Authorial Intent
KATHERINE WILLIAMS
People were running. Doors were closed, seats filled. Aisles were strewn. Deals were made: move down one, my mother is coming. In one particularly bizarre sequence, two women began screaming epithets at each other after one landed a swift kick of the Keens upon the other’s shoulders, launching her from her seat. (If the first woman has a right to that chair, what does one make of the second’s invocation of the freedoms afforded by unassigned seating?) I saw only the aftermath, which came to involve several security officers and iPhone cameras and a good half hour’s worth of gossip hurtling across section 301.
Few believe that the Democratic National Convention is a decision-making event. Since at least the 1970s, the vote bestowed by delegates is rarely cast in doubt, or with much anxiety; the programming is a series of nods and bows to the power of the party, and to the candidate who already knows her name will appear on the ballot. This year’s convention proceeded at the United Center in Chicago’s Near West Side and hosted several days of admiring, deferent nods to the party’s nominee.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker brought in the National Guard for the convention, calling it a “national security event,” as comparisons to 1968 abounded. At that year’s DNC, law and order politics was precisely the accusation levelled at then-mayor Richard J. Daley, whose invocation of the Chicago Police Department brought violence upon protestors. The governor at the time also called in the National Guard, writing in a letter, “It is deemed that a time of public disorder and danger exists.”
It is so deemed––this year, too, the convention was fraught over disorder, its speakers eager to absorb anxiety into a message that security is nigh. Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden delivered nearly identical lines on how a prosecutor is better than a convicted criminal; that electing the former would reduce rising crime was a familiar refrain. If America is insecure, Harris is the paternal figure whose authority orders the country. Around the United Center were layers of police––from the city, the state, and the country––whose presence assured that the event would not be interrupted, the message not fractured. The authority of the party would be secured.
Inside, there were credibly-sourced rumors of Beyonce. There were Black Eyed Peas songs. There were hot dogs, with ketchup. One could purchase Official Democratic Convention Merchandise: a shirt with a Pop Art quad of Kamala portraits or one with the Chicago flag, its stars replaced by Democratic donkeys. The donkey comes from Thomas Nast’s political cartoon of Abraham Lincoln––an Illinois native––galvanizing votes through fear of a dictatorial Grant presidency, probing the country’s anxieties as a donkey in a lion’s skin. A convention and a party are always meant to be a pageant, a skilled circus artistry; in Chicago, the popcorn bags and suffragette white colored the Democrats’ longstanding attempts to find some unity of signification, to order an identity otherwise insecure.
Despite skepticism from a younger, further left constituency––whose clearer indictment of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence has remained steady––Harris’ record as a prosecutor has turned out to be of enormous assistance to her campaign. It has allowed her to overcome biases against women in office, to win the support of moderates, to cheer at the support of former advisors to Ronald Reagan. It is not just that she is a deal-maker or an adept debater, an experienced official or a strong leader. She is the law itself.
When she spoke at the 2012 DNC in Charlotte, offering her support to then-candidate Barack Obama, she enacted a similar rhetorical posture: the choice between Obama and Mitt Romney, she said, was between “an America where everyone plays by the same set of rules, or a philosophy that tilts the playing field,” between “holding Wall Street accountable” and “letting it write its own rules.” A certain kind of deference to the law, a service to an apparatus, guides the tone of her speech. It also underscores her characterization of Republicans as those who have no respect for the rule of law. The American ideal, whatever that means, is “written into her laws,” she said; to speak without the authority of written language––or to “weave,” as Trump calls it––is to desecrate the sanctity of the inscribed.
In the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole suggests that Harris would be the president to make Trump a “throwback,” to frame herself as the future of America. Indeed Harris has described her campaign again and again as a movement toward progress, repeating “We are not going back” and asking crowds to say it with her. O’Toole writes that Trump represents a democracy “frozen in time,” persistently excavating desire for white and culturally Christian patriarchy. Perhaps Harris does not suggest preservation in this sense, but she does not promise “change” in the way that the optimism of the Obama years did. During her speech at the convention, she declared that the nation has “a chance to chart a new way forward.” But this “new” method, as she articulated, is one in which sacred principles of the political establishment are upheld: where power is transferred peacefully, where elections are fair, where the rule of law is held in respect.
Harris derided the “chaos and calamity” of the Trump presidency, with its rise in crime and insurrectionist mob and assault of law enforcement officers. A repetition of that era would invite dictatorial consequences, she warned, to a crowd whose votes are galvanized by the prospect of disintegration. Indeed, perhaps she is less an emblem of preservation and cultural hegemony, but what she promises is not an alterable topography of political relations; she promises reconstitution, redemption, restoration––the values which promise change and deliver instead the grandeur of history. Harris concluded her speech with an ode: “Let us write this great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” Listening to the raucous cheers at the nomination of a president intent on the restoration of authorship and authority, I thought of Derrida: “The petrified character of writing assures the law’s permanence and identity with the vigilance of a guardian.”
