Chicago’s DNC: a pulsating rave where the ecstasy is a vision of MAGA-free America

CHICAGO — It was somewhere before DJ Cassidy rocked the house at 118 beats per minute for a presidential roll call so loud and boisterous that famed Chicago law-and-order boss Richard J. Daley was probably spinning in his grave, and before Atlanta hip-hop star Lil Jon bounced down the arena stairs chanting “We’re not going back” to celebrate Georgia’s vote for Kamala Harris, when I saw a natural high of ecstasy take hold on the floor of the United Center.

The Democrats who’d descended on this heartland metropolis to pick their president couldn’t sit still. The California delegates with the best seats at 2024’s Democratic National Convention were swaying back and forth and screaming incomprehensively at the Kansas contingent wearing Chiefs-style football jerseys all numbered “24” — presumably relitigating Super Bowl LVIII. Nearby, Wisconsin delegates, all wearing cheeseheads, looked on with amusement. Then the lights dimmed, and thousands of glow-light wristbands flashed a neon red, white, or blue.

Stripped of any meaningful political purpose, America’s political conventions have become the nation’s vibe checks. A month ago and just 92 miles north of here, at Donald Trump’s Republican confab, I witnessed a tent revival where a deified Trump with right-ear stigmata absorbed fictional testimonials and peddled his quack political patent medicine.

Since then, the political landscape has been hit by the neutron bomb of Harris replacing President Joe Biden. As DJ Cassidy’s roll call segued Tuesday night from “Lose Yourself” for Eminem’s Michigan to “Kiss” for Prince’s Minnesota and a political party where party trumped politics and screamed and swayed, it felt less like a basketball arena and more like an old abandoned warehouse on the West Side, swept up in rapture and fearing only the fire marshal.

The DNC had become a rave, and the partygoers were only hoping they wouldn’t crash before November.

Moments after the roll call, Washington state delegate Jen Carter, a 47-year-old hospital commissioner, was still beaming more brightly than the glitter on her Statue of Liberty getup. “It’s all about inclusion and engagement, and that’s what I loved,” she told me. “I loved hearing country music songs, I loved hearing some hip-hop, and I love classic rock because we have a big tent, and we do want to attract everyone. We did lean toward younger music, and that’s who need to engage.”

Carter also told me her version of what every DNC attendee said about why Democrats in Chicago aren’t just upbeat but downright giddy: Their admiration for Biden’s July decision to pass the torch to his vice president, and the lightning-bolt vibe shift among young voters and other parts of the Democratic base who are jacked for Harris after tuning out the 81-year-old president. The reversal of fortune in the polls that now mostly show the woman honored in that raucous roll call defeating Trump and the prospect of beating back the far-right extremism that threatens their playlist of American diversity.

But it’s clear that a much bigger prairie fire is burning in Chicago this week.

This is not the Democratic Party I’ve watched since I entered adulthood in the 1980s, blinded by the faux sunrise of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” so terrified of being called “liberal” or getting a bad headline that they ended up like a dog that’s been beat too much, spending the last four decades covering up. I could feel the shock waves of the vibe shift from the convention floor Tuesday night as I watched the star speaker, former first lady Michelle Obama, who’d famously defined the old ways when she declared that “when they go low, we go high.”

But just like the Eagles prove every Sunday with their trademarked “tush push,” you don’t drive back your opponent unless you get just as low off the line of scrimmage. Obama paid brief lip service to civility before a “crackback block” on Trump’s racism that had caused the GOP cult leader to once claim her husband was not an American.

“Who’s gonna tell him the job he’s currently seeking might be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” she roared, and the floor of the United Center shook in a way that it hasn’t since Michael Jordan dunked over Karl Malone.

It turns out that replacing Biden with Harris was more than a shrewd political calculation. It was a signal for America’s political abuse victims to finally break free, to replace senatorial decorum with in-your-face memes, to speak their own truth about how Trump, Project 2025, and right-wing extremism have been battering America without worrying about what uptight fact-checkers and the tsk-tsk crowd at the New York Times and the Washington Post will say, and to make their own kind of music.

As the DNC opened, the great writer and social critic Anand Giridharadas captured the stunning new zeitgeist in a piece about the rise of a new Democratic “Brat Pack” that will probably be read by political scientists for years to come as they try to figure out what the heck just happened in the long hot summer of 2024. Giridharadas captures the rise of storytelling to replace dry white papers, a zeal to win the new culture wars from TikTok to Spotify, and a determination that emotional appeals to regular folks aren’t just the province of a fact-free right wing.

He added: “What is happening now, and perhaps reflects the Brat Pack’s way, is an interest in claiming patriotism but making it one’s own, a progressive patriotism for a multiracial democracy that is still in the works, a way of talking about American democracy that doesn’t erase what’s wrong nor skip over all that’s right.”

What strikes me about Chicago is that seeing an escape route from the near-death experience of a frail Biden succumbing to Trump’s wannabe dictatorship has made Democrats not just giddy but more willing to bulldoze anyone who opposes them.

