The Other Left-Wing Convention

As I filed into the Friends Center—the self-declared "Quaker Hub for Peace and Justice in Philadelphia"—on Wednesday evening, I was struck with an instant feeling of familiarity. The flyers on the wall of the parish house promoting various social justice causes; the severe-looking woman with close-cropped hair, decked out in her finest overalls (at events such as these, it's the men who sport the ponytails) and the meeting house itself, with its creaky pews and simple, unadorned aesthetic. It hit me almost immediately: I felt like I was back at the First Unitarian Church of Providence, which I attended weekly when I was growing up. I could almost taste the stale pretzels and warm apple juice that was doled out during Sunday school.

But the event here was not explicitly religious—or rather, it was based on a different sort of faith. The Friends Center played host to a sort of counter-convention to the Democratic party gala that was happening simultaneously just a few miles to the south. Several hundred socialists, Green party activists, union organizers, and other assorted gadflies had gathered to listen to some leftists panels, including one featuring Jill Stein, the Green party's presidential candidate. They also came to vent their collective spleen; as one attendee shouted during a supposed question and answer session, we need to "shut shit down!" Her call for disobedience was greeted with rabid applause.

The contrasts between the two confabs were striking. The putatively progressive Democrats held their convention in a lavish venue named for America's third largest bank by assets, outside of which they could sip $7 Coors Lights at the "Xfinity Center" bar; the Friends Center, meanwhile, is one of Philadelphia's oldest progressive institutions, having been founded in 1856. The Democrats had Lenny Kravitz, Sigourney Weaver, and Lena Dunham; the Friends Center hosted a union leader who warned the audience that the "building trades [unions] have been infiltrated" by right-wingers. The Democrats featured endless paeans to Hillary Clinton's compassion and particular concern for children; the Friends Center hosted the daughter of Berta Caceres, a Honduran activist who was murdered in 2015. Caceres's daughter's host charged that Clinton was indirectly responsible for Caceres's death, because of the former secretary of state's support for "neoliberalism" in Central America.

The star of the show was undoubtedly Stein, the medical doctor and long-time political activist. Apparently already comfortable in her role as a politician—she showed up late for her panel, and was greeted by uproarious applause when she made a dramatic entrance—Stein made a hard pitch for disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters.

"Bernie launched [the socialist] agenda," she said, and now "we're talking the baton from Bernie and continuing to run with it." As a fellow panelist, the radical journalist Chris Hedges, sat glowering next to her, the lean, grey-haired Stein exhorted that it's "time to say goodbye to the two zombie political parties." The doctor had particular contempt for the Democratic party; she bemoaned its "militarism" (a particularly potent charge on the night that the Democrats featured several military leaders as speakers) and labeled it "counter-revolutionary."