Inside the arena on Monday, Aug. 19, the star of the show made a surprise appearance, wearing a custom Chloe suit with a crisp lavalier blouse that retails for a cool $1,490 at Bergdorf Goodman. Just as brides are supposed to be the last member of a wedding party to be seen at the altar, presidential nominees usually don't show up to accept their party's nominations until the final night of the convention.
But for Vice President Kamala Harris , the party threw out the playbook. She appeared onstage in Chicago on the first night of the Democratic National Convention and then livestreamed in from a barnstormed amphitheater in Milwaukee the following night. The tableau was pristinely produced for television. The crowds in both stadiums were relieved and effusive with their cheers. The first woman, black American, and Asian American to occupy the vice presidency was glowing, looking easily a decade younger than her 59 years.
It was a spectacular showing for the Democratic Party — at least if you didn't tune into the show outside the arena.
While the party elders were producing their perfect picture of Harris, bringer of joy, thousands of protesters marched joylessly with Palestinian flags, posters of hammers and sickles and machine guns, and caricatures of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that would make the cartoonists at Der Stürmer blush. They marched from their soundstage at Union Park to their city-sanctioned "inflection point" at Park No. 578. At the fence, fewer than 800 feet away from the United Center on the night that the sitting president of the United States was set to speak, and barely a month after the former president was nearly assassinated at a rally, the barbarians broke through the gates.
Flanked with signs saying "F*** KILLER KAMALA" and declaring both Harris and President Joe Biden guilty of committing genocide, the protesters began breaking through the fence. They started slinging water bottles at police officers and trying to charge what maybe amounted to a three-minute walk to the leader of the free world and his anointed successor.
More than a dozen rioters were arrested on the first night of the DNC . Even though Chicago police would go on to fortify the perimeter fencing quietly the next morning, Mayor Brandon Johnson declared the city's performance a success for "protecting the First Amendment." The message was received. By Tuesday night, the number of arrests more than quintupled to 72 as rioters were detained for storming the Israeli Consulate.
The revolution will not be televised. The Democratic stenographers known as the national press corps don't want to shatter the illusion that Harris, a candidate who became a presidential nominee without receiving a single national primary vote in either 2020 or 2024, is the leader the people asked for. But the revolution is still happening. It's not just that the barbarians are at the gates. They have invaded them, both inside the carefully scripted and stage-managed main event and also in the policy platform quietly subsumed by their radical, anti-American ideology.
The grand irony of the revolutionary rage of the rioters is that with the successful palace coup against Biden, they have already won. Outside the Israel litmus test, there isn't too much daylight between the nominal policy preferences of the protesters and the party bosses in the hall.
Outside the arena, the protesters demanded a candidate who takes money away from law enforcement and gives it to environmental projects. Inside the arena, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the socialist who has done more to mainstream "Defund the Police" efforts than any other person in Congress , waxed poetic during a prime-time address about how the Biden-Harris administration has spent a record-shattering $1.6 trillion on its climate agenda. Outside, the protesters demanded legal abortion without any gestational limits and taxpayer funding for the procedure. Inside, the nominally Catholic president who once hewed to the "safe, legal, and rare" position has been steamrolled into handing power to a successor who co-sponsored a bill that would legalize abortion up until birth. Harris is also again campaigning for the presidency on allowing the federal government to fund abortions directly by repealing the Hyde Amendment.
Even on the issue of Israel, after a monthslong public pressure campaign, the distance between Harris and her haters has steadily shrunk. The protesters demanded a ceasefire on the very same day that the president and vice president boasted to conventiongoers that they had convinced the Israeli government to accept one. (Israel, of course, has agreed to a number of deals before that Hamas has gone on to reject, and every successfully negotiated ceasefire since Oct. 7 has been broken at Hamas's instigation, including the original ceasefire that Hamas broke on Oct. 7.)