I saw that firsthand at DemPalooza, the DNC’s effort to channel enthusiasm, sign up volunteers, and sell a ton of Kamala swag in a section of downtown’s sprawling McCormick Place that the public can access without credentials. A few hundred were milling around an event that would be hard to imagine if Biden were still the candidate.

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At the Bright Blue Dots merch stand, a woman wearing a “Kickass Kamala” T-shirt directed me to her boss, Joellyn Beckham, the 63-year-old owner from Birmingham, Ala. She came up with the idea for her liberal customers in one of America’s reddest states to put a small blue dot sticker on their cars since vehicles with signs for Democratic candidates were getting keyed, or worse. “People are so thrilled to see somebody on the road and think, ‘Oh my God, I am not alone,’” she told me.

It’s different now, as folks flock to her stand this week to buy pro-Harris or anti-GOP shirts like the one she was wearing: “Make Stupid Embarrassing Again.” She said Democrats want to wade into the mud and fight Trump. “When they go low, we want to go smart-ass, and hopefully we’re filling that need.”

“I just wanted to check it out and be close to the convention — and hoping to get some Kamala merch,” Kendra Corr, a 55-year-old real estate agent from just outside St. Louis, told me after getting her photo next to a Harris cutout. She was in Chicago to drop her daughter off at college and stopped at DemPalooza on a whim. But she succinctly nailed the prevailing mood here. “After the last eight years now we were struck with Trump, I just feel like we’re finally coming out of the dark. If we can beat him this time, maybe he will go away, and we can close that door …”

We are watching America finally, belatedly, catch up with the rest of the world. Just months ago, a seemingly hopeless Democratic Party limping under the weight of gerontocracy and its long legacy of fear seemed to be watching helplessly as our developed allies like Germany and especially France rose up against right-wing populism and xenophobia — putting aside leftist squabbling and marching in the streets to prevent extremists taking power.

It turns out that millions of repressed Americans were dying inside to make their own statement for a kind of freedom that values diversity, a sleeper cell waiting to be activated. Then Harris bounced on stage with Beyoncé’s “Freedom” blaring, with a vocabulary that spoke to generations born long after Reagan waved farewell.

You know who really hates this? Well, Republicans, of course; they have been caught flat-footed by the Great Vibe Shift of 2024 — as evidenced by Trump’s joyless and nonsensical monologues about bread buyers getting raped or murdered, and turnouts for JD Vance that are counted in the dozens. But even more freaked out seem the nattering nabobs of the mainstream media and the fact-checking industrial complex, who can’t handle liberals talking about how it really feels to be an American today.

It’s been stunning to watch the Washington Post or the hopelessly tired FactCheck.org nitpick Democratic statements from the United Center podium while pretending Trump is a serious candidate and not a serial liar who tries to escape the political consequences of what he says by pretending he didn’t mean it.

The most ridiculous case was when the Post’s fact-checker tried to ding a DNC video that showed Trump’s infamous 2016 statement that there should be punishment for women getting an abortion — labeling a clip of what he actually said as “mostly false” because Trump’s panicked aides forced him to walk it back. The bigger reality that Trump and his U.S. Supreme Court picks have seriously curbed the reproductive rights of women is above the pay grade of the lowly fact-checker, apparently.

You’re going to see a lot of nonsense like this over the next seven-plus weeks. The elite Beltway media is used to dictating the terms of America’s political debate — usually badgering Democrats to move to the center-right — and clearly cannot handle this new power dynamic. That’s not surprising, but here’s what is: Democrats, from Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, down to the rank and file, no longer care what the New York Times picks nits about. In a remarkable change from Trump’s 2016 victory, it’s now the Democrats who want to be taken seriously but not literally.

It sure looks like a winning formula, but like an actual rave, ecstasy — whether human or manufactured — is a heckuva drug that can paper over problems.

The efforts by Democratic leaders to sweep dissent over U.S. weapons aid to Israel off your TV screen may be offending some young and gettable voters. Harris may be smart not to drown under policy white papers, but still owes voters more info on what she’ll actually do on key issues like education or the environment. The exuberance here isn’t irrational, but Democrats have to remember that Trump’s defense of ancient hierarchies still gets him nearly half the electorate. Obama’s attacks on Trump were secondary to her main message that Democrats can still lose in the fall if the people listening don’t “Do something!”

They insist they will. ”I’m just excited about everything now … I’ve been waiting for a woman president my whole life, it feels like,” said Amy Pritchard, 57, who runs a political staffing firm in Boston and Washington, D.C., and who wouldn’t let a recently broken leg stop her from attending her ninth DNC. But it’s also more than that. “Look, the threats that we have, the opposition we have, hasn’t changed at all. The stakes haven’t changed. But the opportunity for us to change is really different from a month ago.”

A lot will change, and a lot will happen this fall, but right now, I wouldn’t bet against the party that’s dancing in the aisles. My political advice for the Democrats is to rave on — it’s a crazy feeling.

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