patrick iber

I attended the DNC as a journalist, and wrote about the relationship between the Democratic party and its left movements for the Fall issue of Dissent (where I am now co-editor). (Here in Spanish.) The party has learned things but it has also asked for adaptations from its left, which was willing to make them from the stage.

If the left has taught the party something about how it needed to change, the party has responded by asking the left to speak its patriotic language in order to be part of a winning coalition. Florida’s Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the youngest member of Congress, was given a prime spot on Thursday night to talk about climate change. Acknowledging the challenges ahead, Frost projected optimism: “With our movement and with organizing and an administration that cares, we are making progress.” The crowd cheered his formulation that “fighting the climate crisis is patriotic.”

Moving from outside to inside the party has made it possible to counterbalance competing factions of the party. The 2024 DNC was a demonstration of a party that had accepted its internal ideological diversity, that can cheer now for Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders alike. Deflecting attempts at red-baiting him for things like supporting universal free lunch programs for Minnesota’s students, vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz said that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” But as he well knows, there are a lot more neighbors in this country than there are socialists.

The big challenge, and the big disappointment for many on the left, was the limited engagement with the Uncommitted movement, which I cover in the piece.