Democrats Just Can't Quit Saving Our Souls
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton bring millenarianism—and messianism—back.
Say what you will about the otherwise calorie-lite first fortnight of the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz campaign, at least it eased for a moment the shrill catastrophizing that has marked Democratic messaging against former President Donald Trump over these past nine years.
"Gone are [President Joe] Biden's sober exhortations about the battle for the soul of the nation and a democracy under attack," The Washington Post observed earlier this month. "In its place are promises of 'freedom' and 'a brighter future' and, at times, audible giggles and laughter."
Well, the darkness came back with a vengeance in Chicago during Monday's opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Staged as a somewhat awkward and late-running "Thank you Joe" celebration, Day One demonstrated that the party remains in thrall both to the millenarian temptation and its flip side of messianic zeal.
"We're facing inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come," Biden barked, familiarly. "That's not hyperbole. I mean it literally. We're in a battle for the very soul of America."
As puzzling as it may seem to those scores of millions of us who never once voted for the man during his half-century in elected office, we heard serial testimonials during Biden's valedictory night about the president's soulcraft. "He has brought us together, and revived our country, and our country's soul," Convention Chair Minyon Moore claimed, improbably. Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) extolled the president's "determination to heal the soul of our nation." Daughter Ashley reassured us that "He never stops thinking about you."
If only these sentiments were merely the good-natured embellishments of retirement banquets. Democrats, as they did massively for former President Barack Obama and are already cranking up for Harris and Walz, positioned Biden as a benevolent, borderline omniscient parental figure, ennobling citizens with meaning through the munificence of their gaze.
"They saw us, they fought for us, they heard us," Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said of Biden and Harris. The 2024 ticket, Harrison continued, "will invest in our hopes, and our dreams, and our futures." Hillary Clinton posited that "We're not just electing a president. We are uplifting our nation." California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis testified of the Democratic nominee that "She cares. She cares so much that if you are lucky enough to be her friend, she called you on her birthday, and sometimes she sings to you."
It was only the Democrats' miserable show-running organization that prevented Biden from being serenaded by James Taylor with a rendition of "You've Got a Friend," a song he also performed for Obama at the 2012 Democratic convention, and that Carole King dedicated to both Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. These politicians seeking access to the nuclear codes are not some distant, calculating power-seekers, but rather neighborly types who just want to lend a hand!
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.), a Baptist pastor, was the most effective at tying together the Democratic strands of millenarianism and messianism. After busting Trump's chops for hawking Bibles ("he should try reading it"), and alleging that the GOP nominee "is a clear and present threat to the precious covenant we share with one another," Warnock reached for the stars.
"I'm convinced tonight that we can lift the broken even as we climb," he said. "I'm convinced tonight that we can heal sick bodies. We can heal the wounds that divide us. We can heal a planet in peril, we can heal the land."
George Will produced a memorably relevant metaphor in the 2014 Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. "The presidency," Will mused, "is like a soft leather glove, and it takes the shape of the hand that's put into it. And when a very big hand is put into it and stretches the glove—stretches the office—the glove never quite shrinks back to what it was. So we are all living today with an office enlarged permanently by Franklin Roosevelt."
So too goes the stretching of presidential speechcraft. Obama, with significantly more charisma than Biden or Harris could ever muster, expanded the modern rhetorical template with his 2008 convention speech, delivered against a backdrop of Greek columns in a 76,000-seat stadium, that climaxed with this rapturously hubristic close:
I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
Just prior to Obama's rise, Gene Healy warned us about executive branch omnipotence in his terrific book (and Reason cover story) The Cult of the Presidency. "The chief executive of the United States," Healy wrote, "is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He 'or she' is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America's shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He's also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth."
Obama's successor Trump, after having campaigned on a Great Man Theory of politics, continued the modern tradition of playing overpromiser in chief. "Dying industries will come roaring back to life," he predicted in his 2017 speech in front of a Joint Session of Congress. "Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land. Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and ultimately stop. And our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety and opportunity." Or not.
As Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward remarked at the time, "This weirdly grandiose rhetoric is a reflection of a weirdly grandiose bipartisan conception of the powers of the president….Presidents do not make the earth move. They do not turn back tides. They do not heal the sick, or eliminate vice, or remake the nation. They are humans with human failings, and one of those failings is the inability to resist taking a big slurp of their own Kool-Aid in moments of triumph."
Investing our very souls into the fortunes of politicians is not the habit of a healthy civic culture. The people who compete for the right to control $7 trillion of money extracted from taxpayers upon threat of imprisonment are not your friends. The executives who sit atop the Justice Department, who have control over history's most powerful military, are not responsible for your hopes, your dreams, your healing. Imbuing elected officials with such spiritual potency is a recipe for self-infantilization, disappointment, and terrible executive-branch governance.
Presidential candidates will only stop promising to heal our souls when we stop asking them to. The long, slow climb out of our national sump hole requires not only that we treat pompous pols with the derision they deserve, but that we stop pouring our own aspirations into the career prospects of the politically ambitious.
Democrats will spend these next three days scaring voters both about Trump's legitimately scary behavior, and such Potemkin threats as Project 2025 (or as Sen. Jim Clyburn (D–S.C.) called it last night, "Jim Crow 2.0"). Such darkness is the regrettably typical stuff of politics, on both sides. It's when they imagineer a government headed by Kamala Harris to be an agent of spiritual healing that you should really reach for the gong.
