Policing the Polycrisis 

Even before the first Democrat arrived, the anxiety of another ‘68 covered Chicago like a smog.  Loyal liberals in their cocktail attire fretted that the cries and the strife would deafen the speakers; that the stench of tear gas and bloody police truncheons would sully their politics of joy; that supposed sectarians and their morality plays would be a distraction; that the bellowing ash clouds and pediatric carnage from Gaza would somehow wash onto the shores of Lake Michigan.

Instead, it went off without a hitch. Thousands of protestors exhausted themselves against phalanxes of law enforcement and the sprawling metal fencing surrounding the United Center. The uncommitted delegates—a vocal but ultimately silenced minority seeking an end to the American-armed Israeli slaughter—were quarantined.  

Yet there was something unfamiliar about this iteration of the Democratic Party. The technocrats and their disdainful glances were kept at a distance. School voucher advocates, once a rising faction, had evaporated into ether. Save for a few anti-Trump Republicans, their blatant neoconservative streak had been painted over with a soft embrace of European-style social democracy. The austerity pathology, once the standard of the post-Reagan moment, that had haunted the corridors of the Washington consensus appeared inoculated. These Democrats spoke of “healthcare as a human right,” not simply as a commodity to be tinkered with. Unions were periodically centered in their speeches. 

But then some loathsome cheerleader of the Iraq War would gush over including Leon Panetta, former top dog of the CIA, in the ceremony. One Democrat-aligned sheriff waxed poetic at the thought of having a future Prosecutor-in-Chief. A video surfaced of attendees mocking pro-Palestinian protestors as they listed the names of murdered children. Vice President Kamala Harris asserted herself as a relentless border hawk during the grand finale. 

On a certain level, leading Democrats understood this and it was laid bare at and around the convention. Condemnation of the party’s approach to Gaza—be it through protest or electoral pressure—was not to be taken seriously, only tacitly and tepidly acknowledged.  

This stance was about gearing up for a new chapter in what the economic historian Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis: “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality,” Tooze explained in his inaugural column with the Financial Times.  

In our case, a litany of crises—from the instability of a livable climate and the alienation and anxiety of modern life to the collapse of traditional geopolitical lines, and the pervasive manipulation of key assets like housing—have created the conditions for a more repressive world. One where order in the face of chaos will be paramount. For the Democratic leadership and their affluent donors, this will mean disciplining the political left and leaning on some of the timeless tools of superpowers: border hardware, correctional steel, and geopolitical supremacy. 

On the convention’s first day, I made my way toward the legions of marchers who were gathering in Union Park, which sat just half a mile outside of the United Center. Speculation was that potentially 40,000 protestors would join in the first procession, which would then snake its way along the northern security perimeter. With the end of the Biden campaign, however, the urgency around his genocidal Israeli policy seemed to have diminished turnout with estimates putting the crowds anywhere from 11,000 to 20,000. 

Still, they would not be denied. Wrapped in keffiyehs and brandishing banners embroidered with phrases like “Arms Embargo Now,” the dissenters slowly made their way toward the edge of the United Center. There was a contingent of Hasidic Jews, a multitude of socialist organizations, and Muslim families pushing children in strollers. A solitary, retirement-age leftist had flown solo to the convention from Connecticut. She walked quietly with a hand-made sign that read “Free Gaza.” Media figures, from the popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker to a conservative knockoff of “All Gas No Breaks” stalked the exterior of the crowd for potential content. 

The latter, who told me they were working with Bari Weiss’ anti-woke publication The Free Press, was asking participants if they supported “free gender-affirming care for migrants.”

While the focus was heavily geared toward Gaza, activists drew on the connections between America’s interdisciplinary approach to policing its internal population, its outer edge, and its imperial footholds. “From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go,” one chant went. “From Chicago to Palestine, occupation is a crime!” rang another as the excruciating buzz of a police helicopter hovered over our heads. 

This perspective made connections between this Chicago DNC and 1968 not just unhelpful but misguided. The legacy of the ‘68 brawl was not the problem, but rather the last time the city had hosted the convention, in 1996. 

