A protest carnival produces little heat in Chicago

Code Pink, the Party for Socialism & Liberation, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, the Atlanta Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression — the 270-odd groups that marched to the DNC security perimeter were united around cutting off military aid to the Jewish state. Some wanted to abolish it altogether, dismantling one “settler-colonial” nation on the way to dismantling all of them.

Inside the convention, the three dozen uncommitted delegates, elected by anti-war protest voters, were just as focused. But their demands diverged. Democratic anti-war activists in the United Center wanted an immediate ceasefire and an “arms embargo” on Israel. The Biden administration was working on the first, but unlikely to deliver the second, and Harris had essentially ruled it out.

“The Vice President’s team has been engaging,” said Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan and frequent spokesman for the faction. “They’ve been listening. I find that very encouraging. It is definitely a very big change from when we were trying to have conversations with President Biden.”

Alawieh said that after a DNC panel about the war, which the party had given the uncommitted bloc after weeks of pressure. They had another short-term demand — a DNC speaking slot for a physician who’d treated bombing victims in Gaza.

Democrats weren’t allowing that, and their platform endorsed nothing beyond an “immediate and lasting ceasefire deal.” They did send some on-stage messages to anti-war activists. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told delegates that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.” During Biden’s valedictory speech, after Gaza ceasefire activists unfurled a banner — and other delegates blocked it — Biden said he was working to “end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people, and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire in this war.”

“Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden continued. “A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”

The protesters on the street were not there to negotiate with Biden, though Monday’s protest was smaller than they’d hoped for. Chicago police claimed that 3,500 people marched to the convention, organizers claimed to have 15,000 in the park. They had predicted between 30,000 and 40,000 would assemble, from Chicago’s homegrown left-wing groups to activists who’d flown and driven hundreds of miles to oppose the Democrats.

“I do not believe that reform from within is ultimately going to lead us to the results that we need,” said Kamil Khan, 33, who’d come to Chicago from Portland, Oregon. “Bernie Sanders has been culpable in genocidal denialism. He’s tried to label this as the Netanyhu government’s war, and not indicative of what zionism is.”

The end of the Biden campaign, and his replacement by Harris, had sapped some of the energy from the sprawling movement. Protesters took that as a partial win: “We know that it was our movement that made Joe Biden so unpopular that he had to step down!” said Muhammad Abu Zaghrouta, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, from the rally stage.

But no major party would deliver what many protesters wanted: The dismantling of America’s overseas military presence, the end of the Jewish state, and a global wave of decolonization that would take land from its current rulers and give it to indigenous people.

“Listen, some of those folks probably aren’t Democrats,” Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison told Semafor.

They were not. Before marching to the DNC perimeter, protesters in the park heard from independent presidential candidate Cornel West, who’d just met with the Abandon Harris (formerly Abandon Biden) movement and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

“A lot of folk, getting excited about sister Harris because she’s a Black sister from Jamaica,” West told the crowd. “A Black face in a high place in the same empire is the same capitalist policies, the same policies of genocide!”

And when the march began, it quickly ran up against its limits — and the expectations of media and organizers who wondered if anti-war protests would disrupt the DNC in a 4K remake of the 1968 convention. Protesters marched to one of the convention’s outer gates, several blocks away from the main checkpoint, and further away still from the United Center. A small group lifted one fence, climbed inside, and were halted by police. Credentialed reporters filmed from one end; the activists filmed themselves from the other.

The results were dramatic headlines (“Protesters clash with police”) and a much less dramatic stand-off, half a mile from the place where Joe Biden would say goodbye. Between a row of townhouses and a jungle gym, a few dozen protesters faced off with a line of police.

“This is the terror!” said Justin Marcum, 36, as he walked back and forth past officers waving a Palestinian flag.

But the protesters never drew closer, and the standoff petered out. They never got to bring their demands to Democrats.

“I think we should end the war in Gaza,” said Marcum, a West Virginian who’d left the Democratic Party over the war, and would vote for the Green Party in November. “If they don’t want a two-state solution, this is going to turn into a worldwide revolution that’ll end up with a one-state solution for the Palestinians.”

There’ll be more protests this week, including one Thursday night that could snarl traffic into Harris’s acceptance speech. But the Democrats’ Gaza problem got a lot clearer on Monday. There’s one faction of the party that wants to mobilize for Harris, particularly in Michigan, and warns that it can’t do that effectively if there’s an ongoing war. There’s an overlapping faction that wants more — an arms embargo — and won’t be satisfied with a ceasefire. And there is a sprawling, left-wing, anti-imperial movement that wants Israel to be replaced by a secular Palestinian state.

These latter people were simply never going to vote for the Democratic ticket. Chicago isn’t being torn apart by protests, and neither are the Democrats. In Union Park, I heard chants of “we are the intifada,” saw a Hamas flag and pro-Hamas signs, and talked to polite organizers of far-left parties who never cast a ballot for a “capitalist” party and never will. This protest was going to happen, war or no war, ceasefire or no ceasefire, and the “1968 redux” hype that preceded it in some media was a little silly.

That said: The Democrats in 2020 were very comfortable aligning with that year’s racial justice movements and their own protestors on the left, a fact that the Trump campaign is still using against Harris. (Her tweet supporting donations to Minneapolis’s Freedom Fund is, in their polling, one of the least popular things she’s ever done.) They are building perimeters between themselves and the newer protests this time, dividing the gettable organizers from the ones who will never support them. Democratic leaders may not be able to satisfy more mainstream progressives upset with their policy stance, but they want them to feel heard and to stay inside the tent to keep making their argument in 2025 and beyond.

It struck me that Republicans avoided anything like this, in Milwaukee, with a simple strategy — they simply didn’t invite anyone who didn’t support Donald Trump’s third nomination.