A tale of two conventions
The spectacles in Cleveland and Philadelphia both came down to a question as old as the Republic: who are the people and who speaks for them?
Jill Lepore
They perched on bar stools, their bodies long and lean, like eels, the women in sleeveless dresses the color of flowers or fruit (marigold, tangerine), the men in fitted suits the color of embers (charcoal, ash). Makeshift television studios lined the floor and the balcony of the convention hall: CNN, Fox, CBS, Univision, PBS. MSNBC built a pop-up studio on East Fourth Street, a square stage raised above the street, like an outdoor boxing ring. Who won today? Who will win tomorrow? the networks asked. The guests slumped against the ropes and sagged in their seats, or straightened their backs and slammed their fists. The hosts narrowed their eyes, the osprey to the fish: Is America over?
Americans had been assassinating one another, in schools and in churches, in cars and in garages, in bars, parks, and streets, insane with hatehate whites, hate blacks, hate Christians, hate Muslims, hate gays, hate police. A certain number of Americans, bearing arms, had lost their minds, their souls, the feel of the earth beneath their feet. Dread fell, and lingered, like mud after rain. At the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, gas masks were banned, body armor was allowed. Write any or all emergency phone numbers somewhere on your body using a pen, a security memo urged reporters. Best to write your name, too, came a whisper over a stall in a womens room, a Sharpie skittering along the tiled floor, as if it had travelled all the way from 1862, when twenty-one-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wounded at Antietam and afraid he was about to die, scratched a note and pinned it to his uniform, Union blue: I am Capt. O. W. Holmes, hoping his body would find its way home.
Has America ever before been so divided? the television hosts asked their guests on street-side sets, while the American people, walking by, stopped, watched, and listened, a tilt of the head, a frown, a selfie. Wash yourselves! Make yourselves clean! evangelicals advised, by megaphone, placard, and pamphlet. Judgment is coming! T-shirts stating the significance of life came in black and blue or pink (for fetuses). Past the chain-link gate at the entrance to the Quicken Loans Arena, a line of delegates and reporters snaked across an empty parking lot and into security tentsconveyor belts, wands, please place your laptop in the binas if we were about to board an airplane, take off, and fly to another country, a terrible country, a land of war. There are a lot of people who think the whole purpose of all this turmoil is to create martial law, Hal Wick, a delegate from South Dakota, told me, musing darkly on the shootings. Wick doesnt believe that the United States will last much longer if Hillary Clinton is elected. If you do the research and the reading, he said, you find out that, if you get to a point where more than half the people are on the dole, the country doesnt exist. It descends into anarchy. It wont take as long as four years. I give it two or three, Wick said. Tops.
A parking garage attached to the arena had been converted into a media production center, cubbies for radio and television and Snapchat and Twitter, like cabins on a ship, the floor a tangle of cables like the ropes on deck. Don King stood astride its bow, dressed like a Reagan-era Bruce Springsteen (faded jean jacket; swatches of red, white, and blue). Hed wanted to speak at the Convention, but hed been snubbed; this was his chance to testify. An audience of reporters and photographers flocked around him, seagulls to a mast. He drew himself up. He threw his head back. He roared, as if he were introducing a matchup: Donald Trump is for the people!
Every tyrant from Mao to Pern rules in the name of the people; his claim does not lessen their suffering. Every leader of every democracy rules in the name of the people, too, but their suffering, if they suffer, leads to his downfall, by way of their votes (which used to be called their voices). Still, the voice of the People is a figure of speech. Government requires make-believe, the historian Edmund S. Morgan once gently explained. Make believe that the king is divine, make believe that he can do no wrong or make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.
Cast back to a time long past. In the thirteenth century, the King of England summoned noblemen to court and demanded that they pledge to obey his laws and pay his taxes, and this they did. But then they, along with other men, sent by counties and towns, began pretending that they werent making these pledges for themselves alone but that they represented the interests of other people, that they parleyed, that they spoke for them; in 1377, they elected their first Speaker. In the sixteen-forties, many of those men, a Parliament, wished to challenge the King, who claimed that he was divine and that his sovereignty came from God. No one really believed that; they only pretended to believe it. To counter that claim, men in Parliament began to argue that they represented the People, that the People were sovereign, and that the People had granted them authority to represent them, in some time immemorial. Royalists pointed out that this was absurd. How can the People rule when they which are the people this minute, are not the people the next minute? Who even are they? Also, when, exactly, did they grant Parliament their authority?