Though existing in very different contexts—’96 was about rebooting the youthful energy of a smooth-talking incumbent—both instances saw a strong emphasis on policing the periphery of the American empire and its frontiers. It is here where one finds crucial cohesion between the party we know today and the supposedly vanquished conservative wing of the Democratic establishment. 

In between the Macarena and a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” performed by Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray, Bill Clinton’s second convention had been about flexing a tough-on-crime record, reinforcing the border from undesirable migrants, and highlighting the party’s unwavering support for the state of Israel. 

After bragging about allocating “$8 billion in new funding to help states build new prison cells” and “100,000 new police officers on the street,” the 1996 Democratic Party Platform underscored Clinton’s administrative success in constraining the border. 

“We have increased the Border Patrol by over 40 percent; in El Paso, our Border Patrol agents are so close together they can see each other. Last year alone, the Clinton Administration removed thousands of illegal workers from jobs across the country,” the proclamation reads. 

While the 2024 platform did not contain such harsh language or proposals, there was a more conservative tilt as compared to 2020. Gone were calls to create a federal moratorium on the death penalty; the supposedly radical exigency of the George Floyd uprisings had given way to flourishes on how it was the previous regime which had been soft on crime. Flowery language about the transgression of the Trump administration had been replaced with a more “pragmatic” approach to immigration. The Biden presidency, the charter assures us, has always been about securing our Southern border.  

This was to say nothing of the actual record of the Biden-Harris regime, which suggested that the ghosts of the nineties hadn’t exactly been exercised. The president had kept intact Trump-era tactics, like the use of Title 42, that used COVID-19 as a justification for border closures. In Biden’s first year alone, the policy allowed for over a million migrants to be expelled without trial. Programs employed by Biden’s predecessor to expand the use of high-tech migrant enforcement technology—like the use of AI, biometric tracking, and robotic surveillance—continued unabated. And before it could become a source of weakness, the Commander-in-chief enacted what was essentially a freeze on the asylum system. 

On the criminal justice front, where calls for reform had played a significant role in bringing Biden and Harris into office, police shootings and deaths in custody saw significant increases. The same institutions overseeing such failures have now been tasked with criminalizing the unhoused and mentally ill, while the executive branch remained silent. 

Most urgently, the complicity surrounding Gaza was hard to overstate. In the face of innumerable horrors, which has rightly been called genocide by a plethora of international human rights organizations, Biden and Harris have remained steadfast in their commitment to arming the perpetrators. A week before the convention, the administration approved a $20 billion arms sale to Israel—on top of having provided the equivalent of $25 million a day in military aid since October 7th. 

And it seems unlikely that a Harris-Walz administration would break from this continuity. Much like Biden, Harris has been adamant that an arms embargo is not on the table and has weaponized humanitarian language to appease critics. As a candidate, Harris has emphasized her prosecutor background and her support for the draconian, bi-partisan immigration bill—which was contemptuously undermined by Trump—as evidence that she’ll be tough on the border and traffickers. 

“Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border,” a stern, disembodied voice tells viewers in a recent campaign ad. 

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” it concludes. 

These attitudes—especially when intertwined with the circumstances of Gaza—tell us that liberals at the highest levels of power see those attempting to escape the smoldering wreckage birthed by our imperial past and present as, at best, politically inconvenient. At worst, those fleeing either Israeli bombs or the fallout of the American-led economic order are a problem to be dealt with via the cold, calculating hand of the administrative apparatus. 

That’s how the journalist Antony Loewenstein explained it to me. In Lowenstein’s recent book, The Palestine Laboratory, he makes the case that the methods by which Israel has conducted its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank—especially through its advancements in military and surveillance technology—have been exported across the globe. From the United States to India, governments interested in efficiently handling their undesirables have been keen to borrow the tactics and tools tested by Israel. 

“The way I see it is that there is an attempt increasingly to Palestinianize global issues, meaning that the way that Israel deals with Palestinians is to put them in either isolated areas behind high walls, mass surveillance, keeping them almost on life support,” Lowenstein said. 

