The psychological wage of liberalism was laid bare at the DNC

On Wednesday night, Barack Obama took the stage in Philadelphia to deliver his fifth consecutive Democratic National Convention speech. His skills as an orator, even in the absence of a crowd and its rapturous energy, are undimmed from the moment he electrified the 2004 gathering with his breakthrough keynote. While no one may match Bill Clinton’s record of 11 consecutive convention appearances, Obama remains the speaker worth pausing to see. It was a punchy and vividly-written speech. But the distance between it and his soaring early efforts felt very long in more than years.

In those early speeches Obama promised progress—never utopian, but always ambitious. In Wednesday’s speech, as Vox’s Matt Yglesias put it, Obama offered only “a twilight struggle to preserve the basic trappings of political democracy.” It emphasized the obstacles faced by earlier generations of the excluded and marginalized, and their ability to rise to the challenge. Now, Obama said—speaking at times explicitly to the low-propensity voter—you have to do your part or the whole American enterprise in democratic self-government could be lost.

It’s an argument with the virtue of being true. But it sounded, with the dubious benefit of four, eight, and 12 years of hindsight, forlorn and inadequate. I remember only too well how it feels to be moved by the ideal of democratic self-government as a formal expression of human equality and dignity. But I don’t feel it anymore.