Kamala Harris’ candidacy has healed the Democratic Party.

Kamala Harris understands the promise of a new beginning. For the past eight years, the Democratic Party has been torn by a split between two large, broad factions that formed around the respective 2016 primary campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. But at the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday night, the divide that had defined the party for nearly a decade seemed to have been healed, as speaker after speaker laid out nearly identical visions of policies that meet the needs of working families.

There was Joe Biden’s pro-business Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who promised Democrats an economy “free of monopolies” while telling a touching story about her father’s factory job being shipped overseas by wealthy Republicans. There was the left-wing luminary, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who fired off a blistering critique of Kamala’s “patriotic” critique – earned by protecting “our way of life” from “corporate greed.” The crowd was as enthusiastic about the appeals to Harris’s background as a prosecutor as her plans to protect abortion rights and help young families buy homes, but the centrality of the economic message was impossible to miss. No fewer than seven union leaders graced the stage over the course of the evening, most notably United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who brought the crowd to its feet by calling Trump a “strikebreaker” – a word that wasn’t even in the Democratic vocabulary at the last convention but has since become the ultimate liberal insult.

Eight years ago, anyone who accused the leadership of stoking racism to “divide and conquer” workers would have been attacked by an army of outraged people for downplaying the role of race in American history. When Fain said this on Monday night, a relaxed audience simply cheered. This was a party that was content with its stance of being pro-union, anti-monopoly and pro-family –all families—one whose paeans to retail workers, immigrants, and former Trump voters sounded natural and required no certificates of authenticity.

There were real differences in worldviews between the old Clinton and Sanders camps, but what made these ideologies so difficult to reconcile was their origin in an equally real social difference. For all the ink and pixels devoted to analyzing the 2016 campaign by race, gender, and class, the most glaring and persistent demographic divide was age. Hillary easily defeated Bernie among women overall, for example, despite Sanders beating her by 37 points among women under 30. Sanders’ idealism was inherently appealing to youth, whose energy and optimism have always been essential to any project of social change. But his appeals to economic justice were especially compelling to a generation that came into working age during the Great Recession, a time when the amount of student debt more than doubled. Even college graduates who made it to the economic lifeboat knew many people who hadn’t. Economic frustration was widespread, economic anxiety nearly universal. The dividing line between millennials and Generation X was not so much a calendar year as an economic order.

A common claim in American politics is that it is dangerous to rely on young voters when older voters turn out so much higher. But the young adults of the Bernie brigade are now middle-aged, and their economic views are no longer just one or two standard deviations from the mean. Biden knew this when he took office, and insisted on merging the Obama-Biden project with the Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren world. While Obama had recruited his economic team from Citigroup, Biden brought a whole host of former Warren staffers and academic experts onto his team. The result was not free of revolving door types, but it was not dominated by them either. Biden spent much more money on supporting the domestic labor market than Obama did, and he was much more aggressive in securing domestic manufacturing than his predecessor.

His project was criticized by economists who said Biden was spending too much money and indulging in irrational nostalgia for the old factories. But the project proved remarkably successful. The US experienced the world’s strongest and fastest recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. Inflation peaked earlier and was lower than in the rest of the developed world, and the country experienced its best job market in at least 50 years. The DNC’s economic policy rhetoric is bolstered by Harris’s economic program as well as her roster of advisers – she works with Brian Deese and Bharat Ramamurti of Biden’s National Economic Council. One is an Obama administration and BlackRock graduate, the other a former Warren staffer, and both have exceptional track records under Biden. And Harris’ economic program looks very convincing: She plans to use antitrust law to crack down on food and grocery price gouging; Make housing more affordable by building 3 million new homes and helping first-time buyers with a $25,000 down payment; and decimate child poverty by increasing the child tax credit to up to $6,000. per childThis project also has its naysayers – the same experts who condemned Biden all the way down to the best economy in the world.

Biden’s economic program gave Harris plenty of good material, but he never really managed to unite the Clinton and Sanders factions because he made a habit of distancing himself from the left on non-economic issues, such as attacking the “defund the police” activists of 2020 and mocking student protesters who criticized his support for the Israeli government’s spate of war crimes against the Palestinian people, international journalists and aid workers.

These students were still in elementary school when Bernie’s millennials occupied Wall Street – they represent a new generation of protest politics and a new source of conflict within the Democrats. Protesters demanding justice in Gaza made their presence felt on Monday night, unfurling a banner on the floor of the convention urging Biden to “stop arming Israel.” Other Democrats shouted “USA!” at them – an inappropriate response to the demand of those calling for an end to brutality against children.

But the Gaza protesters were more lenient with Harris than with Biden because, for some reason, she is widely seen as an opponent of the president’s Middle East policy. And while the rhetoric from the stage Monday night was grammatically no different from that of the Biden administration on Gaza, it was clearly different in tone. When Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock implored “the poor children of Israel,” And the poor children of Gaza … Israelis And Palestinians,” including the Palestinians in the moral calculation drew cheers from the crowd. One of AOC’s biggest applause lines came after she declared that Harris was “working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and bring hostages home.” Biden, of course, claims to be doing the same while fueling the violence with an endless stream of money and weapons—but it certainly sounded like AOC meant something more substantive by the line.

Harris may or may not disappoint AOC on Gaza. She must first defeat Trump, and the election remains close. But on Monday night at least, her Democratic Party seemed like a procession of cheerleaders, enraptured by the prospect of a leader who has spent more than a third of her life in the 21^st Century. On an evening organized as a farewell party for the Clinton-Biden generation of Democratic leaders, it was telling that Hillary Clinton’s most powerful remark – embedded in one of the most emotionally powerful speeches of the evening – was an overture to the future: “I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know that I was here at that moment, that we Here.”