October 30, 2024 - 7:00am

Washington D.C.

The last place you’d worry about the death of American democracy is the one place everyone seemed terrified of losing it. On Tuesday, as the sun set on a spectacular autumn day in Washington, tens of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall to support Kamala Harris. The crowd was enormous — like a “mini inauguration”, as one local described it.

After snaking through the thicket of Democratic loyalists for over an hour, winding around the lines of people waiting to enter, I settled on the north side of the Washington Monument, near the White House where Harris would soon make her closing argument. I chose the spot for a reason. It was the exact vantage point from which I covered Donald Trump’s remarks at the Ellipse on 6 January, 2021.

Harris made this geographic parallel explicit. “Look, we know who Donald Trump is,” she told the audience. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.”

Trump’s speech took place on a wind-whipped morning in early winter; Harris spoke at night in perfect weather. Trump’s supporters were furious; Harris’s were optimistic. Both crowds were big — although Harris’s reported 75,000 attendees is an increase on the 53,000 who were present in 2021 — and both were convinced democracy was slipping through their fingers.

This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” said Harris yesterday. “It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.” Previous generations, Harris argued, “did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant”.

The biggest difference between the crowds was in regards to class. I’ve never covered a political rally whose attendees looked better off than Harris’s. Trump’s rallies are a mixed bag but the crowd which assembled peacefully at the Ellipse — before some members went on to violently breach the Capitol — was much more working-class. It was filled with people who felt censored by the Beltway-dwellers — the Beltway-dwellers who rallied for Harris on the same turf yesterday.

The suburbs of Washington D.C. are the wealthiest in the nation. They’re home to the bureaucrats and the consultants whose pay cheques will likely be steadier if Harris defeats Trump and Trumpism. It’s no surprise the Harris campaign drew such a large and enthusiastic crowd in this deep-blue enclave. It’s also no surprise that just as Harris addressed her audience, Joe Biden described Trump voters as “garbage” on a Vote Latino call. “The fact that someone disagrees with us doesn’t make them the enemy within,” the President said of Trump. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

Messages don’t get more mixed than this: Trump is a fascist and his supporters are garbage, but he’s also going to lose because the country is too decent and our disagreements are healthy. Adam Smith famously wrote to British MP John Sinclair in the midst of the American Revolution: “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” The question at any given moment, then, is whether the ruin is an existential threat.

The people I spoke with on 6 January believed it was, and they were angry. The people who turned out for Harris in Washington feel existentially threatened too, but are much more optimistic about the outcome. As I watched one elderly woman dance breezily to Beyoncé on Tuesday, wearing a pastel sweatshirt emblazoned with “MARTHA’S VINEYARD” on the front, Democrats’ optimism made a bit more sense. Material dread hits differently to its abstract equivalent.


Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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