Political Conventions: What's the Take Away
The Conventions: Totally Predictable or A Political Turning Point?
A blog by co-host of The Election Show on MNN Lincoln Mitchell
Over the last two weeks, through their conventions. both parties had to the opportunity to present their #candidates and make their pitch to the American people. It is not likely that the conventions themselves will be seminal moments or key turning points in the #election, but they revealed a bit about how the Democrats and Republicans view the election.
The #Democratic convention was in some respects entirely predictable. There was a lot of emphasis on the presidential ticket, speeches that showed the diversity in the party as well as the breadth of the coalition heading into November, and an attempt to present Joe #Biden as a caring and decent person at a moment when there is a paucity of empathy or decency coming from the White House. However, there was another dynamic in play at the Democratic convention as the speakers, as usual, stressed the need to vote, but they also made it clear that the right to vote was in peril for many Americans and that there was no guarantee that this election would be conducted freely and fairly. If viewers got the sense the Democratic leadership is concerned about the prospect of election fraud and authoritarianism, that is because they are.
The #Republican convention demonstrated that the party’s transition from a conservative political organization to the political arm of the Trump cult is almost complete. While some aspects of the Republican convention were familiar, such as the effort to highlight a handful of prominent non-white speakers and to defend the incumbent Republican president’s record, much of what we saw this week is without precedent in modern America history. The absence of well known Republicans was hard to miss. There were no Bushes, Romneys or McCains and very few other Republicans whose role in the party predates the rise of Trump. Instead there was a stream of #Trump family members and direct employees telling us how wonderful their father, husband or boss is. The party’s decision not to even bother with a platform further underscored the marriage of the GOP and the cult of Trump.
Additionally, the flaunting of the #Hatch Act, which seeks to draw a line between government and party and between governance and campaigning was just another brick in the wall of democratic rollback the Trump administration has been building for nigh on four years now. Apologists for Trump asserted this was not a big deal because voters don't even know that the Hatch Act is, but they could not be more wrong. When the governing party becomes the state and is able to use state resources for their own political purposes, democracy and political competition frequently do not survive.
To a great extent both parties went precisely as most informed observers thought they would. The only was Biden’s acceptance speech which was better than expected. It is unlikely that either convention will change the feel of the race, or even have much of an impact at all, what we saw over the last two weeks makes it more clear than ever that in the next months the US will either move to consolidate a non-democratic regime or begin the effort of (re)building its democracy.
