The speech Kamala owes America Like Obama, she needs to speak to a biracial nation

And then the demons Obama had let loose turned on him with Wright’s comments. Obama had to make an about-face and now tell Americans a complicated story about how the races existed harmoniously alongside each other even as, time after time, they didn’t.

Reading the transcript of his speech now, you long for the days before piety politics took hold. Instead of glibly presenting himself as a hero by bravely fighting battles that had been won generations ago — railing against Confederate monuments, for example — Obama reminded people of how “in South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans”. One could imagine the legion of pietist editors at The New York Times hearing that line today: “Where the Confederate flag still flies? Whites and blacks together? Is he a crypto-fascist?”

It was a magisterial peroration. He inveighed against the wrongfulness of “a view that sees white racism as endemic [let alone ‘systemic’], and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America”. He talked of “problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all”. And he spoke with compassion about “the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family”.

But Obama grazed the democratic sublime when he, a biracial man, put himself into the lives of white Americans:

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one handed them anything… They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labour. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away… [So] when they hear an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighbourhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time… to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.”

I’ve quoted from Obama’s speech at length because if I simply paraphrased it, young people would not believe that a liberal, let alone a two-term liberal president, once spoke in that way. I might as well be paraphrasing Demosthenes.

Imagine. There was a time when a liberal, a progressive even, spoke about people in terms of irreducible, incalculable, particular and unique individual experience. When the white mother or white father who has just lost their child to an opioid overdose — or is battling cancer, or grief, or depression, or isolation, or failure, or poverty — could be acknowledged as having a pre-eminent claim to compassion; when that claim would be more real than the self-aggrandising white fantasies of black people, including millions of happy, healthy, high-achieving, prosperous black people, still supposedly reeling from the conditions on slave ships in the 17th century. When the disappointments that totally irritate the privileged, pampered, mega-entitled white women of Gen Z — the only true beneficiaries of the DEI revolution — were not considered, especially when expressed through tears at just the right moment, more pressing and intolerable than real pain in the real world afflicting non-historically oppressed persons.

Like everything tailored in consumer society to ever-more delineated appetites, historical suffering is now in its Mannerist phase. Just as the proportions of the human body in a Mannerist painting are distorted, on account of what had become artists’ weariness with the accurate rendition of the human body, so the actuality of human suffering is now tailored to new types of appetites based on new forms of self and group identity. In other words, there is now an exuberant market for suffering by the demographic numbers (“We have just the cross for you to bear!”). There is no market for plain old particular and incalculable anguish and despair. (“Have you tried the vintage shops downtown?”) That is why so many people simply explode. It is a desperate act of product placement.

Kamala Harris, for all her flaws the only figure now standing between America and the monstrous prospect of Trump, has called herself an “underdog” in this election. That could not be further from the truth. The election is hers to lose. Trump now has all the appeal of a 1962 Buick running on gas fumes and a flat tire.

But it is telling that Harris should think of herself as an underdog. As she has done all her professional life, it seems, she is basing her strength on what she wants to sell as her historical weakness — as a woman, as a black woman, as a woman of South Asian descent. This former prosecutor seems only to excel at special pleading. It is excruciating that an unimpressive, incompetent-seeming figure like Harris should be the one person able to obstruct Trump’s plans to cause chaos on the grandest scale.

Having said that, I intend to vote for Harris. If what the Republicans say about current Democratic machinations to ensure their victory is true — I hope it is — I will vote for her several times. I would vote for Gumby if that were the Democratic candidate. But if Harris is going to win, she is going to have to find someone to write her own Jeremiah Wright speech for her. (No, I am not saying that she cannot write a speech like that because she is female/black/of South Asian descent. I am saying that she can’t because she can’t. Let Michelle Obama write it.) The challenge will be to talk about the particular ways in which Americans suffer now, rather than mouth pieties about what has become a boutique, self-serving caricature of social injustice.