Compare that to the Democrats' counterparts across the aisle. Although former President Donald Trump has unified the GOP with what can best be described as his dominant cult of personality, Republicans remain deeply divided on questions of policy and principle. These are divisions that Trump himself cannot paper over. There are true believers in protectionism and industrial policy, including Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the GOP vice presidential nominee, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) as well as Trumpworld advisers Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro. Yet there are also laissez-faire Trump loyalists such as Art Laffer and Stephen Moore who are pushing to prioritize deregulation, extending and expanding the 2017 Trump tax cuts, and economic growth in a second term. On the more rancorous abortion debate, there are ardent social conservatives in the party livid at Trump's refusal to back a ban on mifepristone, regulations of in vitro fertilization, or federal gestational abortion limits. Trump and party centrists insist this is something that must be left to the states.
It's hard to find a single major policy area that stokes any such debate within the Democratic Party. Anti-abortion Democrats have been almost entirely run out of the party. Every single Senate Democrat except nearly departed Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) voted for legal abortion without gestational limits, just as barbarians demanded. The Green New Deal didn't die. It's just been broken up into a series of smaller but still multitrillion-dollar spending bills.
In Chicago, the rancor outside the gates is really just about the vibes. The rioters passing out pamphlets that refer to Oct. 7 terrorists as "Palestinian fighters" who "broke out of Gaza" after repeated efforts of "nonviolent resistance" do not want a shiny, happy President Barbie to cackle about coconut trees, luxuriate in being "brat," and pal around with Beyonce. They don't want the "folksy," "Midwest princess" of a schlubby and smiling Tim Walz. One piece of protest literature referred to "Genocide Joe's vice president" as the "top kkkop in California." And the rioters certainly don't want "joy," seeming very angry indeed.
Since the moment Democrats installed Harris at the top of the ticket, the media have dutifully and pathetically stuck to the script. Harris is "black joy" personified , "women's joy" epitomized , "political joy" exemplified . From the eve of the convention through the start of its third day, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, and CBS News used the word "joy" to describe Harris or her campaign 120 times. Since the start of the month, they've done so a staggering 562 times.
Of course, it's a little awkward that after four years of Harris being the top adviser and "last person in the room" with the most powerful man in the world, the rest of us are feeling anything but joyous. A record-shattering influx of more than 10 million illegal immigrants, the worst inflation in 40 years slashing real average wages by 5%, and geopolitical implosion from Ukraine to Gaza have not given ordinary folks much joy.
The stark dissonance was thoroughly illustrated during Tuesday's speech by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Famously wedged out of the 2020 primary in favor of Biden because party elders declared the latter a centrist, Sanders praised Biden and Harris for accomplishing "more than any government from FDR."
Then, in the same breath, Sanders lamented, without a hint of irony, that things have been terrible for ordinary people.
"Too many of our fellow Americans are struggling every day to just get by — to put food on the table, pay the rent, or get the healthcare they need," Sanders said. "Bottom line: We need an economy that works for all of us, not just the greed of the billionaire class. My fellow Americans: While 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, the top 1% have never had it so good."
Of course, we all know why that is. For four years, Biden and Harris deflated the world's reserve currency to fund free college for lesbian dance theory majors, electric bus chargers, and "gender-affirming care" for children and illegal immigrants. It so happens that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and their comrades storming the gates got nearly everything they wanted. It just turns out that everybody else absolutely hates it.
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Outside the gates, the barbarians admit they like what Harris claims to propose — price controls, expanded union protection, antitrust, treating adults like dependent children and treating actual children like prisoners of war, liable to being either terminated in the womb just before birth or mutilated in childhood at the altar of gender ideology — they just don't believe her. The rioter who takes Harris's "equity" to its logical conclusion wants to liberate us from everything that makes America the world's superpower: capitalism, military might, diplomatic credibility, and social norms that suggest you should probably shower before attending an all-day rally with packed crowds. Maybe the keffiyeh clothes and industrial grade N95s should be swapped out for a brassiere or some deodorant.
The Democrats are not in disarray over democracy. There were no 2016-style walkouts over the disenfranchisement of the tens of millions of primary voters who cast their ballots for Biden. The arena has been breached, even if neither the patricians inside nor the barbarian invaders know it.
Tiana Lowe Doescher is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.
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