Democrats emerged mostly united from the progressive Netroots Nation event this weekend in New Orleans.

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The gathering, which brought together nearly a dozen potential Democratic presidential candidates who rallied around a broadly similar progressive program at the event which drew over 3,000 people from across the country.



The moderate speaker, congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, who spoke last month at a convention convened by the centrist thinktank Third Way, reaffirmed his support for Medicare for All and legalizing marijuana while the most leftwing, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a call for Democratic unity.

Across the sprawling convention center, Democratic operatives and activists lounged on couches making social visits while panels were held on a host of topics ranging from the most effective ways to use text messaging as a campaign tactic to a session about “menstrual equity”. The conference had the ambience of a family reunion. Activists mourned longtime attendees who had died in the past year and shared obscure inside jokes at a beer soaked pub quiz inside the main hall.

Despite the broad policy consensus, questions of race and gender still remained for attendees to grapple with.

“I’ve got nothing against old, white men,” Mike Lux, a veteran progressive activist, told the crowd Saturday. “Some of my best friends are old, white men. But we’ve got way too many of them in the House and the Senate.”

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Organizers boasted that two-thirds of the speakers were people of color, 63% were women and a quarter identified as LGBT. Those speaking in the main hall almost seemed contractually obliged to mention Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate in Georgia who would be the first black female governor in America if elected.

The shift could be seen around the event where a stray Bernie Sanders bumper sticker might be found stuck to the back of a Macbook but attendees were far more likely to wear a T-shirt bearing the image of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “Alexandria the Great” and issues of racial and economic justice were viewed as fundamentally interwound.

“I have a problem with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” said Senator Kamala Harris of California on Friday. “Let’s be clear – when people say that, it’s a pejorative. That phrase is used to divide and used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It’s used to try and shut us up.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Garcia, gubernatorial candidate for Arizona, at the Netroots Nation. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

The conference which has a history of disruption by Black Lives Matter activists saw a similar protest on Saturday. But while past events saw activists demand that presidential candidates explicitly state that “Black Lives Matter,” those crowding the stage holding signs saying “#blackasscaucus” were focused on administrative issues.

The protesters accused organizers of not inviting enough local activists and demanded that Netroots include them in planning, and better schedule panels and sessions led by people of color, so that they did not conflict with each other.

“I see some of you are uncomfortable. Your white fragility is showing. Your white tears are showing – I’m ready to drink them,” one activist told the crowd.

When they finished, Rev Angel Kyodo Williams, a Zen Buddhist priest who appeared periodically throughout the conference to lead participants in deep breathing exercises, returned to the stage afterward to praise the room for “holding space for protest”. She asked the crowd to repeat her: “we are going to change it”.

“If we can’t change it amongst ourselves at the biggest progressive activists conference how are we going to change it anywhere else?” she told them.

Yet, despite these occasional cracks in the facade, there remained a strong political and policy consensus at the event. As New York mayor Bill DeBlasio told attendees “it’s not a time for moderation: It’s a time for progressives to double down on what we believe in.” And Ryan told the Guardian that while Third Way had “some creative ideas that we should all look at that can very easily become part of a progressive agenda,” in his opinion “the energy in the party is [at Netroots.]”

Ocasio-Cortez, who has raised ire in some circles by promoting primary challenges against a number of veteran Democratic elected officials, appealed for unity.

“Discourse is not discord,” insisted the Democratic nominee for Congress in a New York district. “Family can argue and that’s alright because we come out healthier on the other end.”

Ocasio-Cortez who campaigned as an unapologetic socialist, tried firmly to root her views into the history of the Democratic Party and depicting them as a natural evolution from the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

“These are not new ideas,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “We are picking up where we last left off, when we were last our most powerful, when we were our last greatest. It’s time to own that our party was the one of the Great Society, of the New Deal, of the Civil Rights Act. That’s our party. That’s who we are. It’s time for us to come home.”