Some people speak from their depths, and some speak from their shallows. Some speak to make a name in some political game they’re playing. But others speak from wells of a moral conviction. Their words are not applause lines; they endure.
Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic convention from his depths. His speech was not just meant to help the Democrats win an election; it was to identify a historical crisis and address a spiritual need. The former law professor spoke from his deep love for our Constitution, the whole intellectual and moral regime that has been built around it and the way it is now being betrayed by a self-indulgent narcissist.
His speech was fiercely pro-American and fiercely anti-Donald Trump, showing that, in fact, to be fiercely pro-American you have to be fiercely anti-Trump.
But Obama went far beyond the election to address the crisis of national faith beneath the crisis of politics. He spoke from Philadelphia, site of our true founding that, as flawed as it was, provided the moral source that points us toward justice.
He spoke to all those young people who, having drawn the lessons from the doleful events of the past few years and from the propaganda of their high school curricula, question whether America is so special after all. Obama held up, by contrast, those generations of African Americans who lived under the lash or the threat of the noose and who had every reason to lose faith in America but who did not lose faith and instead redoubled their efforts for its salvation.
His speech was not the only act of devotion at the Democratic convention this week. Bernie Sanders has served his version of socialism for 50 years. For several weeks last winter, it looked as if he would be the nominee and this convention would be his. That was snatched from him.
But he put his love of country above his dream and laid it all at the feet of Joe Biden. In his words, you could hear an old man’s awareness of this crisis of the moment and his surrender of self to the larger purpose. That was an impressive moral act.
Elizabeth Warren loves her plans, but in her speech, you heard not a wonk’s delight in technocracy but the emotional power of a thousand wrenching life stories told to her through tears on the campaign trail — of mothers defeated by the impossible demands of work and child care, of young men eviscerated by the self-doubt borne from joblessness. No politician is as good at translating the arcana of policy to the language of pain, suffering and relief.
There have been a lot of other speeches, and most of them have been instantly forgettable — lacking emotional honesty, philosophic depth or literary grace. I hope that in some future speech Kamala Harris moves beyond being a historic symbol and opens her heart and mind. Bill Clinton didn’t need to be there. Jeffrey Epstein’s buddy could have served himself and his party through a year of silence and penance.
And then there have been the “regular people.” The virtual convention is a great equalizer. The people who are usually just members of a cheering throng are being given more of a chance to tell us about their lives — a withering illness, the terrors of a drunken husband slashing them in the night, even just the awesomeness of fried calamari.
When you let actual people speak, what you get is not angry populism — that TV studio concoction — but hope in the struggle of everyday life.
And this is where I put the Bidens. One way to see Joe Biden is as the Hubert Humphrey of our day, a party fixture and a conventional pol. But that’s not quite right. The better way to see Biden is as a regular person who entered into politics but never quite got the game, who is goofy, heartfelt, unpolished, undisciplined, incapable of being manipulative — the way a lot of regular people actually are. Jill Biden in a classroom. Joe Biden on the train.
Some think Biden isn’t smart enough to handle the complexities of the presidency or is too old and has lost a step. But this convention, the presidency and life, in general, reveal depths or lack of depths.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the depth of Biden’s family values, the depth of his working-class roots, the fact that he is a person who did not emerge from the valley of grief with empty hands. Don’t underestimate the capacities of a person who does not see populations in the mass, or subjects in some study, but each person one by one.
When your democracy is in crisis, you don’t need cleverness above all or dexterity at playing the game. You need someone with the ability to stick himself down and hold fiercely onto what is precious.
Some young activists give the impression that they invented the struggle for justice and that everything that came before them is rotten. But the struggle is as old as America — 1776, 1860, 1965, 1989. Biden offers a return to normalcy, but in America the struggle is normalcy.