Crowd Control
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: commotion in Chicago, democracy adrift, and a short philosophical ghost story.
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Convention Commotion
The 2024 Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago today amid mounting tensions between the Biden administration and pro-Palestinian protesters critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Some commentators have drawn comparisons to the tumultuous 1968 convention: “an overseas conflict stirring disapproval at home, a wave of campus demonstrations and a new Democratic presidential nominee taking the stage.”
The logic of violence is inexorable. Lance Morrow recalls the scene in the Wall Street Journal:
Sure enough, the spectacle of mutual political hatred enacted itself with the precision of Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. The protesters provoked; the cops poured out of Balbo Drive, a side street, waving riot clubs. They went to work on the football helmets or unprotected skull bones of the young. Blood flowed.
Media coverage makes war a moral matter. And it could happen again, claims Charlie M. Blow in the New York Times:
It isn’t easy to unsee the limp body of a dead child in a mother’s arms. It isn’t easy to unsee hungry people scrambling for cover when they come under fire. It isn’t easy to unsee the wreckage after a convoy of food aid trucks came under fire and several aid workers were killed. People have seen all those things on their TVs and phones. . . . The numbers are staggering. The level of suffering is unacceptable. Young people will make that point clear this summer in Chicago.
Media itself is democratized now. There’s good reason to think that the violence we saw in 1968 is impossible in today’s media environment, claims Heather Hendershot:
But just because a situation echoes the past does not mean history is repeating itself. Today’s media is completely different, and a machine politician is no longer at the helm in Chicago. . . . The media ecosystem is radically different from what it was 50-plus years ago, when news was more centralized and media technologies were less portable and more difficult to obtain by nonprofessionals. . . . There are many differences between the 1968 and 2024 conventions. One of the biggest is that now, the whole world is filming. The problem today is not how much we can see but how much we can believe.
The whole world isn’t watching. Ed Kilgore, though, points out that now, people don’t watch network news—or anything but their own social media feeds:
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
The Democrats and the Will of the People
Whatever happens this week in Chicago, the Democratic Party is experiencing a profound crisis of confidence, as Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell discussed last week with Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld about their new book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton University Press, May).
Last month, Shadi and Damir talked to Freddie deBoer on the podcast about whether the Democratic Party’s presidential-nominee-picking process lacked democracy. That discussion continues.
They just don’t care. More Freddie:
The major problem is that I think the Democrats have essentially abandoned any pretense that the voters get to choose their candidates, which is part of a larger bad dynamic where the party is increasingly ruled by an utterly unaccountable aristocracy of cutthroat neoliberals.
They just don’t care (II). Michael Tracey:
Kamala Harris is being crowned the overnight nominee by an “insider” process that is staggering in its total disconnection from any actual voter input. She won a grand total of zero delegates in 2020, and a grand total of zero delegates in 2024, at least as apportioned by primary election outcomes in the states and territories. She’s undergoing this coronation at the behest of donors and ‘strategists’ who schemed behind the scenes to impose their will.
We have never been democrats. Justin Smith-Ruiu gets philosophical:
Democracy is a myth about “the great discontinuity between our rational and improved form of life and that of the greater part of humanity from its earliest origins.” In other words, about parliaments and presidents being better than kings and queens. But now: “The idea of democracy was a mighty powerful force in helping that belief to survive as long as it did.”
We’ve known. Last year, NPR reported on a looming “primary problem.”
Ghost Stories
In his Tuesday Note last week, Damir highlighted some passages from an essay by Simone Weil: “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Violence, Weil says, literally turns men into things: “Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.”
Weil herself died in 1943, but perhaps she’s less absent than Homer could have imagined: In a recent interview, philosopher Byung-Chul Han said that the twentieth century activist and mystical philosopher is still present to him:
Simone Weil has recently moved into me and talks to me all the time. This is no coincidence, because she died on August 24, 80 years ago. She’s still alive and she talks to me, I maintain an internal dialogue with her. I feel like a reincarnation of Simone Weil.
That’s philosophical inspiration in a rather stronger sense than usual.
From the Crowd
Gemma Mason, commenting on Damir and Christine’s podcast discussion last week with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?:
I think we often fail to appreciate the relationship between religion and responsibility, with motherhood. It can be scary to think of yourself as responsible for another person's whole existence, and thus responsible both for what your child does and for what your child experiences. Anti-natalist arguments from human evil and from your potential child's negative life experiences both rely implicitly on the idea that your child's existence is, fundamentally, your responsibility.
By contrast, if you are religious, then in a sense you get to share that responsibility with God. You're not the ultimate arbiter. You are, to be sure, responsible for doing the best you can. You need to treat your child well, and you need to try to build a good world for them to live in, and you need to help them learn to be good people. But, to the extent that you cannot control those things, you can leave them in God's hands. You don't have to bear the entire moral weight of your child's existence on your own.
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