💭 Chicago Blues: Next Up, a Make-or-Break Convention for the Democrats

Politics

The Republicans’ bizarro conclave in Milwaukee, for all the lip service it gave to “unity,” was cloaked in extremist rhetoric and the shadow of violence: Only two days before it began, an assassin tried and failed to kill the GOP nominee, Donald Trump. Next up, the Democrats. The party’s leaders, now in considerable disarray, will gather 90 miles south, in Chicago, for their national convention. And it’s not lost on historians that Grant Park, stretched along the shores of Lake Michigan in the city’s downtown Loop, has been a kind of American omphalos: a venue for celebration, surely, but also a portal to the belly of the American beast.

Vanity Fair     Jul 22, 2024