Saturday in the Park

This year’s Ozy Fest was the third such gathering. It promised all the political and intellectual engagement you can handle—provided you could afford the $79 admission. That’s just the start, though. There are two further tiers of more expensive VIP tickets, with perks ranging from roving masseuses to what appears to be a table in one of the restricted tents full of consumer electronics handed out as party favors. It can safely be assumed that dwellers in the ritzy apartment buildings lining the park were all too happy to pay top dollar to see the top speaker, Hillary Clinton.

Ozy Fest has been described by Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson as “TED meets Coachella,” which is a sunny way of describing this cultural hell of our own making. Aside from Clinton, such notable figures as the actress and #MeToo icon Rose McGowan, Karl Rove, comedian Chelsea Handler, Democratic National Committee head Tom Perez, and a contestant from RuPaul’s Drag Race will grace the dais, along with hipster bands Passion Pit and Young the Giant and the rapper Common.

Ozy, to its credit, isn’t content to exist entirely in a liberal bubble. In fact, watching the unbalanced Chelsea Handler on stage yelling “Who gives a s—?” at Karl Rove seems like a fiendish plan to make even a crowd full of liberals sympathize with the Republican uber-operative (believed by left-conspiracists to have personally reprogrammed all of Ohio’s voting machines in the 2004 election). At one point on Saturday afternoon, there’s even an all-GOP panel featuting anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and soon-to-be-ex-congressman Mark Sanford.

Norquist is a veteran of the festival circuit, having gained notoriety as one of the few prominent right-wingers to be a regular at the Burning Man gatherings in the Nevada desert. A former NRA board member, Norquist has carefully honed his pitch to liberal crowds, knowing full well his message of more guns and lower taxes goes down easier if it’s paired with his emphatic support of legal weed.

But with Norquist and Sanford’s panel sandwiched between a drag queen dating game and an interview with the DNC’s Tom Perez, the liberal crowd grows restless. Moderator Fay Schlesinger, Ozy Media’s managing editor, gamely tries to engage the crowd by getting Norquist to bash Trump’s protectionist trade policies. It’s not that Norquist isn’t a staunch free trade advocate, but he expends considerable effort correcting Schlesinger’s misapprehension of how Trump’s tariffs are supposed to work before he can explain what’s wrong with them. Sanford shouldn’t, in theory, have to prove his bona fides with the crowd. His principled opposition to Trump meant that he lost a Republican primary election earlier this year.

However, as the talk turns to Trump’s irresponsible fiscal policy of increased spending paired with tax cuts, you can see the line at the dragonfruit juice stand quickly grow longer. New York liberals don’t want to hear Republicans, no matter how critical of Trump they are, tell them that spending restraint is of the utmost importance. The very notion prompts an indignant rant from moderator Schlesinger in the form of aquestion.

“So what would you cut?” she says to Sanford and Norquist. “Because I think that’s where the solutions really lie. And I’m really curious to see what you think because I agree there is a lot of government spending in the form of contracts for private military contractors and in the form of subsidies for oil companies . . . and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on cutting social programs that Americans have paid into. I look at my checks every two weeks, and I pay a lot of money into Social Security and Medicare, and when you have lawmakers specifically targeting those issues . . . that message is something very negative to the American people.”

Norquist, perhaps not wanting to completely alienate the crowd, cheerfully stumbles through an answer about the difficulty of entitlement reform, but doesn’t get at the fundamental feebleness of Schlesinger’s premise. Credible estimates of the unfunded liabilities of America’s entitlement programs range from about $30 trillion to $130 trillion. No other line of federal spending, let alone comparatively trifling spending on oil subsidies and Pizza Huts at military installations in Afghanistan, represents more than a drop in this bucket. Further, this crushing debt is the result of Americans not paying into these programs nearly as much as they take out. Schlesinger gets loud

applause nonetheless.