In 1647, the Levellers, hoping to remedy this small defect, drafted An Agreement of the People, with the idea that every freeman would assent to it, granting to his representatives the power to represent him. That never quite came to pass, but when, between 1649 and 1660, England had no king, and became a commonwealth, it got a little easier to pretend that there existed such a thing as the People, and that they were the sovereign rulers of . . . themselves. This seed, planted in American soil, under an American sun, sprouted and flourished, fields of wheat, milled to grain, the daily bread. (The fiction that replaced the divine right of kings is our fiction, Morgan wrote, and it accordingly seems less fictional to us.) When Parliament then said, We, the People, have decided to tax you, the colonists, meeting in their own assemblies, answered, No, were the People. By 1776, what began as make-believe had become self-evident; by 1787, it had become the American creed.
We the people are, apparently, grievously vexed. Around the corner from Don King, NBC News was running a promotional stunt called Election Confessions (Tell us what you really think), asking passersby to write on colored sticky notes and shove them in a ballot box; the confessions were displayed, anonymously, on a wall monitor. Blue: I cant believe it got this far. Orange: I get to vote for the first time, and now I dont want to. Green: THESE ARE OUR CHOICES? I wandered down an aisle and sat next to Johnny Shull, a delegate from North Carolina who used to teach economics at the Charles Koch Institute and helps run a conservative talk-radio hour, The Chad Adams Show. Sitting beside him was Susan Phillips, a warm and friendly woman who was a guest that day on the show. I told Shull what Wick had said, about the end of America. Thats silly, he said. Shull had originally supported Rand Paul and was now a Trump delegate. He thinks America is resilient and will bounce back, no matter who wins. Phillips agrees with Wick. She loves Trump because he says all the things she wants to say and cant; because he speaks her thoughts about the half of America thats living off the other half, and about the coming lawlessness. (Mitt Romneys forty-seven per cent, which is the same figure that the Nixon campaign complained about in 1972, has very lately risen, in the populist imagination, to forty-nine per cent.) I asked Phillips what happens if Trump loses. She said, Then weve got to build our compounds, get our guns ready, and prepare for the worst. Half of the people believe that they know how the other half lives, and deem them enemies.
We the people welcome you to Cleveland, banners declared, hanging from street lamps along the road to the citys Public Square, a granite-and-steel plaza with fountains and patches of grass, trough and pasture. Parts of Ohio used to belong to Connecticut, and the New Englanders who settled Cleveland, in the eighteenth century, set aside land for a commons, a place for grazing sheep and cattle and for arguing about politics: the public square, the peoples park.
God hates America! a wiry man was shouting from the soundstage. America is doomed! Most of the protesters came in ones and twos. Oskar Mosco, who told me that he was a pedicab driver from California, carried a poster board on which hed written, Why Vote? He said, Democracy, lately, is just a fiction. Make believe the people rule. I sat down on a step next to Amy Thie, a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Cincinnati. Shed made a T-shirt that read, I know shirts. I make the best shirts. Mexico will pay for them. Its terrific. Everyone agrees I have baby hands, to which shed affixed a pair of pink plastic doll hands, one clutching a miniature American flag. Some people really hate Trump, she said. I dont hate him. I think hes bringing to light aspects of our society that need to come to light. Shes worried about the world, but shes not that worried about Trump. People are too reasonable for this movement to win.
Thies faith in the people is a faith in the future. It dates to the era of Andrew Jackson, when the idea of the people got hitched to the idea of progress, especially technological progressthe steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph. Ralph Waldo Emerson, awed by the force of American ideas, American people, and American machines, called the United States the country of the future. If the people can be trusted to be reasonable, all things are possible, the historian George Bancroft argued, in an 1835 speech called The Office of the People. Bancroft was writing at a time when poor men were newly enfranchised, and a lot of his friends thought that these men were too stupid to vote. Bancroft offered reassurance. If you lock a man in a dark dungeon for his whole life and finally let him out, he may be blinded by the light, but that doesnt mean he lacks the faculty of sight; one day, he will see. Let him add his voice:
Wherever you see men clustering together to form a party, you may be sure that however much error may be there truth is there also. Apply this principle boldly, for it contains a lesson of candor and a voice of encouragement. There never was a school of philosophy nor a clan in the realm of opinion but carried along with it some important truth. And therefore every sect that has ever flourished has benefited Humanity, for the errors of a sect pass away and are forgotten; its truths are received into the common inheritance.
The voice of the People became a roar and a rumpus. Year after year, the People convened, to write and revise and ratify state constitutions, to vote on party rules and platforms, to pick candidates. The men who drafted the Constitution had been terrified of an unchecked majority; events in France had hardly quieted their concerns. John Adams and James Madison, old men, hobbled into constitutional conventions in Massachusetts and Virginia, where they sat, stiffly, and endured the declamations of long-whiskered shavers and strivers, the lovers of the People. Americans had grown convention-mad. In 1831, they even began nominating candidates for the Presidency in convention halls. The People must exist: they climbed the rafters.
