"In the mourning we find hope": Biden's somber recast of Obama's story of America

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In his remarks on this week's civil unrest and Trump's authoritarian response today, Biden hit some vitally right notes.  He committed himself as president to obtaining equal justice for all. He spotlighted the depravity of Trump's words and actions in response to this week's demonstrations, accurately recalling their echoes of the vicious police chiefs who assaulted the civil rights demonstrators of the 60s. He spoke of his own crushing personal losses and, with humility and obvious sincerity, modeled the empathy that Trump lacks for suffering triggered by economic inequality and racism. 

Most strikingly to me, he recast Obama's heroic narrative of American history in somber tones even as he echoed Obama's signature tropes -- the pursuit of a more perfect union, the arc of history that bends toward justice.

Obama's seductive love for America

The irony in this "Obama doesn't love America" crap is that Obama got himself elected by holding up  to Americans a flattering mirror that was suited to the moment.

The national narrative that Obama put forward in 2007/8 had two salient points (okay, may it had three or four or five, but two come to mind here). It was, first, a bid to move the political center to the left -- to cast American history as a progression in which Americans at various crux points demanded and obtained new common investments in shared shared prosperity and new extensions of equal opportunity to an ever-widening and more inclusive circle -- African Americans, women, gays. In Obama's telling, the nation had veered off-course for eight or thirty years, but democratic self-correction was also part of the long historical pattern and would come with him.

That's a kind of "whig history" for America, and it resonated in the wake of a disastrous conservative presidency.  It was also a message essentially common to all Democrats and would have worked for almost any Democrat.

The real contest in 2008 was in the Democratic primary, and perhaps Obama beat Hillary by making this whig history sing, tapping a deep American mysticism previously tapped by Lincoln and -- somewhat more caustically -- by Martin Luther King. This second element was captured by Obama's "more perfect union" trope.  That is: America's founding documents expressed principles for the best ordering of human society, and while the nation has never lived up to these ideals, its democratic engine draws it ever closer -- ever more perfect, never perfected. Those ever-widening circles of inclusive opportunity are bending the arc of history toward justice. Martin Luther's famous "check" of equal opportunity, returned for insufficient funds, is being paid on a very long mortgage schedule.