CHICAGO — The Democratic National Convention has barely begun, and it is already marred by liberal lunacy and protests from anti-Israel radicals, both of which are being driven by the very voters Democrats are trying to court: leftist Gen Zers.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who, barring yet another intraparty coup, will be coronated this week as the party’s presidential nominee, seems to believe that success at the polls this November depends on winning over my generation of young voters. In fact, she seems to have handed over her entire campaign strategy to fresh-out-of-college 20-year-olds who think memes and “vibes” are an acceptable replacement for policy and substance.
But it’s this very demographic threatening to tank Harris’s campaign and any hope of a unified front Democrats may have had going into this week.
Just blocks away from the convention center, thousands of leftist activists, the vast majority of whom were young adults, rallied in protest of Harris and the Democratic Party on Monday. The stated reason was Democrats’ support for Israel, but just a few minutes at the rally made it clear these voters wouldn’t be satisfied even if the conflict in Gaza ended tomorrow.
“When they ousted ‘Genocide Joe,’ they thought we wouldn’t come here today. But we don’t want new leadership of a genocide,” said one speaker, who is a part of the Anti-War Action Network. “We will only get what we demand if we keep demanding,” he added, going on to add to his list of demands a robust climate justice agenda, transgender rights, reproductive rights, an end to colonialism and imperialism, and so on and so forth.
It does not matter to any of these protesters that the Democratic Party has endorsed all of these policies already. The Democratic National Committee released a land acknowledgment apologizing for holding the convention on “stolen land,” for Pete’s sake.
A Gen Z voter I spoke with at the protest, who wished not to be named but made sure I knew his pronouns were they/them, confirmed that it doesn’t really matter what Harris says or does over the next few months: He’ll never vote for her.
“Affordable healthcare, rent control — none of that will ever happen if we just cede to the Democratic Party,” he said. “If we get in line behind Kamala Harris, nothing will ever change.”
And yet these are the very voters Harris is trying to court. She has deliberately been more critical of Israel than other Biden administration officials, and she has tiptoed around condemning the violent, anti-Israel protests that broke out on college campuses across the country earlier this year, even claiming the protesters showed “what human emotion should be.”
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This is exactly why so many protesters have turned out for the DNC: Because, unlike the Republican Party, whose convention was free of similar spectacles, the Democratic Party continues to pander to them and treat their demands as legitimate. Worse, Democrats have adopted the very ideology that serves as the foundation of this protest. The terms “settler-colonialism” and “imperialism,” both of which featured prominently in every speech at the protest, did not come from nowhere. They came from the halls of universities, corporations, and other elite institutions that Democrats have controlled for decades.
Of course, Democrats thought that if they embraced this ideology and trained up the next generation in it, they’d have militant voters for life. Well, the “Killer Kamala” chants and “Abandon Harris” signs would suggest otherwise.