By the time I got to my seat in the Quicken Loans Arena, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, was ordering delegates to file out, sending them off to this committee meeting or that: Rules, Platform, Credentials. When he stepped down from the podium, the jumbo teleprompter that hed been reading from flickered, went black, and then turned back on. I stared, wide-eyed. They put that up there whenever the stage is empty, a reporter from The Nation told me, helpfully. Up there, in L.E.D., was the Gettysburg Address. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
Lincoln stopped in Cleveland in 1861, on the way to his inauguration as the first Republican President. Down on the convention floor, George Engelbach, a delegate from Missouri, was dressed as Lincoln: top hat and suit, whiskers. I asked him why he admired Lincoln. If it were not for him, we would have a divided country, he said. Engelbach has been a Trump supporter from the start, because Trumps the only one who can put it back together again. That night, the speakers at the Convention talked about dead bodies: the bodies of Americans killed by undocumented immigrants, of Americans killed by terrorists in Benghazi, of Americans killed by men who supported Black Lives Matter. A grieving mother blamed Hillary Clinton for her sons death. Soldiers described the corpses of their fallen comrades. I pulled his body armor off and checked for vitals, one said. There were no signs of torture or mutilation, another said. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. But this wasnt Gettysburg. This battle isnt over. Our own city streets have become the battleground, the Homeland Security Committee chair, Mike McCaul, said. The Milwaukee County sheriff, David A. Clarke, Jr., said, I call it anarchy.
Philadelphia was to Cleveland the zig to its zag, the other half of the zipper. The Democrats recycle. They provide compost bins. They speak Spanish in the security lines. They serve kosher food. They offer a Gluten-Free Section. They have blue-curtained breast-feeding and pumping areas. The Democrats run out of coffee. They run out of seats. They run out of food. They run out of water. They talk for too long; they run out of time. During breaks between speakers, the Republicans played the Knacks My Sharona (When you gonna give me some time, Sharona / Ooh, you make my motor run); the Democrats played Princes Lets Go Crazy (Dearly beloved / We are gathered here today / To get through this thing called life ).
Try to get through a night at a Democratic Convention, early in the week, with nothing more than MMs and the voice of the People to jolt you awake. Its like being at a sleepover and trying to stay up until midnight for the candlelit sance, the conjuring of a spirit: Speak, speak!
Dearly beloved. There is tension and dissension in the land, Cynthia Hale, of the Ray of Hope Christian Church, in Decatur, Georgia, said, leading the invocation on the Conventions first day. And there was tension and dissension in the hall.
Its time that the people took the power back, Rebecca Davies, a delegate from Illinois, told me. I asked her if she supported Clinton. God, no! she said, mock-affronted. She was wearing a pointy hat, made of green felt, with a red feather tucked in its brim. Shed got the hat at a gathering that morning, when Sanders tried to persuade his followers to support Clinton, and they balked. People all over the arena were wearing Robin Hood hats, as if it were 1937 and Warner Bros. was holding auditions for an Errol Flynn film. Davies was cheerful, but she was disappointed; the People, spurned.
The proceedings began. But when Barney Frank got up to speak the crowd booed him. Thank you, or not, as the case may be, Frank said, grimly. Frank, no fan of Bernie Sanders, co-chaired the Rules Committee, whose decisions Sanders supporters had protesteda protest strengthened by the release, the day before, of hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails. (Hacked by Russia? Hack more! Trump taunted.) The People had been betrayed by the Party, corrupted. The D.N.C. thinks its better to keep people ignorant, Robyn Sumners told me, angry, astonished. She was a precinct inspector in Californias District 29, where Sanders lost by a smidgen. She blames the press and the D.N.C. They dont want people involved, she said. They dont trust us. Theyre afraid of Bernie because you know what Bernie does? He wakes people up. I learned in this election: They dont want us to vote. Some Sanders people covered their mouths with blue tape, on which theyd written SILENCED. The People, muffled, stifled, muzzled, unloved.
Carl Davis, a delegate from Texas, works in the mayors office in Houston. Hes African-American and a long-standing Clinton supporter. He was a Clinton delegate in 2008, too. The Democratic Party brings hope to this nation, he told me. We, we are the ones looking out for the people of this country. Not Trump, not Trump, not Trump. My name isnt Sucker Boone, Emily Boone, a Kentucky delegate, snapped, when I asked her what she thought of the Republican nominee. When Democrats on the floor talked about Trump, wincing, shuddering, they tended to talk about a political apocalypse possibly even darker than the one conjured by Trump supporters when they imagined a Clinton Presidency: Fascism, the launch codes, the end of days.
