Before the DNC show, democracy broke out on the streets of Chicago

CHICAGO — Many of the folks who began pouring into this city’s Union Park ahead of Monday’s major protest against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza traveled great distances, like the bus convoy that left Minneapolis and drove all night straight to the park, or a man I met who’d come from California … by train. Some were protest veterans like the Code Pink posse, on the march since George W. Bush’s Iraq War, and some were even boomers who’d marched against the Vietnam War.

But Nick Lopez, 23, who graduated from college a year ago and still hasn’t found a job, and who lives here in Chicago, decided to pop on down to the March on the DNC, on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, all by himself. Before he left, he penned his protest message on both sides of a large sign, complaining about both his sizable student debt and the continued backing of leading Democrats for sending weapons to Israel, arguing in his scrawl that the “DNC is unfair.”

“I want to show my solidarity with the Palestinians, and call on the Democratic Party, who say they’re fighting for democracy, to enact an arms embargo,” he told me, expressing moral outrage over the killing in Gaza, but also questioning America’s priorities.

“Bro, I’ve been unemployed since graduation, I have $21,000 in unpaid student loans, and the Democratic Party thinks it can maneuver the money to Israel to buy bombs, but I can’t get a student loan bailout? We can’t get a public works project like before? … They want to put on this grand show, but there’s going to be a vast majority of constituents telling you to do this.”

I spent most of Monday in Union Park, soaking up the August sun and breathing the windswept dirt from the softball infield at a rally with a cheerful vibe that felt more like a Lollapalooza concert than an angry mob, except for the lack of a beach ball to bat around and the Palestinian music that warmed up the crowd.

I listened to speeches and walked with marchers past the endless thin blue line of bike cops. But mainly, I came to meet some of the estimated 5,000 to 6,000 marchers — a good crowd, but far short of the 20,000 some organizers hoped for — and to listen. That’s because ever since this war began with the unconscionable Hamas assault of Oct. 7, demonstrators on college campuses and elsewhere have been portrayed by TV pundits mostly as cartoon characters, mysteriously propelled by nothing more than their alleged antisemitism.

Here’s the deal. The harsh views of many marchers toward Israel and its current leaders as well as the concept of Zionism that led to Israel’s origin in 1948, and the Democrats and their nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris — dubbed “Killer Kamala” on Monday by some chanting protesters — would offend and trouble many voters who don’t agree with them. At the same time, I never saw or heard anything offensive toward Jewish people, or even the words Jew or Jewish mentioned over five hours. Except when several of the attendees told me they were Jewish.

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“I’m a Jewish person, and have been anti-Zionist my whole life — as soon as I found out what it was,” said Ly Baumgardt, a 23-year-old activist from Minneapolis who is active in the Democratic Socialists of America. Like nearly every protester I spoke to, Baumgardt has a very specific grievance: that Israel’s months of assaults on Gaza have killed thousands of women and children, that the U.S. is paying for a lot of this with foreign aid and arms deals, including a new $20 billion multiyear sale supported by President Joe Biden, and that Biden and Harris need to listen to the millions of Americans morally outraged by this. “We could just house the homeless with that much money; that could go to people who are here who need it, instead of bombing children,” they said.

Officials in Gaza say that more than 40,000 have been killed there since October, the majority of them civilians. Most of those who marched on the DNC Monday believe that is a genocide, and said that belief morally obligates them to speak out.

Carol Walker saw the infamous anti-Vietnam War protests at 1968’s Chicago DNC on TV, and in November 1969 she joined the roughly 250,000 people who descended on Washington, D.C., for the massive moratorium protest. Now 73, she belongs to a group called Women Against Military Madness. “I think we need to put pressure on our politicians” for a cease-fire and a weapons embargo.

Most political experts question whether protests will have any influence on Harris, who has met with some pro-Palestinian activists but has given no indication she would change the current U.S. policies of bomb shipments and other aid to Israel. And many rank-and-file Democrats are angered by the tenacity of these protests, which they argue only aid the potential second coming of Donald Trump, who would not only curb democracy but also offer an even more militaristic Middle East policy than Biden.

Indeed, the only major political figure who joined the nearly two-hour procession of pre-march speakers was independent presidential candidate Cornel West, the leftist academic who Democrats fear will siphon votes away from Harris in any state he qualifies for the ballot. West gave a passionate and eloquent defense of the Gaza movement. “This is about not some Machiavellian politics or utilitarian calculation about an election,” he said. “This is about morality! This is about spirituality.”

Gaza protesters have a story to tell that you rarely hear on cable TV or elsewhere in the mainstream media. The folks who marched on Monday truly believe their opposition to U.S. support for Israel in Gaza is why Biden dropped out of the presidential race last month — because his lack of support from young people and Black and brown voters who oppose the war was the reason he hopelessly trailed Trump.

There is something to that idea, although I think it’s far from the only reason Harris has surged past the GOP ex-president in the polls. But I do think the marchers are 100% right about this: When first Biden and then Harris reject a position that, according to one recent poll, is held by 77% of everyday Democrats who want the U.S. to stop sending weapons to Israel, then something is broken with American democracy.

On Monday night, DNC delegates voted, without any serious debate, for a platform that was hashed out before most of them had even arrived in Chicago, that doesn’t address any of the protesters’ concerns. Such a debate might spoil the reality show of preapproved TV speechifying, which has become the only function of what used to be conventions. That’s not democracy. What is democracy is what 6,000 angry citizens did here Monday afternoon: exercising their First Amendment rights to speak freely, to assemble, and to air their grievances with a government that isn’t listening.

Over the course of the 21st century, those rights have been reduced to a size where they could be drowned in a bathtub zone. Free speech on the things that matter has been squeezed into narrow zones, kettled and occasionally tear-gassed, and surrounded by massive displays of militarized police force backed by concrete barriers that make downtowns look like a Grand Prix course. On Monday, police arrested at least four marchers who tried to bust loose.

That didn’t happen with the group I marched alongside, who went off midafternoon squeezed onto cramped streets several significant blocks away from the United Center delegates they so desperately wanted to hear them. That seemingly endless phalanx of hundreds of bicycle cops walled off the entire route. It felt like the healthy red blood cells of dissent were trying to force their way through a clogged artery, crimped by the fatty tissue of a decadent republic. Show me what democracy looks like? This is what today’s democracy looks like.