‘Let Them Eat Joy’

The Democratic National Convention, which just wrapped up in Chicago with the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, positively glittered. The event was chock full of celebrity politicians, musicians, movie stars, millionaires, and even a couple billionaires; the combined net worth of the Democratic glitterati who graced the stage was probably bigger than that of some small nations. And boy are those rich people happy. Joy is back! Hope is back! Obama is back!

One other thing, though, was on full display: the class divide that has come to define the Democratic Party.

For hardworking Americans struggling to make it in the economy created by three of the speakers who took the convention stage—Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—there was precious little by way of policy to make the case for Harris. To the extent that a pitch was made to the American people about what a Harris/Walz administration would look like, it was that it would be filled with the joy of the rich and the famous, of Kerry Washington and Hillary Clinton, JB Pritzker and Michelle Obama.

Who is Kamala Harris? What does she plan to do as president? There was gaslighting aplenty as we were reintroduced to a woman we all know, as if she were a blank slate available for projection.

“[Kamala] understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” Michelle Obama said of a woman who dropped out of a primary before a single vote was cast and somehow failed her way to the top of a presidential ticket. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” Michelle Obama said of a woman whose father and mother had PhDs. “If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead,” the former first lady said of a woman leading a party that just undermined an entire election process to get Joe Biden off the ticket. Not to be outdone, former President Obama spent half his speech demonizing Trump and the other half complaining about polarization.

Every accusation with the Democrats is a confession.

The theme of “freedom”—or at least, the use of the word freedom—was hit again and again, mostly in relation to abortion, and how the Democrats will make sure women still get to choose abortion, given that Donald Trump is allegedly going to ban it.  

Oh, you hadn’t heard that Trump wants to ban abortion nationwide? Perhaps you had heard the opposite, in fact? That he torched the pro-life language from the RNC 2024 platform? Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit as neatly with the chosen theme of the Harris candidacy: “We’re not going back!”

To be at the DNC was to be told again and again in so many words that if you are nostalgic for 2019, when you could afford to feed your children a simple protein multiple times a week, that this reminiscence is the equivalent of being nostalgic for the Jim Crow South. To long for a time when your dollar stretched much further is to crave bloody, back-alley abortions.

The abortion lie was only one of many that were told about the former president over the course of the four-day convention. The American people were told that five people died on January 6—who knew—and that Trump called neo-Nazis “fine people,” never mind that even CNN debunked that as misinformation! Have you heard that Trump is going to implement Project 2025—even though he mocked it endlessly and humiliated its writers? Astonishing! Did you know he promised a bloodbath if he loses—in the auto-industry, but never mind that last part! And of course, everyone knows he’s going to be a dictator; haven’t you heard about his “explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents and anyone he sees as the enemy,” as Harris put it in her speech Thursday night?

Of course, none of this is true, which raises a rather compelling question: If Donald Trump is such an obvious threat, why the need to lie, embellish, and invent stories about his evil? Indeed, if Harris’s plan to save America makes her such an obvious, easy choice over Trump, why talk about him at all?

Yet Trump was pretty much all the speakers at the DNC talked about, aside from abortion. There was almost nothing by way of policy, a major disappointment after Harris’s economic speech the week before that laid out the foundations for a Democratic populist vision. There were many invocations of “Kamala Harris, for the people,” though not all the people, it turns out; one of the most articulate voices for working-class dignity, Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien, was unforgivably ghosted by the Harris campaign for the sin of bringing the case of workers’ rights to the Republican National Convention, at Trump’s invitation, where he lambasted Republicans for nearly half an hour. Instead, the DNC put up the head of the UAW, Shawn Fain, who flattered the Democratic audience with flamboyant anti-Trump pageantry.

I held out hope that at least Harris’s own speech would develop her economic vision and present struggling Americans with a significant choice between Trump’s protectionism and the distributionist model Harris laid out in her speech. But her campaign has already started backing off her promise to use price controls to tame inflation, and her DNC address was completely devoid of any policy whatsoever.

It was instead a list of platitudes: “I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations.”

“A strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success, and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”

“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system.”

“America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities.”

Is such pablum likely to fly with the American people? The polling seems to suggest that all the enthusiasm for Harris is localized in a very specific group: college-educated voters. As Ruy Teixeira pointed out in the Liberal Patriot, Harris is doing even better than Biden with the college-educated, and even worse with the working class—of all races. Among working-class voters, Harris is trailing Trump by seven points—and she’s ahead with college-educated voters by 20 points. And she’s lost even more ground with nonwhite working-class voters, who Biden carried by 48 points in 2020, while Harris is ahead by only 29 points.

The Democratic Party remains the party of the elites; now it’s given up on economic policy altogether, which has been replaced by feelings and “vibes.”

If Harris were being honest, her campaign slogan wouldn’t be “Kamala Harris—for the people.” It would be, “Let them eat the joy of the rich and powerful.” That’s all that’s on offer.