the state they felt they needed to show the worthiness of their cause. At the end of the week, Brandon Johnson held a press conference, where in a pleasantly surprised tone he celebrated the success of the convention and the CPD’s work. To quote Johnson, “if the 1968 convention went down as an example of police brutality, then the 2024 convention will go down as an example of constitutional policing.” Suffice to say this year is no '68.

At the protests, everyone we interviewed was asked “why protest the DNC?” to which there was a spectrum of responses. Radlibs would be the most honest: “we want to pressure the Democrats.” A second class of protester, not affiliated with any organization, would say to us that the protests would in fact do nothing, but one still had to do something (why?). A third type, sectarians, who circled the protests to scalp straggling malcontents, halfheartedly answered they were against both parties — yet the majority of these organizations would not be seen protesting the RNC, the presumptive types they assume they’ll be recruiting are the would-be Democrats: the radlibs and the nihilists.

On the last day of the DNC, as we were interviewing a member of the CPI (Center for Political Innovation — Caleb Maupin’s outfit), two RFK Jr. buses pulled up alongside the protest. Journalists swarmed it, and a young man burst from a hatch on top of the bus, throwing out t-shirts to the crowd gathered below. Suddenly right in front of the bus, a confrontation broke out between a Leftist and a Newsmax reporter. The Leftist was loudly demanding the journalist to be kicked out, proclaiming “it would be better if you were dead!” Journalists then swarmed this interaction, while the RCA (formerly the IMT) stood awkwardly to the side of the confrontation in the hope that some of the cameras might turn around towards them. At this point the interviewer I was working with remarked that it'd be a funny experiment to give 10 people cameras to run somewhere and see how many reporters followed them.

The aphorism of 'if it bleeds it leads' became very clear over the course of the protests. I noticed a kind of morbid camaraderie among journalists in their mutual pursuit of chasing after whatever is violent or awful, which I noted by the smirks they would shoot me — a fellow cameraman — at any of these moments. They seldom ever focused on the protest itself (as nothing really was happening), instead moving around as a swarm to capture oddities, freakouts, and incidents. There is something heroic about these muckrakers, in that what they do is largely informed by an aesthetic sensibility. If only it wasn’t being deployed by the news media as it currently exists.

Outside the entrance of the DNC was a great variety of live-streaming provocateurs, unusual single-issue protesters, Leftists, Rightists, and fringe micro-celebrities. Here we interviewed and/or met Mike Lindell of MyPillow; a group of protesters who were there to advocate for non-CIA agent US citizens to be included as recipients of free healthcare for Havana Syndrome; an Evangelical pro-Biden Democrat holding up a protest sign reminiscent of the Westboro Baptist Church sans the slurs; a femboy holding a Nazbol flag who in another interviewed confessed to really just wishing there was a respectable Republican back in office a la George W. Bush; PETA (one of the least interesting people we talked to); and a group of Leftists chanting the names of dead Palestinians for hours and hours at the delegates entering the United Center. While I worked the entrance, this chanting and a woman singing R&B oldies who charged me $5 to interview her were the soundtrack.

Ironically however, the most interesting people we talked to might have been the Chicago Firefighters union. They had gathered to protest that they had not received a renewed contract from the city in three years, despite their previous contract having expired. Naïvely, I asked why they didn’t just stop putting out fires for a day, to which they responded they wouldn’t be able to just do that. But it did seem their situation was very dire, they were severely understaffed which had led to a shocking amount of firefighter deaths the past few years, and had pushed many EMTs to quit due to insane overtime requirements. This and a conversation with some United Steelworkers reps put into perspective the relation of many unions to the Democrats. The firefighters were completely subject to and attached to the Democratic government in Chicago — they gathered in the hope some delegates might see them and talk to them, and bring attention to their cause to city officials attending the DNC. Their state was totally hopeless, the best they could do is hope someone sympathetic would walk by and speak well of them inside the DNC. It puts into perspective the disturbing reaction many had to the head of the Teamsters speaking at the RNC. Labor is stuck as one as many constituencies inside the Democratic Party with very little bargaining power and yet when Sean O’Brien speaks at the RNC it’s a “betrayal.” The Teamsters have a lot of bargaining power relative to other unions, but the majority of unionized workers are closer to something like the Chicago firefighters.

Another day, we were assigned to go to an especially boring youth politics forum. This was hosted by UChicago and was purportedly nonpartisan, but after being there for approximately 15 minutes, it was clear that the cult of “future leaders” was the familial worship of the Democrats. Boring talk after boring talk spoke on voter statistics, and it became clear to me that “getting people out to vote,” despite purportedly being a nonpartisan slogan, was really something instigated by Democrat-adjacent administrators. Not because if everyone voted, the Democrats would win — quite the contrary actually. But there is a magnetic belief among Democrats that was unmistakable throughout the entire convention. This belief goes as follows: the Democrat party line is what most people already believe. By voting for the Democrats, one is voting in step with a majority. Republicans believe what they do as a result of some kind of perverted contrarianism against the majority. Therefore if the majority voted, the Democrats would win every time. This is the arch-ideology of the lowest common denominator of Democrats. For the peons on the ground (the intellectual apologists), no lessons have been learned from Trump’s success. The leadership however has learned.