Donald Trump knows that the American people are angrya fact so obvious he can see it from the top of Trump Tower, Elizabeth Warren said from the lectern, undertaking the sober, measured work of arguing that Trump did not speak for the American people, that he had misjudged if he thought that he could make the American people angry with one another. Ive got news for Donald Trump, Warren said. The American people are not falling for it!
The People are easy to invoke but impossible to curb. A spirit cant be bottled. If you look at our platform, all the way through it talks about trying to lift people up, people who have been left behind, Chris McCurry told me. This was McCurrys first Convention. He was a delegate from South Carolina, where he works as an I.T. guy in the states Department of Transportation. He was wearing a hat decorated with red-white-and-blue tinsel and a vest pinned with eleven Hillary buttons. Shes spent her whole life trying to lift up women and children, and when we do that we lift up the nation, when you do that you get gay rights, you fight racism, he said. You always progress.
The Democratic Partys argument is that it is the only party that contains multitudes. What happens when the people are sovereign? The dangerous term, as it turned out, was not sovereignty, as the historian Daniel T. Rogers once put it. It was the People. When white men said, We are the People and therefore we rule, how were they to deny anyone else the right to rule, except by denying their very peoplehood? We, too, are people! shouted women, blacks, immigrants, the poorest of the poor. And, lo, the People did say, No, you are not people! That worked for only so long. And, when it failed, the People passed new immigration and citizenship laws, and restricted voting rights, and made corporations honorary people, to give themselves more power. And, lo, a lot of Americans got to worrying about what viciousness, what greed, and what recklessness the People were capable of. These people called themselves Progressives.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the left lost its faith in the People but kept its faith in progress. Progressives figured that experts, with the light of their science, ought to guide the government in developing the best solutions to political and economic problems. In the nineteen-forties, populism began to move from the left to the right, not sneakily or stealthily but in the shadows all the same, unnoticed, ignored, demeaned. In Christopher Laschs grumpiest book, The True and Only Heaven, from 1991, he argued that a big problem with postwar liberalism was liberals failure to really listen to the continuing populist criticism of the idea of progress. Their confidence in being on the winning side of history made progressive people unbearably smug and superior, Lasch wrote, but they felt isolated and beleaguered in their own country, since it was so much less progressive than they were. That went on for decades.
In 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected, a letter to the editor appeared in a small newspaper in upstate New York. The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next weeks groceries, the letter writer argued. What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials? AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE. It was written by a young Timothy McVeigh.
And still, after Oklahoma City, and Waco, and the militia movement, all through the nineteen-nineties, progressive politicians and intellectuals continued to ignore the right-wing narrative of decline, even as it became the hallmark of conservative talk radio. And they ignored Sanderss warnings about decline, too, when he talked about the growing economic divide, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the stranglehold of corporate interests over politics. There is a war going on in this country, Sanders said, in an eight-and-a-half-hour speech from the floor of the Senate, in 2010. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people against working families, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country. He spoke alone. Progressives and liberals talked about growth, prosperity, globalization, innovation.
Dearly beloved. Dont let anyone ever tell you that this country isnt great, Michelle Obama said, in an uplifting speech on the first night of the Democratic Convention. But then Sanders got up and said it: This election is about ending the forty-year decline of our middle class, the reality that forty-seven million men, women, and children live in poverty. A sea of blue signs waved at him, as if in rebuke: A future to believe in. Sanders, and only Sanders, talked that way about decline and suffering. Meanwhile, outside, a sudden summer storm battered the city, the rain falling like dread.
Ivanka Trump had introduced her father; Chelsea Clinton introduced her mother. Daughters are the new political wives. Chelsea wore a red dress with a heart-shaped neckline. She introduced the Presidential nominee as a grandmother. I hope that my children will some day be as proud of me as I am of my mom, she said. Mother-love is the corsage pinned to every dress, right or left. Im a mom! said everyone who was one, at both Conventions, from Laura Ingraham to Kirsten Gillibrand. We all hope for a better tomorrow, Morgan Freeman intoned, in his voice-over to a Clinton-campaign film. Every parent knows that your dream for the future beats in the heart of your child. And here, at last, was the resolution, shaky and cynical, of the argument between the people and progress. People + progress = children. In an age of atrocity, the unruliness of the people and a fear of the future have combined with terror, naked terror, to make the love of children an all-purpose proxy for each fraying bond, each abandoned civic obligation, the last, lingering devotion.
Hillary Clinton took the stage in a suit of paper white. I am so proud to be your mother, she said to her daughter, beginning her address to the American people not as citizens but as objects of love. I will carry all of your voices and stories with me to the White House, she promised, the words like lace. We begin a new chapter tonight. The balloons fell. newyorker.com
