Conventional Wisdom: What Anti-capitalists in Cleveland Portend for Philadelphia

“The joke in the past few days had been that there were 10 cops for every reporter,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi observed of the Republican National Convention, “and 10 reporters for every protester.” 

The math sounds about right to me. Cleveland Public Square, a newly christened space just a few blocks from the convention hall, was an epicenter for the handful of demonstrators the city had counted on arriving in droves. It seems the avoidance of a deadlocked convention, in addition to a summer of so many wicked events, helped to depress the number of protestors who made the trip to Cleveland. 

Still, the square hosted its share of the angry, anxious, and agitated over the course of the convention, including a small rabble I watched troop about for some time, separated from a melee of cameramen by a cordon of cops who outnumbered the demonstrators seven to one.  By the looks of the group’s members—ink-black shirts, anti-fascist flags, a few disguised faces—I assumed they were anarchists, but a college-aged participant named Ben quickly corrected me. “We’re a collective,” he said, one that included communists and socialists as well as anarchists. “We have our disagreements,” he admitted, “but we have a common goal, and that is to take down a capitalist system.”

Conventions always attract youthful idealists enamored by the possibility of blowing up “The System,” but what should give Democrats pause as their own convention gets underway this week is how the incendiary bent of certain young people, like Ben, reflects a deep and relatively recent dissatisfaction with the world that’s been given them. 

A native of rural Ohio who dropped out of college in order to “find employment,” Ben admitted that he voted for Barack Obama in 2012. “I don’t hate him,” he assured me, but between then and now, he has clearly become disillusioned by the President’s leadership. Obama represents “the status quo,” Ben said, a state of affairs, as he sees it, in which all but an elite few “live in [a] society that is rigged against us.” The disenchantment took some time, but when the President “signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that was the death nail in the coffin for me.” A nail for President Obama and, one suspects, for mainstream politics.

Reflecting on my chat with Ben as well as the many other conversations I had at the Republican convention, I take away one central lesson: not that some specific economic system is rising up to challenge democratic capitalism—even Ben’s “collective” can’t agree on a replacement—but that voters across the political spectrum are increasingly convinced that the status quo, however they see it, is broken beyond repair. When someone like Ben says that “capitalism represents the global elite” or that the system is “rigged in favor of the 1 percent” or that politicians are “gonna screw us over one way or another,” his language is little different from so many Trump supporters I spoke with. They may not see eye-to-eye with Ben on the remedy, but both sides agree it must be radical. 

The Conventional Wisdom series features John Paul Rollert’s dispatches from the 2016 Republican and Democratic national conventions. You can see more Conventional Wisdom posts here. If you want to engage the discussion, tweet John Paul @jprollert.