When did you last hear a speech that made you hopeful about the future?
Here in California, speeches have not played much of a role in the campaign for governor. Instead, the primary has been a roller coaster of scandals, omnipresent ads, shout-filled debates, focus-grouped talking points, podcast appearances and the all-too-familiar pursuit of viral moments.
The net result is that it feels as if you simultaneously know a lot and nothing at all about the candidates. Steve Hilton is a British-born Fox News personality who talks up California while talking down its big government. Tom Steyer is a billionaire investor who supports a progressive wish list. Xavier Becerra is either credentialed or disqualified by his lengthy government experience. Katie Porter is either celebrated or scorned for her sharp elbows.
But where do these people want to lead us, and why?
The last Californian who ascended to the height of American politics was propelled by a speech. In 1964, Ronald Reagan was an out-of-work actor recently let go by General Electric. Then he delivered a nationally televised speech — “A Time for Choosing” — that repackaged conservatism as a blend of common sense, unabashed religiosity and patriotic nostalgia; it was a story that vaulted him to the governor’s mansion and ultimately the White House. Forty years later, Barack Obama, then a state senator, had a similar success with his speech to the Democratic National Convention by casting liberalism and multiracial solidarity as a unifying formula for change.
Reagan and Mr. Obama spoke their parties out of the political wilderness. Democrats today should recall that the pathway from their 2004 heartbreak to a 2008 landslide depended upon more than policy proposals or ideological positioning: It was forged through storytelling about American identity.
The alchemy of democracy is the interplay between movements and power, culture and politics. Try, for a moment, to imagine the Reagan revolution or the Obama coalition without the speeches that defined them. Or try to imagine the culture war without the grievance-filled language of Pat Buchanan, the civil rights movement without the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. or abolitionism without the moral clarity of Frederick Douglass. History shows us that the words spoken by Americans matter — persuading, mobilizing and ultimately remaking the country itself.
In recent years, technology has fractured how we consume information. Whereas radio prized plain-spoken explanation and television elevated charisma, the internet created infinite competition for our attention. Then social media sorted us into algorithmically polarized tribes. Political speech is now consumed in bite-size pieces designed to motivate or trigger the consumer. Storytelling has been eclipsed by viral moments and images. With artificial intelligence, human beings are no longer even needed to sustain this feedback loop.
Much has been lost in the process: the capacity to make, or listen to, an entire argument. This has limited our experience of opposing views while making our own arguments poorer because they are often designed not to persuade but purely to reinforce pre-existing views. In this closing stretch of the California primary, every communication I see on a screen seems designed to convince me that a candidate either shares my views or cannot be trusted to do so.
It is no coincidence that Donald Trump has dominated this era. Like that of other authoritarians, his emergence owed something to his ability to frighten and embolden a crowd, attacking a vast and amorphous Other. But it also depended on the breakdown of our capacity to speak to one another, to share a national identity or even to inhabit the same reality.
Even those who disagree with the president often feel compelled to mimic his manner or forms of communication. Democrats from Hillary Clinton to Gavin Newsom have fired back at him on social media. Podcasts and YouTube shows have become a proving ground for presidential aspirants. Strategists pine for a communicator who can sell popular policy in pithy videos.
Of course, it makes sense to reach voters where they are. But while speeches can summon Americans to a higher purpose, our current politics is lowering our expectations not just for the president but also for ourselves. Donald Trump is not simply a conductor of our national discourse: He is a mirror held up to the nation.
The closing argument at the Constitutional Convention came from Benjamin Franklin. His speech defended the virtue of compromise itself. In it, he implored the delegates to rally behind an imperfect document as the best possible result. He also offered a warning. The new government “can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
The Constitution’s compromises made the United States possible, but they also left the question of American identity unsettled. Are we a multiracial democracy committed to the ideal of equality for all? Or are we, as JD Vance argued last year, not a nation defined by a creed, but rather “a particular place, with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life”?
The battle between these stories has shaped our politics for 250 years. And Mr. Trump has tapped into currents that have been there all along: populist grievances of the working class; white Christian nationalism that delegitimizes self-criticism; the demonization of immigrants, be they Irish, Chinese, Salvadoran or Somali; the deification of wealth; and distrust of government. These currents converge in a story of exceptionalism as old as the nation itself: America feels entitled to do whatever it wants to people within our borders, or to others beyond them.
Politics feels existential today in part because Mr. Trump has sought to declare this battle over: He and his cronies have won. Power is concentrated in the hands of a strongman who starts wars and builds monuments to himself. The rich are looting the nation and its unraveling empire while most people cannot afford a tank of gas or imagine a future that is better for their children.
This has opened a gap between the way most people feel and how most politicians communicate. In California, it has been dispiriting to watch candidates shout at each other about their credentials to reform housing laws while investors make billions off an A.I. boom that could wipe out jobs needed to pay rent. Our political debates feel divorced from how power functions, apportioning shrinking resources while Wall Street and Silicon Valley make record profits.
We live in a cynical time, surrounded by forces that feel beyond our control. The world spirals into chaos, the algorithm shapes what we see, the oligarchy profits while people are impoverished, and our kids make friends with chatbots. Corruption, as Franklin worried, abounds.
Through it all, Democrats have failed to tell a coherent story about what is happening to America, why it matters and how we can get out of this spiral. In times like this, we need leaders who tell us hard truths while insisting that the present state of our politics is not permanent. The people don’t need despotic government, but they do need someone to tell them how to get out from under it.
We are getting close to the despotism Franklin feared. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’ll get through this only if we have leaders who call on us to believe in something bigger than ourselves.
Ironically, California disproves the MAGA story that seeks to govern our lives. We are not a particular place: At the time of America’s founding, much of what we now know as California was a distant province of the Spanish empire, populated by Indigenous tribes. We are not a particular people: The demographics of California looked nothing like those of any of the 13 colonies. We are not a particular way of life: California has incubated more ways of living than anyone could count, creating ripples that remade the world. For all those reasons, California ought to be a place where Democrats can make a case for an American identity that transcends nostalgia.
Across the country, a few younger Democrats are beginning to paint a picture of a nation that stands for more than gratuitous displays of power and wealth, the bombs we drop on Iranian children or an oligarch purchasing the pageantry of the Met Gala: Jon Ossoff is arguing persuasively that rooting out corruption is the key to making government serve the people. James Talarico is describing how his faith compels a brand of politics in which we care for one another. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is demonstrating a cheerful fearlessness that defangs the powerful forces arrayed against her.
They aren’t offering up pablum about the past; they are making Americans believe in the future. And what could be more American than the lone voice in front of a crowd, insisting upon a morality infinitely bigger than our imperfect selves?
Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “All We Say: The Battle for American Identity,” from which this essay is adapted.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post How Democrats Lost the Plot appeared first on New York Times.
