The Soul of the Nation Wasn’t Enough

Why Biden’s moral vision failed—and what liberal democracy actually needs to survive.

In 2020, Joe Biden ran on a promise to “restore the soul of the nation.” His campaign was framed not around policy transformation, but moral repair. He spoke of decency, character, and the quiet dignity of democratic norms. For many, especially those exhausted by the cruelty and volatility of the Trump years, the appeal was comforting. It offered a return to something familiar.

But as a theory of political legitimacy, the “soul of the nation” pitch fell short. It did not account for how deep the disillusionment had become. It offered healing without diagnosis. Biden asked Americans to believe in democracy, but never addressed why so many had stopped.

Liberal democracy depends on something more fragile than laws or procedures. It depends on public consent. That consent cannot be assumed. It must be earned—through responsiveness, shared purpose, and a sense that the system reflects the will of the people. Right now, that belief is in crisis. And no moral branding campaign can substitute for its absence.

What Consent Actually Means

In political theory, legitimacy is not guaranteed by elections alone. It is an ongoing relationship between the people and the institutions that claim to represent them. Democratic consent is not just the act of voting. It is the belief that power is exercised with accountability, fairness, and a sense of obligation to the governed.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Rousseau argued that sovereignty belongs to the people. Government, in this view, is only legitimate when it reflects the general will. Hannah Arendt saw political authority as something that must be built together, through collective action and shared reality. Neither believed that democratic legitimacy could survive on symbolism or tradition alone.

Yet this is where American politics now finds itself: reliant on symbolic gestures, moral appeals, and institutional nostalgia, without a functioning mechanism for real democratic renewal.

The pro-democracy establishment continues to frame the current crisis as a problem of information, manners, or extremism. But the erosion of trust goes deeper. It is rooted in lived experience—of economic abandonment, cultural isolation, and political irrelevance. Americans are not rejecting democracy in the abstract. They are rejecting the version of it that appears unresponsive and uninterested in their lives.

Why the “Soul of the Nation” Frame Failed

Biden’s moral pitch treated the public as a passive audience in need of reassurance. He positioned Trump as a temporary rupture, rather than a product of structural decay. The implication was that once the bad actor was removed, the system would reassert itself and order would return.

But Trump did not invent the crisis. He exploited it. The rot predated him, and it remains.

The Biden message offered no invitation to participate in rebuilding democracy. It asked people to trust in institutions many no longer recognize as legitimate. It asked for unity without addressing the causes of division. And it cast political dissent—not just from the far right, but from any quarter that questioned the establishment consensus—as a threat to the national soul.

This is not how you rebuild democratic legitimacy. You cannot persuade people to re-enter a political relationship by denying their reasons for leaving in the first place.

The Absence of a National Project

What’s missing from American democracy today is not just faith. It is direction. There is no shared project, no collective goal, no vision that links individual effort to a broader civic purpose.

Historically, moments of legitimacy have been tied to such projects. The New Deal reimagined the role of government in economic life. The civil rights movement demanded a moral reckoning with the country’s democratic ideals. Even the Cold War, for all its contradictions, mobilized a sense of national purpose.

Today, Americans are offered slogans. “Defend democracy.” “Vote like your rights depend on it.” But they are rarely invited to shape the future in concrete terms. Political participation is reduced to resisting threats rather than building anything new.

Michael Sandel has warned that without a sense of shared obligation, democracy becomes thin and transactional. Citizenship turns into consumer choice. And in the absence of belonging, the culture war rushes in to fill the void.

Legitimacy or Collapse

The future of liberal democracy will not be secured by appealing to decency, civility, or character. It will be secured by rebuilding the relationship between the people and the state. That means making institutions responsive again. It means restoring the possibility of collective action. It means acknowledging the reality of widespread disaffection—not dismissing it as misinformation or malice.

If democracy is to survive, it must justify itself. Not with branding. Not with nostalgia. But with substance.

The soul of the nation cannot be restored from the top down. It must be rebuilt from the bottom up, through a renewed sense of agency and a political system that deserves the public’s trust.

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Thanks as always for reading! ICYMI, I did my first Substack live this week with Reed Galen of The Home Front. It touches on many of the themes in this piece. You can watch it here.