Why the DNC Worked So Well

One of the first events of the Democratic National Convention, as it began airing on national television on Monday evening, was an “In Memoriam” segment that mourned the more than 165,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19.

You can read the segment as mawkish, or as a cynical exploitation of emotion for partisan ends: the stuff of a Hollywood awards show, wandering awkwardly into the wrong theater. But the segment was precisely what the moment called for. It offered viewers the opportunity to pause for a moment and consider that number once again: 165,000. All those lives, all the pain of the people they’ve left behind. Political conventions, as spectacles that are aired to the public, typically traffic in willful optimism. Their participants talk in. And there is, inevitably, the quadrennial reminder that more binds us together than tears us apart. Conventions are infomercials, basically. And while an infomercial will briefly acknowledge a problem—a messy home, a messy life, a knife that just won’t cut—it is much more interested, in the end, in selling you a solution.