For the Democrats, this was always going to be a convention of ghosts

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There is this refrain the Democrats keep returning to. It’s how presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have framed their ticket as shining eyes fixed on the horizon, in contrast to Donald Trump’s rearview-mirror grievance farming.

And now that the party has gathered in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, this phrase is murmured constantly on the blue-carpeted convention floor like a prayer, hollered defiantly to the rafters and chanted in unison: “Not going back.”

It manages all at once to present a positive future vision and a travel-sized attack ad against Donald Trump and the Republicans.

But the Democrats never had any choice but to go back. This was always going to be a convention with ghosts at the table.

The best they could do, maybe, was what they did on Monday: invite all the phantoms in at once, hold a séance in their honour, maybe perform some gentle exorcism work. Then hope that with the restless spirits brought to peace at last, the rest of the week unfolds like a dream.

Chicago is haunted ground for a Democratic convention – even before real-time history added so many parallels that if you wrote this as fiction, any decent editor would tell you to get over yourself.

There are once again protesters flocking to the city – anti-Vietnam War protesters crashed into bloody-minded police in 1968; activists demanding a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war are meeting a studied calm from police now – where a vice-president is stepping into the breach after an unpopular sitting president stood down.

But on top of the eerie historical echoes, this was a convention that had to grapple with its own spectres of the past, and Monday was the day to do it (Barack and Michelle Obama spoke Tuesday night, but they are pure Democratic star power without baggage).

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When Hillary Clinton took the stage at the United Center to a rapturous reception, she illustrated how huge sweeps of history can fit inside a single family. Her mother Dorothy was born in Chicago when women weren’t yet allowed to vote, Ms. Clinton said, but that barrier fell and then eventually so did so many more, including Geraldine Ferraro becoming the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket in 1984.

“Then there was 2016, when it was the honour of my life to accept our party’s nomination for president,” Ms. Clinton said. And when things didn’t unfold as expected, people marched and ran for office again and kept going.

“We kept our eyes on the future,” Ms. Clinton said, then paused for effect before thundering, “Well, my friends, the future is here.”

The crowd erupted with what felt like too much energy for only the present moment; this was a current compressing itself backwards through time and disappointment and upside-down expectations.

The entire time Ms. Clinton was speaking, Susana Mendoza stood on her chair in the midst of the Illinois delegation directly in front of the stage, her eyes glistening.

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“I can’t tell you how awesome it is for me to be here,” said Ms. Mendoza, who is the Illinois Democratic comptroller, afterward. “I was thinking to myself, ‘It should have been her in 2016.’”

“They did so much of the heavy lifting, and now it’s our job to help her break that glass ceiling, finally,” she said of Ms. Harris. “This isn’t like we’re hopeful – it’s our time and we have to make it happen.”

When Mr. Biden finally walked out on stage as the final speaker on a very long night, the crowd bathed him in a standing ovation that lasted four minutes and 30 seconds; every time it seemed about to subside, it would crest again, folding and feasting and tumbling on itself. People wept openly, or yelled out “Thank you, Joe” with an urgency that suggested they needed his ears to hear their one individual voice.

His speech was largely a celebration and defence of his record as president, and of the country into whose history books he would soon be inked. It might have been indistinguishable from a stump speech in a different circumstance – one that until a month ago seemed inevitable and was now unthinkable – but the moment changed everything.

It was a valedictory address.

Mr. Biden invoked his inauguration in 2021, and the “winter of peril and possibility” in which the country was then mired: COVID-19, rampant unemployment, the Capitol under siege, demands for racial justice long overdue.

“Now it’s summer,” Mr. Biden said. “The winter has passed, and with a grateful heart I stand before you now on this August night to report that democracy has prevailed. Democracy has delivered, and now democracy must be preserved.”

Mr. Biden sifted through his own ghosts, too. It was, he said, the rank threat of Mr. Trump that had pushed him to seek the Democratic nomination in 2020, even though he had “lost part of my soul” with the death of his son, Beau Biden, from cancer.

“I realized I had to listen to the admonition of my dead son,” he said. “I could not stay on the sidelines.”

He nodded to his own past self too, marvelling over a country where “a kid with a stutter and modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, grow up to sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.”

Mr. Biden finished on that summer nightwhere he’d started on the winter day in 2021, quoting from the same song he wove into his inaugural address. Because he “can’t sing worth a damn,” he read the lyrics of his favourite verse of American Anthem, which captures what he believes his country to be:

“The work and prayers of centuries / Have brought us to this day / What shall be our legacy? / What will our children say? / Let me know in my heart / When my days are through / America, America I gave my best to you.”

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career,” Mr. Biden said. “But I gave my best to you for 50 years.”

When he was ready to leave the stage, the Democrats applauded the newest and, at this moment, perhaps most beloved of their ghosts for a very long time.