We’ll be reporting from Philadelphia all week and live-blogging each night. Check out all our dispatches from the Democratic convention here.
The theme of the first night of the Democratic National Convention was “United Together,” but there are still doubts about whether the party is going to achieve that goal. For our Tuesday morning podcast, Farai Chideya, Clare Malone, Galen Druke and Jody Avirgan got together to discuss the role Bernie Sanders and his supporters are playing at the DNC.
On Monday afternoon, a vocal group of California delegates booed during several speeches on the convention floor, and Sanders supporters and DNC protesters marched three and half miles in sweltering heat from Philadelphia’s City Hall to the Wells Fargo Arena, where the convention is being held. There, protesters heckled delegates as they entered the arena.
Although Pew Research Center reported that 90 percent of Sanders supporters plan to vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall, the protesters in Philadelphia represent a group of hard-core Sanders supporters who still don’t find that option palatable.
Click play above to hear the full podcast. Here are some highlights from our conversation.
Farai Chideya:
Once again I’m reminded that the American political system is in the minority globally. We are a two-party democracy in a world filled with multiparty democracies, and this year more than ever shows why that can be full of violent disagreement. You have the establishment GOP versus the Trump GOP, and here you‘ve had the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party and the Clinton wing, the left-centrist wing of the Democratic Party.
In the end it will all work out because it always does, because someone’s got to make the doughnuts and keep America running. But the fact is that American political opinion has to be pushed into a funnel of two parties, when, frankly, there are many factions of American political opinion, and I don’t think two parties adequately reflect that.
Clare Malone:
To me, talking to protesters outside, it really felt like the continuation of the Occupy movement. Not just the fact that there were tents in FDR Park in Philadelphia and people were sort of communally gathering and finding each other through activist pages. It was a good reminder that Sanders really is the fruit born of the Occupy movement a few years ago. People coming from Houston, people coming from Tennessee, that’s striking.
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