This Is What Democracy Looks Like

JooHee Yoon

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Editorial Board / New York Times | 26 July 2016

The jeers and boos and angry tears of Bernie Sanders die-hards so dominated the first hours of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that it might have seemed doomed to collapse into hostility and chaos on the first day.

The Democrats were at risk of staging their own version of last week’s Republican debacle, without the hate speech. But in their unruly way they seem to have managed to rise above dissension, with the help of a succession of speeches on Monday night that together would make a remarkable highlight reel of political exhortation toward unity. If the anger fades, if the seams hold, and if Hillary Clinton, on Thursday, rises to her moment as well, she will be in an excellent position to keep her stress-tested party’s eyes on the prize.

“Democracy is a little bit messy sometimes,” Bernie Sanders said on Tuesday morning to dejected supporters who were still getting their heads around the hitch in their plans for a November revolution.

The night before, Mr. Sanders made it clear he was disappointed to have lost the nomination. But he was fervent in supporting Mrs. Clinton, and the party platform, which he had, through a vigorous campaign, bent toward his own vision of helping working people and the poor. Speaker after speaker before him emphasized the urgency of overcoming divisions.

Michelle Obama delivered a speech of uncommon grace and power. It attacked no one by name, but implicitly rebuked Senator Sanders’s most die-hard supporters by recalling that Mrs. Clinton, upon losing the nomination in 2008, “did not pack up and go home,” because she knew “this is so much bigger than her own desires and disappointments.” Mrs. Obama spoke of waking up “in a house that was built by slaves,” of the gratitude in knowing that her young daughters take the idea of a woman president for granted, and of the importance of love and dignity in the face of cruelty and bullying. “When they go low,” she said, “we go high.”

It’s true that the boos have not disappeared in Philadelphia, and Mrs. Clinton remains a far-from-natural politician, whose every flaw has become familiar. But she won millions more votes than Mr. Sanders, and this week, this campaign, this party, now belong to her.

And yet there in Philadelphia was her once-ferocious adversary, recipient of a warmly sympathetic ovation on Tuesday afternoon, when Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii put his name in nomination. Tears overcame him, and the crowd responded with respect and affection.

The Republican convention in Cleveland left many Americans with an unsettling awareness that these conventions are, for once, deeply consequential. They are not just midsummer pageants, the rallies before the homecoming game, where control of the White House involves a periodic governing adjustment a few degrees to the left, right or center. The bleak extremism of the Trump campaign seems to have put the fate of some basic democratic values in play — a tolerance of dissenting views, a willingness to compromise, the eternal search for common ground.

“It is no secret that Hillary Clinton and I disagree on a number of issues,” Mr. Sanders said on Monday night. “That is what this campaign has been about. That is what democracy is about,” he roared, underlining the word in a way that made clear the nature of the stakes. Big, not small. High, not low.