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August 30, 2024

But the hope I felt when she became the nominee has been curdling into despair over her refusal to allow a Palestinian to address the convention—and her continuing silence on Gaza.

Delegates wearing keffiyehs hold up signs with the names of people who died in the Gaza war on the second day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago on August 20, 2024.(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

In my first job out of college, in publishing, I learned the importance of flap copy—the text that introduces the book on its cover.

“If you get it right,” my boss said, “you’ll be amazed at how many reviewers will repeat exactly what you write.”

To my astonishment, this turned out to be true: If you wrote that a novel, say, was an unforgettable saga of three generations of women, lots of reviewers—not all but quite a few—would describe the novel as an unforgettable saga of three generations of women.

I thought of that lesson a lot over the past week, during and after the Democratic Convention.

The word on the cover, in this case, was “joy”—and I was astonished to see just how many pieces came out discussing this word. I saw it whooshing past on social media, including among my friends. I was a little embarrassed, as I was at my first job, when I realized how easily people could be manipulated. But I got it. I myself felt jaded, cynical—a lot of years have passed since I graduated from college, and I’ve gone through too many electoral disappointments to feel joy at the thought of most politicians—but I felt relief when Biden stepped aside. I felt hope when I thought that a second Trump presidency began to seem avoidable. And a week ago I felt optimism: I was excited by the selection of Tim Walz.

But as the days went by, the word “joy” made me cringe more and more—and not just because it was so overused. Every day during the convention, it became clearer that nothing was going to be said about the war on Gaza. It became clear that the Democrats, who were billing themselves as the party of anti-racism and inclusion, who even allowed anti-choice Republicans to speak, were not going to allow a single Palestinian or Muslim American to speak about a question of life and death. This was notable—given, as Jon Stewart said, that the convention “was only four nights, eight hours a night.” My optimism turned to amazement when I reflected on easy it would have been to do this. There are dozens of Muslim elected officials in the party. There are hundreds of people they could have found to mutter some anodyne, carefully vetted words about “pain” and “peace” and “both sides.”

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Cover of September 2024 Issue

For me and for the millions of Americans who care deeply about this horrible war, this refusal felt like contempt. And the tentative optimism I had felt at the beginning of the week started to curdle into emotions I didn’t want to feel—like despair, betrayal, rage. I wanted to keep these emotions to myself, because I’m aware that you’re not supposed to express them when demanding justice for marginalized groups. I remember so well how gay people were told not to “screech.” I remember the warnings to women not to be “shrill.” I remember how often black people are told not to be “angry.”

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But over the course of the week, that’s how I started to feel.

A little screechy!

A little shrill!

A little angry!

And I knew I wasn’t the only one. Great majorities of Democrats and Americans are horrified by what is happening in Gaza. We all know that it wouldn’t be happening without the support of the administration in which the vice president is the second-in-command. Does she dissent from her boss in any way? If so, she might have used some language that indicated, however politely, her distance from him. And if she thought it was too risky to express another opinion, she could have at least allowed Palestinian Americans four or five minutes. Her refusal tells me everything I need to know about who she is. And who she isn’t.

You’ll often hear that foreign policy is not a priority of Americans. That may be true of some foreign policy issues, but what most people on every side of this issue understand is that Israel-Palestine is not really foreign policy. We all know that this war is made in America: On Monday, Israel received its 500th shipment of bombs from the United States. We know how many billions of dollars in aid we send Israel, without the slightest restriction. We have all seen the horrifying footage of schools and hospitals and refugee camps blown up, and we all know where the bombs are made. And we have also seen a Democratic administration—the same administration in which Kamala Harris is the vice president—refuse to go through even the rhetorical motions of condemning this unbelievable horror.

We know that Palestine is an American problem. It’s not like Rwanda, say, or Bosnia. You can say that the United States could have stopped those genocides, but not that the United States caused or supported them. We were not actually sending billions of dollars to the Hutus or the Serbs. We were not handing out machetes in Kigali as we are handing out 2000-pound bombs to Israel. Slobodan Milosevic was not, like Benjamin Netanyahu, getting standing ovations in the United States Congress.

We also know that Palestine is a moral problem that goes to the heart of who we are—or who, at the convention, we were pretending to be. It is a problem that asks a harsh question: Do the principles to which the Democrats pay such joyous lip service, the principles that go to what we were always told was our nation’s very reason for existing, actually mean anything? After all, it’s not as if we didn’t hear about those principles at the convention. We heard a lot about freedom. We didn’t hear a lot about what that might look like for the Palestinians, or how many more decades they are expected to wait for it. We heard, ad nauseam, that Trump broke the law. We didn’t hear so much about how Israel’s constant defiance of international law—most recently, of a damning verdict from the International Court of Justice—makes a mockery of the entire idea of law and justice. We heard a lot about feminism, about the “glass ceiling” confronting powerful women like Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. We didn’t hear too much about the women of Gaza. We heard about “saving democracy.” We didn’t hear so much about bringing democracy to a trapped population that has no citizenship, no vote, and no civil rights.

