The National Convention of the Democratic Party begins today in downtown Chicago. As one would expect the event is conceived to produce maximally persuasive visuals for television, for electronic distribution. The convention as a whole, including various groups coming to Chicago to exercise the opportunity for free expression in the “public square” – will be a messy affair.  “Messy” that is by contrast to that of the Republican Party that has increasingly aligned itself with Trump, ossified, around a dogma of  repressive Conservatism.

It is tempting to decide that both political parties are mirror images, more alike than different. I think that’s a lazy, too comfortable cynicism, a fuck-it-all stasis, which intends to remain high in the bleachers, a spectator to the slow-motion wrecking of the West. As I said it’s tempting but immoral. Politics is the art-of-the-possible, a conjuring of sorts, and by definition traffics in illusion. This must be accepted as a “given”. It is as functionally normal/necessary as persuading a child that “life is good, that he/she is at home here, the world is worth exploring.” Effective persuasion creates a future!

To my eye and ear the differences between the two parties, and the leadership capabilities of the two candidates and their VP running mates are palpable.  Are you able to detect with me a dramatic difference in leadership styles, which is disclosed by the images, by the tone, and the artistry (or lack thereof) of the stump speeches delivered by Harris/Walz and by Trump/Vance?

I noticed
two masters in the art of prose
being crudely and thoughtlessly mistaken for each other,

the one whose words drip down with coldness and hesitation,
as if from the roof of a damp cave
(he counts on their dull sound and resonance)

and another who handles his language
like a supple rapier and, from his fingers to his toes,
feels the dangerous joy
of the quivering, over-sharpened sword
that wants to bite, sizzle, cut. –

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 246

This morning’s New York Times reported on the muscular, Progressive patriotism of the Democratic party.  Here’s a sample:

At her first rally with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris delivered a riff about their quintessentially American backgrounds. She grew up in Oakland, Calif., raised by a working mother, while he grew up on the Nebraska plains, she explained. They were “two middle-class kids,” she said, now trying to make it to the White House together.

“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”