Throughout the night, it became clear that Democratic rhetoric was orchestrated to this tune. “Donald Trump rants about law and order,” Buttigieg quipped, “as if we were going to forget crime was higher under his watch.” Bernie Sanders accused Trump of being the real radical, his agenda a motley of attacks on democratic rule. Democrats, by contrast, will be the ones to restore law and order to its original decency, its grace; Democrats will be the ones to arm the rule of law with significance again. Authority is held in the archives, Derrida wrote, in the ordering of commencement and commandment, in its violence, because power is a form of violence. To him the archive demands enforcement. It demands the logic of rights, reference, and mastery. It demands prosecution.
Set against the prosecutor, Trump is the anarchist paranoiac averse to authority. He wants to defund departments and reduce institutional strength, “play around” with national security and be “unserious” about the law. If Trump is a threat to the symbolic––to language, to law––it is not so much that a felon in office is absurd, but that it threatens to overwhelm the gravity of the institution with the danger of the rogue, with incoherence and destruction. (A gesture which he has assimilated well, like all populists.) Like with Romney, Harris spoke of Republicans as a party of profound disrespect.
“Hope is making a comeback,” Michelle Obama declared. This was nice. But the night replaced hope with pride. It is a more self-conscious tone, hard-boiled and acerbic. (Didion noted that, however well-intentioned, Obama’s “hope” was always a stand-in for naïveté.) It is a tone which hedges its bets against irony. It is a tone which can conveniently replace accusations of softness with realism, or criminal justice with prosecution.
Between every few speeches, the lights dimmed and a campaign video played. Each was different, sort of, but all provided neatly edited origin stories on the various points in Harris’s life, neo-patriotic and also, really, just patriotic. A bit of Norma Rae déjà vu set in: an opening credits of Burns-zooms upon baby photos, a woman made in America. This would be the citizen to protect the family from harm, the nation from violence, the streets from disorder; this would be the president, a black hole of signification, so downright man-to-man about it all, to rise above partisanship and strife and the multiplicity of truth. This would be the transcendental signifier, the restoration of realism, the banishment of sophistry.
The line to enter the United Center that afternoon was beset by protestors and picketers, ranging from the serious to the spectacular. One man dressed as Trump and invited attendees to take pictures with a copy of a Project 2025 mockup. Another duo handed out coupons to a dispensary. And then there were signs: “Democrats: AIPAC’s Subservient Whores.” (Harris has received roughly $5.3 million from the pro-Israel lobby.) Police leaned against the fences surrounding the arena.
The architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune wrote upon the Center’s opening that the construction, walled off in cheap concrete from its impoverished surroundings, filled with the most VIP box seating of any arena in the country, “promises a populist experience” but delivers only “social segmentation.” The rich and the hoi polloi. The “unconvincing cloak of unity” thrown over a city, a reality, fragmented by the concentration of wealth and of violence. Perhaps in the 90s this was a thorough criticism levelled at the country’s fiscal conservatives. By now it has certainly become clear the ways in which that decade’s war on drugs and crime, the unity of myopia, ingrained paradox in the Democratic Party.
Cast upon the uppermost ring of the arena, the one that reaches toward the ceiling, are a series of angled steel panels. They return sound to the bowl seating which surrounds the floor, delivering the cheers for players on the Bulls and Blackhawks several times over. The panels cannot quite simulate “The Roar” of the crowds which filled the Chicago Stadium for most of the twentieth century, but they come close, delivering a dramatic reverberation of the devoted. The arena was designed, with the roaring noise of quixotic Chicago fans in mind, as an echo chamber.
After the balloons fell and the campaign anthem began, we all tried to leave; security had blocked the closest corner, routing everyone to the same exit on the other end of the avenue. Down the block were dozens of police vehicles, waiting just in case. We ended up walking down Wood, a long, wide road that stretches across much of Chicago’s West Side. The street was brightened by tall lamps, filled with former onlookers still carrying their polyester American flags and Harris-Walz cardstock. They were walking toward their cars and their Ubers waiting in the dropoff location, which would take them back to their homes and to the states from which they had come. Wood is beset by quieter and more abandoned streets, absent of city traffic, where converted factory buildings stretch across each block. On one, through which I had walked that afternoon, a stench blew from above a rusted fence. Through the chain links one could see a handful of middle-aged men, peering absentmindedly from the steps and seats of garbage trucks. It was, I learned, where the DNC would dispose of the trash.
Crossing over Wolcott are the elevated tracks for Chicago’s Green Line, which brings residents from the West suburbs and South Side into the downtown Loop. Most of the city’s train lines are above ground; in sparser areas without much foot traffic, the portions of the street in which pedestrians walk under the tracks are echoy caverns, dark and still, their angled concrete often an ad hoc shelter for the homeless. I walked north on Wood, reaching the tracks, under which a dozen officers stood between the concrete beams. Their cars were on, the headlights illuminating a bare sidewalk. A preventative measure for what might fester in the urban unseen. Two women I was walking with thanked them––for their service, presumably––and continued. It was almost eleven and they still had a mile to walk. Any other night this might feel frightening. But tonight, one mused, “there won’t be any crime.” The area had been flooded with officers, sent to protect those who had come to see their future president speak, to prevent any violence that might threaten the sanctity of Democratic pride. Any other night a walk invited threat. But the streets of Chicago were furnished. “It’s the safest night of the year,” she joked.