The Democrats’ “All-American” Convention

You Can’t Be All-American Without All of America

When we hear the phrase “all-American,” a certain image immediately tends to leap to mind. It is “traditional” small-town America. Somewhere vaguely midwestern or southern, perhaps at a Friday night high school football game with young white kids playing football and on the cheerleading squad. And certainly, this is all-American, but it is only a part of the tapestry of this country, a small slice of who we are as a nation.

The recently concluded Democratic convention did a good job in legitimizing the other parts of America that the mainstream media and Hollywood usually ignore, along with our political leaders. People of color have been part of America since its founding, not to mention those who were the inhabitants of America before the colonialists had any idea what was on this massive stretch of land from sea to shining sea.

The convention was a data point in a slow-moving story that has been evolving overtime, the inevitable inclusion of voices who were once marginalized, now fully centered in the American dream. Of course, as the first Black/South Asian woman to secure the nomination, Vice President Kamala Harris is the most noticed and significant sign of this sea change, but you could see it in the delegates and other attendees as well. People of all races locked arms in support of the Harris/Walz ticket, all sharing in the nerdy goofiness of events like the roll call vote.

It is important to acknowledge reality when we get swept up in moments like this. Not everyone is on board for a new, multicultural America. If the Democratic/progressive dream is a version of utopia, there is also a counterbalance on the right that wants a hellish dystopian nightmare. These are the people who want to “go back” to a mythical time where things were “good,” but what that meant in practice was the systematic subjugation of nonwhite races and women. The mental space the right fights for is one where straight white men of means have no limits and are rewarded for subjugating the rest of us. In that universe, men like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have the sole power to master the universe and order everyone else around.

But what the convention showed us in prime time, and what electoral results at both the state and federal level continue to regularly affirm, is that their perverse version of “all-American” is walking (slowly) toward extinction. Multiculturalism is inevitable, it’s just a matter of how hard those of us on the utopian side of things are willing to push for it – and it will be a fight.

Democrats smartly emphasized how intertwined progressive, liberal values are with the concept of “freedom,” and how that very notion has been hijacked by the authoritarian right. It’s absurd, Orwellian doublespeak to cloak the people who want to control bodies, invade bedrooms, and say who is allowed to love who, as a “freedom” ideology. For too long, Democrats have not kept up a sustained, repetitive drumbeat about owning freedom, allowing the right to wave the flag while curtailing freedom.

Perhaps it has taken the nightmare of Donald Trump in the White House, paired with his goons attacking our Capitol, to hammer the point home about who truly wants freedom and who wants enslavement. Whatever the motivation, it is time to seize control of this narrative and never let it go again.

The Founders of America had it right when they created this nation in response to British oppression but limited by the contours of the world at their time, they failed on execution. More than 180 years later at the March on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it was time to bring the nation’s actions up to the level laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Nearly six decades after his call to arms, we still have fallen short of the goal despite significant advances.

Redefining “All-American” to be more accurate for ALL Americans is key to getting there. We are closer now than we were a week ago. And we still have far to go.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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