Plus: Democratic conformity. Underwhelming protests. A fact-checking farce.

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In today’s edition:

• Is Democrats’ secret weapon conformity? Or Doug Emhoff? Or — still — Obama?
• Anti-DNC protests ended up a farce, but ignoring them would be a tragedy
• Fact-checking some of history’s greatest speeches

Double-edged democracy (and Doug)

If you asked me which single person best explains Democrats’ monolithic backing of their nominee, Kamala Harris, I would probably say Nancy Pelosi.

Jason Willick’s somewhat headier answer is Alexis de Tocqueville.

Jason, an outsider dizzied by the Democrats’ lockstep insistence that Joe Biden “passed the torch” willingly and that Harris is the perfect candidate, past doubts be damned, dives into the writing of the 19th-century political theorist to figure out what’s up.

Pulling enough quotes to fill an AP U.S. History paper, Jason concludes that “controlling political thought can be ugly, and its results surreal — but Tocqueville saw that monopolizing opinion was inseparable from mass democracy.”

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Democrats understand that idea much more than Republicans do and have wielded conformity as a powerful weapon; Jason just warns them to remember that it’s double-edged, because a democratic majority is a fickle thing.

(For more on Democrats’ unitary energy, listen to our columnists in Chicago on the latest “Impromptu” podcast. They discuss how everyone is on the same page — and how, interestingly, that page doesn’t dwell on Harris being a woman.)

After Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, the party’s real secret weapon might be Doug Emhoff, the vice president’s husband.

“American men need to see Harris through her husband’s adoring eyes, without dismissing Emhoff as the kind of obsequious male figure they don’t really trust,” Matt Bai wrote in pre-speech expectations for the second gentleman. Based on the in-person and online responses to Emhoff’s remarks, he achieved just that.

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But at the end of the day, Doug (or “Dooouuug”), it’s still Barack Obama’s party.

The former president isn’t necessarily pulling strings or anything — see above: Pelosi has that covered! — but Jim Geraghty writes that Obama’s rapturous reception in Chicago shows that........

© Washington Post