The Battle for the Soul of America
Biden’s Speech Gave Us All the Feelings. But Can He Really Fix a Broken Country?
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So goes the old saying — and there was a vivid demonstration of it last night. America’s at a crossroads — a point from which there just might be no turning back. The depths of the abyss beckon. And yet Joe Biden rose to the occasion.
His speech at the DNC, accepting the nomination, was a remarkable moment. He spoke, impassioned, of how his decision to run was made when Neo-Nazis marched sneering and shouting through the streets, their twisted faces lit by torchlight. He reminded Americans — literally — that “silence is complicity.” He spoke of how grief has touched his life in many ways, and only tempered the steel of love and grace. He struggled for words at times, the childhood stutterer, obviously swayed by the gravity of the moment. And it was so powerful to see a man putting his many vulnerabilities on open display, right out there, in this age of chest-beating macho demagogues.
My friends, I’m about as hardened a skeptic of the insubstantial gloss and pretty vacancy of American politics that there is. But if you can get through even to me, and move me? I’m betting you hit Americans right down in the gut.
Biden didn’t have to say any of those things. But he did. That’s a measure of a person’s moral courage, goodness, decency, truth. Their humanity.
Joe Biden put his humanity front and center — and that’s crucial. Not just for the sake of some kind of campaign of feelings — but because America needs a humanist reformation. America’s long been the kind of society that laughs at people’s humanity — even now, many Americans reading this are rolling their eyes, trained and rewarded only to be bullies and narcissists. So you see how dangerous a gambit this is, to be vulnerable, to be deeply and unashamedly human — and what it tells us, too, about Biden’s resolve.
Let me explain that, in more sophisticated terms, by talking about the deeper challenges that Biden will now face.
Biden then spoke of “four crises” engulfing America. Smart — not least because I recently myself wrote about exactly the same idea (oh, hi Biden speechwriting team! Nice shoes…