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It’s not that people didn’t want to talk about these things. It’s that they were not allowed to.

All that was allowed was “joy.”

But joy was not the emotion I saw.

I saw self-righteousness, heartlessness. I saw people denouncing racism while cheering people responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people who were killed because they belong to another “race.” I saw a woman who insists that she be allowed to finish her sentences forbidding certain people to speak. And when I saw that callousness and cynicism, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. But one thing was sure: aAt the start of the convention, I was planning to vote for Kamala Harris. I hadn’t wanted my own convention bounce—the cautious hope I felt at the beginning of the week—to turn into a lead balloon.

Now? I’m still open to voting for her. There is still time for her to earn the votes of people for whom this war is not a side issue. Because however much they try to shut down our voices, the Palestinian cause is not—can never be—a foreign cause. It is our cause, and we aren’t going away just because we are ignored. The vice president can’t rely on silencing people, or speaking of Palestinian suffering only in the passive voice. At a certain point, she is going to have to address this issue. I hope that when she does, she and the whole Democratic Party can feel a deeper sense of joy: the joy that comes from embracing a just cause, and from proving that freedom and democracy are not just empty words.

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

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We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

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Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

Benjamin Moser

Benjamin Moser is a Nation contributing writer. His most recent book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2020.

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The complex Kennedy legacy has reactionary as well as liberal strands. Former Republican presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump shake hands during a campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23, 2024, in Glendale, Arizona. When he endorsed Donald Trump last Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) ignited a family drama. His famous family name is one of RFK Jr.’s main political assets, so it was not surprising that in explaining why he was suspending his campaign and backing Trump, he claimed the posthumous support of the two most famous members of his clan, his father, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), and his uncle John F. Kennedy (JFK), both assassinated in the 1960s. RFK Jr. claimed that the two deceased statesmen “are looking down right now and they are very, very proud.” This audacious and galling claim was too much for Kennedy’s family. Five of RFK Jr.’s siblings issued a statement saying the endorsement was a “a betrayal of the values our father and our family hold most dear.” This letter was signed by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy, and Rory Kennedy. In an interview with MSNBC, Kerry Kennedy said she was “outraged and disgusted by my brother’s gaudy and obscene embrace of Donald Trump.” She added that her father “would have detested almost everything Donald Trump represents if he was alive today.” Another RFK descendant, brother Max, wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that denounced RFK Jr.’s support of Trump as “sordid,” as well as “a hollow grab for power, a strategic attempt at relevance.” Max Kennedy noted that prior to backing Trump, his brother had unsuccessfully approached the Harris campaign with a quid pro quo, a possible endorsement in exchange for a position in her administration. It appears that Trump made the kind of deal RFK Jr. wanted, so if Trump returns to the White House there will be a position waiting for the black sheep of the Kennedy dynasty. RFK Jr. boasted to Tucker Carlson that he’ll be part of Trump’s transition team and “help pick the people who will be running the government.” Writing in The Washington Post, columnist Karen Tumulty lamented that “RFK Jr. has sullied the Kennedy name and the dimming aura of Camelot.” It’s undeniable that RFK Jr. has betrayed the liberalism that his family, in its best moments, embodied. Indeed, RFK Jr. also proved disloyal to his own stated values, since only a few years ago he condemned Trump as a “threat to democracy,” “a terrible president,” and “a sociopath” whose politics was based on “bigotry,” “hatred,” and “xenophobia.” Given this abrupt about-face, it’s not surprising that former close collaborators with RFK Jr., notably the investigative journalist Greg Palast, openly speak about the politician as someone who has “lost his mind” But as manifestly corrupt as RFK Jr.’s behavior is, we should be wary of the narrative of Camelot betrayed, which relies on the attractive fiction that there is a unified and unsullied Kennedy legacy. In truth, the Kennedys, who have been national figures for more than a century, have been all over the map politically—not always in admirable ways. The family have long been Democrats, but at times very reactionary ones, in a manner that does decidedly show an affinity for Trumpism. As the historian Garry Wills documented in his classic book The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982), the most searching of all books about the dynasty, the family’s patriarch, Joseph Kennedy (1888–1969), imprinted on his large brood a host of bad habits. The grandchild of Irish immigrants and son of a successful Boston politician, Kennedy rose to stratospheric wealth through the stock market and liquor (although not, contrary to popular myths, by bootlegging). But his plutocratic success didn’t win Kennedy many friends among Boston’s Brahmins—snooty WASPs who saw the Irish as inherently low-class. Stung by social rejection, Kennedy pursued alternative paths to status via Hollywood (taking, among many other starlets, Gloria Swanson as a mistress) and