“[And many] other nations also want to treat and manage their own unwanted populations this way…Even parties on the so-called center-left are increasingly adopting these kinds of policies. They see Israel as a model,” he added. “So to me, the fact that the Democrats in general aren’t just not pushing back, that they’re encouraging these policies is, in a way, shows how they see the migrant issue.” 

But it wasn’t just tired masses and Palestinian sovereignty that was being left to rot at the fringes. Leading up to and throughout the convention, critics of Biden and Harris’ approach to the war in Gaza were consistently ignored, maligned, or silenced and given only figurative tokens of solidarity from the Democratic pulpit. 

Prior to Biden’s exit from the race, a coalition of elected officials, student protestors, and activists had tried everything from sit-ins to organizing the Uncommitted National Movement, which had encouraged hundreds of thousands of voters to submit an “uncommitted” ballot during the Potemkin-esque 2024 Democratic primary.

The goal was to signal—especially in key swing states like Michigan—that a significant portion of the party’s base was unhappy with the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. In response, those within the Democratic nexus refused to engage. Not only were the encampments at college campuses defamed—despite often being led by Jewish students—as anti-Semitic, but congressional members critical of Israel’s war like Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman were unseated in their primaries. Their defeats were due largely to the millions upon millions of dollars that the far-right American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby had funneled into their opponent’s campaigns. 

In both cases, an administration that was called “the most progressive since FDR” remained almost mute. It’s hard not to read such circumstances as an effort by the party to discipline its left flank, whose vocal criticism of issues like Gaza, the border, and mass incarceration are seen not as legitimate concerns but politically disadvantageous. 

This would come to a head during the finale of the convention when after countless days of advocacy, a caucus called Delegates Against Genocide had failed to get a Palestinian speaker atop the dais. Led predominantly by a mix of Jews and Muslims, the delegates had tirelessly fought to bring the ethnic cleansing in Gaza to the forefront. Among them were two delegates and a member of the DNC who had gone so far as to brandish a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech. Their banner was promptly blocked by signs that read “We Heart Joe,” and a member of the trio, a Jewish man named Liano Sharon, was removed from the floor by security. 

On Thursday, as the sky inched towards dusk, I joined a throng of other reporters for the delegate’s impromptu press conference. The event was sandwiched between an entrance to the United Center—its massive digital billboards projecting portraits of Harris and Walz—and the CNN Politico Grill—a pop-up restaurant that I watched Wolf Blitzer calmly saunter into as members of the uncommitted delegation sobbed from grief and exhaustion. 

The assembly had slept on the pavement at this very spot last night, desperate to get Ruwa Romman, a Georgia state representative and the first Palestinian and Muslim to be elected in the state, a chance to address the convention. Before members of the congregation spoke, they stood silently with sleeplessness hanging from their faces. These were not some caricaturistic radicals but astute, devoted leaders of the party in states like Connecticut, Florida, and Michigan.

The delegates voiced their views pragmatically and carefully, each sentence crafted in a way as to not place blame on any one particular figurehead. Yet they were still assertive and clear about the stakes. 

“Here is the scandal: The scandal is that there are forces within Democratic Party leadership who do not want us to talk about Palestinian human rights. But that’s not sustainable,” Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted leader, told us just before Romman shared the speech she would have given had the DNC permitted it. Before her delivery, Romman expressed how about the intentional and sanitized nature of her prose, how she had to temper her anger in the face of such insulting absurdities: Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a vocal anti-abortion advocate, had been given time to speak but not her.  

Then she spoke of her family’s roots in Palestine: Her mother’s family had come from Hebron, and her father’s lineage could be traced to a town called Suba, just outside of Jerusalem. That was where her grandfather—who she called her rock—had come from. (Left unsaid was that the village no longer exists. Its residents were ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.) Romman lamented through tears that her grandfather had since passed and would never return to his home. 

“I wanted to ask him how he found the strength to walk all of those miles decades ago and leave everything behind,” Romman said.

