RIP To 'When They Go Low, We Go High'

This year’s Democratic National Convention had everything: A hype delegate roll call featuring a surprise Lil Jon performance circa 2002, a subtle dick joke expertly delivered by one former president aimed at another, more Republicans stanning a high-profile Democrat than what was once thought possible, Oprah Winfrey giving a pointed shoutout to childless cat ladies.

But now that the dust has settled and Vice President Kamala Harris has officially become the first Black and South Asian woman to accept a major political party’s nomination for president, the 2024 DNC will be remembered not only as a history-making event but also as the place where “When they go low, we go high” went to die.

Eight years ago, when Democrats gathered in Philadelphia to nominate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as their presidential nominee, then-first lady Michelle Obama uttered those seven ill-fated words — a well-intentioned but ultimately doomed philosophy that seemed to condone Democrats’ long history of bringing a squirt gun to a semiautomatic gun fight.

What followed was certainly not Michelle Obama’s fault — from normalizing former President Donald Trump’s racist, sexist, xenophobic rhetoric, to historically piss-poor messaging, to lukewarm attempts to fight for reproductive justice and combat anti-abortion lies, the nation’s progressive party has long been of the mindset that securing the moral high ground is enough to win.

Four years of Trump and a scourge of MAGA conspiracy theorists permeating the House and Senate proved that’s not the case.

But that was then. This is now.

Now, instead of placating the hypocritical, ill-intentioned Republican Party under the guise of “partisanship,” Democrats have finally decided to