Biden is out. Here's the case for an open convention.

Here's why an open convention is good for everyone -- including Kamala Harris

I wrote a version of this argument on July 2, before we started Drop Site News, but wanted to re-up it now that Biden has stepped aside. The version I emailed out earlier today was published before Biden endorsed Harris for president. It has since been updated. Krystal Ball and I discussed Biden’s announcement on Breaking Points.

The question now is whether the torch will be handed directly to Kamala Harris or whether she’ll have to fight for it at the convention. Biden did not endorse Harris in his letter announcing his decision, instead only thanking her for her counsel. But in a follow-up statement, he endorsed her for president.

The conventional wisdom is that an open convention is simply never going to happen, and if it does it will be a disaster for Democrats — weeks of infighting and chaos that’ll drag the party down.

But that argument is merely a mix of assumption and assertion. With a little imagination, that chaos could be turned toward the party’s advantage at a time when it’s desperately needed. The argument for coronating Kamala Harris doesn’t consider how it would look for a party that is in the grip of a legitimacy crisis—Democratic elites were the last in the country to acknowledge Biden’s frailty—to foist a new nominee on the public.

If Kamala Harris wants the nomination, and wants it to be worth anything, she has to at least show that she fought for it and won it cleanly. And the only way to do that is at an open convention. It just so happens Democrats are scheduled to meet to nominate a presidential candidate in Chicago next month. That process could help to resolve the legitimacy crisis by at least offering an attempt at something like a participatory democratic process.

The obvious counter argument is that, well, a convention of delegates isn’t really democracy. These are party elites and activists, most of them aligned with the party establishment. But look: The party’s left flank long ago gave up the dream they’d nominate a left-leaning candidate this cycle. At this point, their only real goal is to beat Trump. And democracy is more than just the procedural trappings of elections. (A recent survey, for instance, found that Chinese people were more likely to say they lived in a democracy than Americans were.) And the delegates themselves are not the party elites, they are rank-and-file activists, many of them the kind of struggling, middle- and working-class people the party needs to appeal to.

The key for an open convention to be legitimate in the eyes of the public is that it has to feel open. If the various candidates and their allies are on TV regularly and giving speeches on their behalf, with regular breaking-news around endorsements from big-wigs, unions, environmental groups, etc., it will feel like what we understand today as authentically real and democratic: reality TV. The spectacle will captivate global attention and create a bond between the viewer and the stars of the spectacle—especially if it seems like social media sentiment is playing a real role in how things are unfolding. If that sentiment is seen as helping choose the next nominee, Trump is toast. If Democratic bosses anoint somebody, that person is toast. 

Linger on the reality TV point for a moment. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Reality TV played, I think, the leading role in electing Trump president. Celebrity Apprentice was the most watched show on television, and its tens of millions of viewers (mis)understood that Trump was the person he played on that show. Reality TV is the primary building block of our culture today, for better or for worse. An open convention with confessional-esque interviews and spinoff podcasts is what Democrats need to become one with the public again.

Fans of reality TV today consider themselves more than passive viewers. The opinions of the audience genuinely do influence the story lines, as the characters are aware of the public sentiment and respond to it, both on the show and on social media, in blogs, in celebrity news outlets, etc. That’s a version of democracy, and it produces a loyalty and a parasocial relationship between the audience and the stars that is understood only by a slim minority of today’s savvier politicians. The party that recreates that relationship on a national scale will reap the kind of rewards that took Bravo from a backwater to a cultural phenomenon.

For party leaders, an open convention is a nightmare, because it means briefly losing control. But come on, Jack: Everybody in contention is a reliable member of the party establishment. You’re not even risking anything.

Chicago can be the moment Democrats return the party to the people. Sort of. Like a good reality TV series, we’ll know a bunch of it is staged and scripted, but we’ll happily believe that some of it is real. At least give us that—and then let’s watch what happens live.