Sanford and Norquist clear the stage for the DNC’s Tom Perez, who’s being interviewed by CNN’s Dana Bash. Bash asks Perez a series of tough questions about the electoral viability of the sharp ideological turn to the left among certain Democratic candidates and voters. Perez deftly dodges them. On the one hand, the math behind the “Medicare for All” that the left keeps demanding is impossible. On the other, all of the organizing energy for Democrats is among people who buy into this fantasy. Fortunately for Perez, he can find common ground on another topic. Russia has gone from a place on the map to a sort of political incantation.

“Russia is our most serious adversary. [Trump] should be up there demanding action. [Trump] should have handed the indictments to Putin. He should be holding them accountable, whether it’s Crimea, whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s the interference in our democracy,” says an impassioned Perez. Without letting Trump off the hook for the troubling tongue baths he’s given Putin, in terms of actual policy, the lack of action on all of these issues is a big indictment of the previous administration as well, never mind the irony of Obama’s secretary of Labor repeating Mitt Romney’s 2012 foreign policy talking points.

But ultimately, the workaday partisan concerns of Perez and some token Republicans can’t begin to generate the enthusiasm the crowd has for Rose McGowan. The former star of Charmed and Grindhouse has become a figure of cultural importance in the wake of her battle against accused Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein. She speaks with the passion of a woman who has been liberated, and nearly every remark is greeted by whoops and hollers.

Her story is a bracing one. Long before she was abused in Hollywood, she was raised in a cult that sexualized children. She pulls no punches, telling the crowd flatly that Weinstein was hard to bring to justice because “Democrats protected him.” She also spins a conspiracy theory (featuring ex-Mossad agents) about her bust for cocaine possession on a flight to appear at the Women’s March in D.C. last year. McGowan is received as a hero, however imperfect.

Coming not long after McGowan’s testimony, however, there’s also a hero’s welcome for the day’s headliner, Hillary Clinton. If you sense a jarring juxtaposition between the expressions of support for McGowan and a woman who was involved in shutting up women who accused her powerful husband of sexual harassment and worse—well, shut up and enjoy your free massage and dragonfruit juice.

Clinton seems happy and relaxed and is no doubt comfortable, wearing an exceedingly billowy outfit that sparks a lot of chatter because no one can quite describe it. Caftan? Muumuu? She cut a hole for her head in the expensive top sheet from wherever she slept in the Hamptons the previous night? Of course, she has no reason not to be at ease. She’s being interviewed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the stunning billionaire widow of the late iPhone inventor and, not coincidentally, an investor in Ozy Media. Mrs. Jobs has no intention of getting Mrs. Clinton to bare her soul.

When someone from the crowd yells something about the popular vote winner being prevented from becoming president, Jobs stops and addresses the point directly. “We should talk later about changing the Electoral College. I appreciate it, and as a Californian I would like my vote to count,” she says to cheers, though it’s hard to imagine finding much nationwide sympathy for the fact that the Constitution is limiting the political influence of rich Californians.

Perhaps because Jobs is lobbing them slow and over the middle, Clinton lets the political mask drop a bit. Once she gets through the predictable complaints about Russia, she speaks with disarming warmth, particularly about the effects of Trump’s immigration policy. “We have decades and decades of proof that absorbing immigrants, creating opportunities . . . and opening the doors has been to our advantage,” she says. And when she appeals for help in her efforts to get airline flights to reunite families separated by Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, the crowd seems genuinely moved.

But if it’s unclear what the point of all this is, at the end of the panel the stage opens up behind Jobs and Clinton and a carefully edited video presentation highlights and tallies the thousands of #resistance efforts and marches in states across the country. Many people have paid good money to attend what is ultimately an elaborate attempt to make Clinton feel better about failing to campaign in Wisconsin. Though not everyone is part of the support group: A heckler can be heard bellowing, “Lock her up!”

If outdoor political gatherings and intellectual-ish panel discussions are becoming the arena rock of the 21st century, the guy in the back of the crowd yelling “lock her up” is the drunk fan at every concert demanding a replay of the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic: “Free Bird!”