After Trump implied that Harris uses her various group identities as vehicles for political and social advancement, liberals rushed to celebrate the brutality of it all. The New York Times ran a piece with the following headline and standfirst: “Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History: White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.” What followed was the white-owned — reportedly a mere 12% of The Times’ employees are black — paper’s numbing, antediluvian bromides about how white people define race.

In fact, many Americans agreed with Trump. Harris is a type, known both to exasperated whites, and also to talented and accomplished black people who are used to tolerating both white inferiority in high places and, with sadness and understanding, the race-opportunism of certain black figures. Harris comes across as someone who, on account of her deft manipulation of group affiliation, has never been criticised in a substantive way to her face, and who therefore cannot tolerate criticism. Allow a tasteless joke from my own special, protected group: What does a Jewish-American princess say when she knocks over a Ming vase? “It’s okay, I’m alright!” That’s Harris.

It is remarkable that she retained her embarrassing nervous giggle for so many years. Did nobody point out how alienating it was? And now the sudden disappearance of the laugh is nearly as unnerving as the laugh itself. This indifference to the insular way she comes across is obvious to everyone. It is, perhaps, the result of both a flaw in temperament — watch: she never connects with an interlocutor, thus the laugh, now de-escalated into a maddeningly knowing smile, meant to fill the emptiness —and a reliance on the rarefied liberal snow-globe she has thrived in her entire professional life.

The election is hers to lose. And she will lose it if she doesn’t embrace all those people, of every race and background, who do not want to see Trump back in power, but who do not want to experience on a national level the insulting deception and fix-is-in that they sometimes encounter in their daily lives. With the Democratic Convention taking place next week, Harris needs to, with all the charm she is able to muster, raise the issue of her manipulation of identity in order to laugh it — with a real, genuine laugh — away. “Hey, I use whatever I can. As we all do. Donald would love to be a black, South-Asian woman. He’d put it on a T-shirt and sell it on X.” Something like that. She needs to directly address white people who suffer, not like 18th-century slave-masters, but like humans who rarely think about race, and say that she will be their president. She needs to bravely say that no one is born indecent because they are white. That no one is born indecent because they are anything.

She needs to say that she understands how the idea that boys can become girls and vice versa can strike some people as unnatural, even perverse. Then she needs to wonder aloud how liberating it must be to be someone entirely the opposite of yourself. “Maybe we all need to calm down and spend one day dressing up as each other. I’ll be Steve Bannon.” She needs to tell people they can keep their gas stoves and cars. “You tell me when the storms and power outages and heat waves become too much. Then I will do whatever you think needs to be done.” That’s populism.

She needs to tell a story about black lovers arranging to meet in a small southern town by the local Confederate monument. You are young and in love. They are defeated and dead: trophies of your happiness. She needs to tell a poised epic about good black cops and good white cops hating bad black cops and bad white cops, and about good cops catching bad guys without harming good guys in bad neighbourhoods, so that people’s good kids can live long enough to get into a good neighbourhood. She needs to say that physical illness, mental pain, heartbreak and death have no colour. She needs to acknowledge the narrow world she comes out of, and then ask people to believe that she is larger than her environment. Then she needs to invite everyone to help her change their environment.

True, it won’t be Jon Meacham, the former editor of Newsweek who ran the magazine into the ground before reappearing as Joe Biden’s main ideas-man and speechwriter, and who kept Biden sounding vapid and banal for four years. From Meacham’s lily-white speech to the 2020 Democratic Convention: “In its finest hours America’s soul has been animated by the proposition that we are all created equal and by the imperative to ensure that we are treated equally.” It was mind-numbing banality like that which used to make Trump seem like Voltaire. Which at times made Trump, for all his dissembling, sound so honest he seemed black.

No. Harris needs the gripping candour of Obama 16 years ago. Without some kind of electrifying departure from routine politics — Obamaesque, or Trumpian, for that matter; whatever works — and some soaring, eloquent acknowledgment and then disavowal of the pious groupthink that put her where she is today, and that has driven people away from the Democratic Party, she will never win. “It’s okay, I’m alright.” Somebody has to level with her about that.