The price of joy

The word from Chicago is that everyone is happy. The union guys are happy. The undecideds are happy. Oprah is extremely happy. Tim Walz was so happy he ran around on stage after Harris’s acceptance speech and played with the balloons. Everyone was happy, except for Donald Trump, who got so mad he rage-posted, then called into at least two different right-wing talk shows to seethe and mash the buttons on his phone.

But one key group was left out. The Uncommitted Movement, the antiwar, pro-Palestinian action that placed second to Joe Biden in this spring’s discarded primaries, had spent weeks trying to move the convention, both in matters of symbol and substance, against the U.S.-armed slaughter in Gaza. In the end, their efforts had boiled down to one extremely achievable ask: to give a Palestinian-American — any Palestinian-American — or a doctor who had witnessed the suffering at the hands of the Israeli military a brief speaking slot, at any time during the four-day-long national pep rally.

A speaking spot would have fit right in with many of the themes of the night — of racial and class justice, and that Harris’s life and legal career has been devoted to “protecting the vulnerable and giving the victims a voice,” as her longtime friend and fellow prosecutor Amy Resner said on the main stage. And indeed, the DNC had collaborated with the Uncommitted delegates to an extent — allowing them to host a panel on Palestinian human rights on the sidelines of the convention, at which hundreds of Harris delegates repeatedly signed up to support a ceasefire in Gaza.

But that event was on the sidelines, far from the view of the public, or even the vast majority of convention attendees in Chicago. Allowing someone to speak, however briefly, on the main stage would have been a clear sign that the national party was taking the lives and views of hundreds of thousands of Arab-American and antiwar voters — voters who could make the difference in Michigan, Georgia, and other must-win state — seriously. That is perhaps why the uncommitted delegates, who might have otherwise demanded something more substantive — like a pledge for an arms embargo — were prepared to content themselves with a symbolic act.

Support for this fairly minor request grew steadily throughout the week, echoed by Democratic Party stalwarts from the United Auto Workers to at least 11 members of Congress to Mandy Patinkin. Alana Zeitchik, an Israeli-American writer who had six members of her family kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, posted: “a Palestinian American voice deserves to be heard on that stage.” In a last-ditch effort, one of the proposed speakers, Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman pre-published her speech at Mother Jones on Thursday morning: an emphatic, almost aggressively non-confrontational endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket that does not even mention the State of Israel or the Israeli military, calls for the freeing of both Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and avoids all potentially “divisive” terms like ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Right up until prime time yesterday, the movement and its allies held out hope. As filler block after filler block passed — DJ breaks, a drum line, Adam Kinzinger — I felt certain the party would relent. Maybe this was all just a show, I thought; a way of emphasizing that what would have been an exceedingly symbolic gesture had indeed come at some internal political cost.

But the word that had come down on Wednesday turned out to be final. No Palestinian would be allowed to speak. The defenses from the right and center were both quick and predictable: A Palestinian would hash the joyful vibe; they’d be too divisive; they would, as Matt Yglesias put it, “shatter the narrative and ruin the pro-Kamala atmosphere.”

Nevermind, that at least one of the proposed speeches did nothing of the kind. Nevermind that plenty of time was found for equally tough, depressing, but necessary topics, from the horrific consequences of the Republicans’ stripping of reproductive rights to fraud, authoritarianism, and a harrowing reminder of the violence and danger to democracy posed by Trump and his followers on January 6. Nevermind, too, that there was already a tearful presentation on the horrors of October 7, from the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American veteran of the IDF who is still being held hostage in Gaza — a presentation that the Uncommitted delegates made sure to attend in solidarity with the families of Israeli hostages, by the way.

And the objection that this would have encouraged the antiwar and pro-Palestinian protesters arrayed outside the United Center — masses whom the Democrats had feared for months might reprise or provoke the police riot that crippled the Democrats’ chances at that historic Chicago convention in 1968 — is belied by the celebrations of past protest movements from the convention floor and stage: from the thousands of women wearing white in honor of the lawbreaking, sometimes violent suffragettes to the frequent invocations of the civil rights movement of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

The refusal to platform a Palestinian speaker echoes nothing so much as the refusal, on orders of then-President and candidate Lyndon Johnson, of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, under the leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer, at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, sixty years ago this month. It similarly ignores the substantive divide between the protesters outside the convention and the uncommitted delegates inside — the fact that the latter are trying to work within and in coalition with the institutional Democratic Party.

While some, like some in the MFDP, will likely continue to work for Harris’ election this fall, the refusal to give the reformers even a token platform on the main stage fuels arguments that the party, and perhaps the entire political system as it stands, is too hopelessly corrupted to work with, and thus must be challenged or overthrown. Already at least one pro-Harris Muslim organization has announced its intention to disband. Others may follow.

The reasons for the refusal we can only speculate on at the moment; the DNC isn’t making any official statements or responding to requests for comment. The pro-Palestinian contingent does not know either. “I truly have no idea why they said no. None of us do,” Rep. Romman told me today.

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