politics. Although a Democrat who was appointed as ambassador to England from 1938 to 1940, Kennedy fought bitterly with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During his disastrous term as ambassador, Kennedy threw in his lot with the aristocratic Cliveden set in England who wanted to accept Hitler as overlord of Europe in order to build a bulwark against communism. When his own government rejected this embrace of Nazi domination of Europe, Kennedy concluded that FDR’s mind had been poisoned by a cabal of wicked Jews (such as Felix Frankfurter and Sidney Hillman) who were dragging America to war. A primordial patriarch, Kennedy saw the world in belligerent macho terms: All men were rivals; all women existed for sexual conquest. He passed along this attitude to many of his sons, sometimes, as Wills and other historians have documented, sharing his mistresses with his boys. As Wills conclusively shows, this macho attitude was a pervasive part of the life of JFK and RFK (although RFK, who had a streak of devout Catholicism, was not a compulsive womanizer). During the 1950s both Kennedy brothers were classic Cold War militant anti-communists. JFK was pals with Joseph McCarthy, even going on double dates with the Wisconsin demagogue. RFK served on the staff of McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations and wanted to be chief counsel, a job that was won by Roy Cohn (who would go on to be Donald Trump’s mentor in the art of dirty politics). In 1960, JFK ran to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign policy, decrying a fictional missile gap. As Wills notes, the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs was a pure distillation of the Kennedy style of masculinist politics. The Bay of Pigs, Wills argues, was taken to heart because it was so clearly marked with the new traits of Kennedy’s own government. It had for its target the man who obsessed Kennedy. It had for its leader the ideal of Kennedy’s “best and brightest.” It was a chess game backed by daring—played mind to mind, macho to macho, charisma to charisma. It was a James Bond exploit blessed by Yale, a PT raid run by Ph.D.s. It was the very definition of the New Frontier. To the credit of the Kennedys, they also had a capacity to learn from their mistakes. During the Cuban missile crisis, JFK discovered how dangerous brinksmanship could be. A new openness to diplomacy can be heard in JFK’s address to American University, delivered on June 10, 1963, just five months before he was assassinated. JFK’s counterinsurgency program and meddling in South Vietnamese politics (including turning a blind eye to the assassination plot against President Ngo Dinh Diem) entangled the United States in a disastrous war. But by the late 1960s, both RFK Jr. and Edward Kennedy were outspoken critics of that war. Edward Kennedy went on to be an outstanding liberal senator, although his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a manslaughter case covered by Kennedy cronies, is a reminder of the family’s outrageous license. And Edward Kennedy remained unchecked in his sexual harassment of women, a lasting family trait. Last November, I appeared on the podcast Know Your Enemy to talk about Wills’s Kennedy Imprisonment. The show’s cohost Sam Adler-Bell noted that, on many points, the JFK in the book reminded him of Donald Trump: an aggressive and exploitive womanizer with vulgar taste who was saturated with media culture (Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in the case of JFK, reality TV in the case of Trump). The Kennedy presidency was the first really media-dominated administration, obsessed with “charisma” (an idea taken from the sociologist Max Weber but popularized in that era) and image-making (a concept expounded in 1962 by the historian Daniel J. Boorstin). The traits of charismatic leadership, as detailed by the sociologist Reinhard Bendix and distilled by Wills, are eerily prescient of the Trump era: a loose, personal style of leadership that prioritizes the loyalty of cronies and transactional deal-making above consensus building, democratic accountability, or following norms. Further, the aristocratic ideals JFK inherited from his perversely Anglophilic father, the belief that strong societies require great leaders who can transcend the blindness of the masses, was the seedbed of antidemocratic impulses that still bedevil American society. The Kennedys, therefore, have a mixed legacy. If they have been leaders of American liberalism, they’ve also at times embodied anti-liberal impulses that are antithetical to democracy. One way to describe RFK Jr.’s politics is that in endorsing Trump he is abandoning the liberalism of Edward Kennedy and reverting to the America First authoritarianism of his grandfather. It’s easy to understand why RFK, his siblings, and his cousins all remain haunted by the legacy of their family. To be the children of great men who were killed young is a heavy burden. This is part of what Wills means by the Kennedy imprisonment. But both the family and America would benefit from finding a way to escape this prison. The problem is not just that RFK Jr. has betrayed his father’s legacy, but also that he and America need to be more clear-eyed about how limited that legacy is. Camelot was always a myth. To move forward, that myth has to be left behind.

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Felecia Phillips Ollie DD (h.c.) is the inspiring leader and founder of The Equality Network LLC (TEN). With a background in coaching, travel, and a career in news, Felecia brings a unique perspective to promoting diversity and inclusion. Holding a Bachelor's Degree in English/Communications, she is passionate about creating a more inclusive future. From graduating from Mississippi Valley State University to leading initiatives like the Washington State Department of Ecology’s Equal Employment Opportunity Program, Felecia is dedicated to making a positive impact. Join her journey on our blog as she shares insights and leads the charge for equity through The Equality Network.

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