“But in this pain, I’ve also witnessed something profound, a beautiful, multi-faith, multi-racial, and multi-generational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party. For 320 days, we’ve stood together demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike, to reach a cease-fire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety,” she continued.  

“That’s why we are here, members of this Democratic Party, committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world.”

Following the forum, the delegates locked arms and made their way into the United Center. They proceeded to pace the crowded concourse of the stadium as they intonated the phrase “ceasefire now” over and over again. Other convention goers seemed perplexed. Throughout the week I’d spoken with everyday Democrats who claimed they wanted to hear a Palestinian speaker, who believed that backing Israel’s destruction of Gaza was amoral. Yet when faced with the actual politics of the matter, they uncomfortably navigated around the uncommitted like they were a colicky child throwing a public tantrum—not reasonable actors opposing the aiding and abetting of genocide.

Maybe these Democratic acolytes should have paid closer attention. One uncommitted delegate I spoke with, Rev. Dr. Paul McAllister, said he wasn’t entirely sure he’d support Harris. McAllister hailed from the swing state of North Carolina and in between bites of a hotdog and sips of soda told me his vote—and that of his congregation—was not to be taken for granted. 

“The organizations that I’m part of cannot simply cast a vote and expect to see the outcomes that we’re demanding today. We realize that we need to continue to push for a more constructive human rights agenda that is consistent with facts on the ground and history as we know it to be, particularly when it comes to Israel, Palestine, human suffering, ethnic cleansing… immigration and incarceration, and all of these must be lumped together,” McAllister said in a baritone drawl. 

“So I don’t think it’s a fair assessment to say I will vote for Kamala Harris. I’m here to listen to what she’s going to say and give her the opportunity to be responsive to the interests that we have and make my decision based on what I hear directly out of her mouth,” he concluded. 

I left the convention just before Harris’ speech, worn down by the week’s worth of pageantry and protest. Besides, I would have had to watch Harris on a monitor; even halls leading onto the convention floor had been packed with eager onlookers. Rumors circulated that Beyonce would give a surprise performance. Taylor Swift’s private jet had reportedly landed in Fort Wayne, IN. 

As I made my way through the security checkpoints, I chatted up a Democratic media consultant who seemed eager to talk until I told her I was writing about the party’s right-wing turn on Gaza and immigration. Her expression shifted from ecstatic to anxious. I asked her what she made of the party’s denial of a Palestinian speaker. 

For her it was a simple matter of political reality: “The donors would have lost their minds,” she said before clarifying that she personally supported Romman’s effort—then the consultant broke off to find her Uber. 

Exiting out into a maze of police lines and late-night traffic, I passed by the embers of a small, pro-Palestine protest. It was made up of nonpartisan stragglers, their faces hidden behind N-95 masks. They milled about next to anti-abortion cranks with megaphones speaking of redemption through Christ. A 3-foot-tall manifesto crafted out of cardboard and Sharpie leaned against a utility box, warning about the threat of Project 2025. 

As I gazed upon this scene, there was a deep, perplexing hopelessness. Attempting to avoid total despair, I tried to ground myself in the words of Bill Ayers. A week before the convention, I spoke with the famous radical who had spent much of the turbulent Sixties and early Seventies trying to end the Vietnam War. 

Ayers had been present in Chicago during ‘68, and in the face of unspeakable human butchery, he placed his body in front of the imperial buzzsaw. Those implications hung over our conversation, though almost entirely unspoken. But when Ayers spoke about his experience protesting the DNC, he spoke not of revolutionary fervor nor of practical strategy. He just offered a simple parable. 

“The night I was arrested on Michigan Avenue…I was bloodied, I was beaten up. I was thrown in a police wagon and on my way to Cook County jail with other bloody, beaten-up young people. I felt ecstatic,” Ayers said. 

“I felt freedom like I never felt freedom. And the paradox is here: I was going to the nasty Cook County Jail in a police wagon, but I felt free. Why did I feel free? I had named the opposition to freedom, and I had fought against it. That makes you free.”