It has been well documented that as of the DNC, the Democratic Party ordered from on high that they are now the party of “Freedom,” and “Joy.” Inside the DNC, every speech reiterated this over and over and yet was met with the same thunderous applause. The convention's beats are carefully choreographed, with assistants bringing in thousands of "Coach Walz" or "Kamala" banners at key moments to be raised during speeches. At one moment during Bill Clinton's speech, with mention of Hillary, all monitors cut to her, I failed to catch her face but caught the outline of a woman in a luminescent black and green pants-suit to which I remarked "she looks like Palpatine" to the interviewer I accompanied. During commercial breaks, the floor of the stadium was flooded with a blue wash from the overhead lights, which would cause the speckle of green and pink and yellow neon colored pants-suits to explode out into ones vision like stars. If you were to look up, you would see a section for journalists on the third and fifth rows, easily identified by a massive nebula of white rectangles: hundreds of LED lights illuminating the multinational swath of reporters.

It is clear that in the evenings of the DNC at the United Center, politics aren't happening. The decisions have all been made prior and everyone has already been subjected to party discipline. That said, I couldn't help but get the feeling that there’s some ways that the Democrats are hardly a party at all. There was little difference between who we met on the third and fifth floors of the United Center than who you would meet there during a Bulls game, only the team changed. These people were just fans. The people in the stands are there to just cheer on the march of the "majority." It was unimaginable to me after experiencing the DNC that it would be a place for debate and open consideration over who the candidate would be. Would a Socialist Party function like this? It’s clear that between the Republicans and Democrats, the Democrats are closer to a disciplined political party per say, but it seems unlikely that a socialist party could thrive with a constituency which had been relegated to the role of a passive consumer. Surely the socialist party would not require everyone in it to be “political producers” per say, but the DNC felt like something of a black box. The results of political decisions spontaneously emerged, and one could divine the decisions that went into to why they did, but it was unclear when or who devised them. The candidate this year was chosen in just such a fashion. Wilhelm Reich famously said that “if the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game… could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be unstoppable,” though the moment in which the fans storm the field following a victory mustn't be forgotten.

Many if not most of Trump’s policies have been co-opted by Kamala’s campaign. The new Democratic line is clearly cutting out the "Left" elements that have been absorbed into the party since 2015. These remaining "Leftists" must either fall in line or be cut off. During the DNC, Hasan, who we interviewed earlier in the day at a protest, was unceremoniously kicked out due to “double booking” of his streaming room, conveniently after he berated the Democrats for their position on Israel-Palestine. Who knows what will happen to these Leftists now that they've been cut from the team. This change (which is also a return) in the Democrats was also registered in another way.

During our time at the very boring future leaders conference, one of these young leaders was particularly interesting to our crew. While we sat outside and shot the shit in a period where we weren't allowed to interview the attendees, a young man and a few other attendees stepped outside for air. He was a handsome red-haired guy from North Dakota who kept this serious expression on his face. We spoke with this group of three for a moment, and we asked them all if they were Democrats — we asked this knowing everyone here were political aspirants for the Democratic party. Yet, to this question he was a little coy. They walked back in for the next event, but once they had a break, we grabbed him for an interview. In the interview, he said he was a Democrat, but kept reiterating about a crisis of values in the country, which caught our attention. After the interview, I asked him if he was a former Republican who left because of Trump, to which he replied, "exactly." But it occurred to me, this was the new face of the Democratic party, and I must say, this guy had a vibe that I can't describe any other way other than "electable." I asked him, "so, are you looking to enter politics after your MA?" to which he replied "no I'm actually going to enlist in the army." I said "oh so you're really serious about politics," and he nodded. I won't be surprised if he's elected for public office in the next 15 years.

After we did our time in the DNC conducting interviews and gathering footage, we left the United Center, and seeing the protesters outside caught me by surprise. Did they not understand how truly marginal they were? Perhaps inside, no politics were happening, but outside, lit up by United Center's thin glow, the Leftist protesters were hard to distinguish from the schizos, pseudo-Nazi trolls, and sycophant Instagram influencers that also crowded the exit with flags, megaphones and cameras. As names of Palestinians were listed over megaphone, I couldn't help but feel as though the small mob outside were just mad they didn’t get an invite. The Left is totally marginal — they are unpolitical. Not just there outside the DNC, but everywhere. Yet there are so many people who are totally outside of the current political establishment who could become involved in some kind of Left project — the firefighters union men who are hostages of but have been abandoned by the Democrats — yet the Left isn’t interested in these people. They’re just interested in being the radical wing of the Democrats.