I don’t care what people think, I love political conventions. In an age of deconstructive irony and post-political wonks who think they can graph their way to a better tomorrow, the DNC and RNC are some of our last remaining throwbacks to good, old-fashioned, American electoral camp. That’s true even as they’ve become more scripted, and especially true if you attend in person and venture outside the convention halls, where the activists set up shop. It’s a spectacle that cries out for the gonzo treatment: gulp down a bunch of Quaaludes and sally forth with your steno pad. Alas, the coronavirus intervened, leaving us all stranded on the couch in front of the TV.

So it went with the Democratic National Convention this week. The proceedings ostensibly took place in Milwaukee, though they kept throwing to Democrats all over the country, sometimes to schizophrenic effect: Andrew Yang tossing to Julia Louis-Dreyfus tossing to a calamari supremacist from Rhode Island tossing to Maggie Rogers stranded on the Maine coastline tossing to a man in a Kansas field. It was all very, dare we say, unconventional, which led many on Twitter to disapprove, accusing the Democrats of putting on a glorified infomercial-cum-Jerry Lewis telethon.

Not to defend the party of abortion, but that seems unfair. The Democrats, and the Republicans next week, have no precedent for anything like this. They’ve been forced to start from scratch, and ultimately what the Democrats came up with ended up seeming almost healthy. Despite their perpetual warnings that democracy will die if Donald Trump is democratically reelected, the Zoom-meeting aesthetic of the convention was refreshing. It undermined the hysteria, contextualizing the event as something less important than it otherwise would have been. The election was no longer a clash of the titans before roaring crowds; it was just another browser tab at the top of the screen, a subdued and rather bureaucratic affair. If you believe, as I do, that the nationalization and glamorization of our politics is ruining the country, then this was justice of a kind. Even the Democratic A-listers felt like a B-roll.

First up was Andrew Cuomo, who compared racism and xenophobia to the coronavirus he’d failed to contain and our government to an immune system. Bernie Sanders, who’d once praised Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union, warned that Donald Trump is “leading us down the path of authoritarianism.” Michelle Obama encouraged empathy, a major theme of the convention. Bill Clinton appeared live from Chappaqua, not the Lolita Express, as many were expecting, after photographs published that same day showed him receiving a massage from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Dr. Jill Biden strolled into an empty classroom and proved herself one of her husband’s best decisions. Kamala Harris gave a rather banal speech (“there is no vaccine for racism”) from what appeared to be the headquarters of some intergalactic command.

And then it was over to Ol’ Joe. It seems like a stupid thing to say, but Biden was without a doubt the biggest winner of this year’s DNC. That isn’t always the case with presidential nominees: Barack Obama outshone John Kerry in 2004 and Bill Clinton arguably eclipsed Obama in 2012. With left-wing activists muttering under their breath and Uncle Bernie still rattling around the party attic, there was no guarantee that something similar wouldn’t happen this year. Yet while the Democratic convention was nowhere near as personalist as the Republican one is likely to be, while it focused on issues and party history as well as the candidate, I thought the narrative they crafted around Biden was a winsome one. For four nights, the man was all hands-on-your-shoulders empathy, personal grief, hardscrabble Scranton origins, Amtrak trips.

It was a rejoinder to snarky pundits like me, who like to reduce Biden to his supposed senility. Yet the former veep is much more than that. What he lacks in policy detail and verbal continence, he’s always made up for in social IQ, an essential trait for a politician, perhaps even more essential than attention to detail. That personal connectivity was on full display during his speech on Thursday. It was a success, I think, in that it was almost jarring in its normalcy, a reminder of the way politics used to be. This was an utterly conventional Democratic address with all the utterly conventional kitchen-table issues: jobs, unions, health care, equal pay. Amid a radical and surreal year, it felt disarming. The speech was more proof that Biden is, as Curt Mills has argued, the return-to-normalcy candidate, the Warren Harding of this century’s ’20s.

That isn’t to say, however, that the Democrats didn’t succumb to the feverishness of the times. One of the major rhetorical themes of Biden’s speech was literally darkness versus light, with Trump embodying the former and Biden (conveniently) a paladin of the latter. That made me flash back to a nutty San Francisco Chronicle essay from 2008, which declared Barack Obama to be a “Lightworker,” meaning “that rare kind of attuned being…who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” (True enough, if you were a Yemeni civilian.) Biden is no Obama but there was still a slightly messianic feel to his presentation. The Democrats have apparently decided that this election is a space opera, a titanic showdown between good and evil, with themselves in charge of saving their country. That might ring true to the average left-wing door-knocker, but it’s also self-flattering to an unseemly degree.

I skipped over Barack Obama’s convention speech before, only because it was the best example of this Manichean tendency. The former president appeared in front of a giant backdrop of the Constitution and proceeded to inform us that our very founding was under threat. Obama’s understanding of the Constitution was reductive; it said nothing about, say, secretly spying on AP journalists or launching a war in Libya without congressional approval. The Fourth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment were not mentioned. Instead it dwelt on a single word (one many of the Founders happened to disdain): democracy. Our founding documents, Obama said, contained the blueprint for a democracy, which Trump is now menacing. America was portrayed as a glowing democratic arrow, pointing ever forward, demanding that opportunity and the franchise be continually expanded.

And that overall was the narrative of the convention, simplistic and incomplete, yet also familiar and firmly in the American tradition. In addition to Obama, it was espoused by, of all people, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who in an otherwise lackluster speech that felt like one of the lesser State of the Union responses, said, “That’s the story of this great nation. Action begets action. Progress begets progress.” Well, there you go. Donald Trump sees America as one afflicted by carnage and crime, which only he can fix (this time for real). The Democrats’ narrative, on the other hand, is one that affirms our history as a sequence of collective actions, of communities working with government to set aside self-interest and better the condition of the least among us. The 1619 garbage was (mostly) taken out; incremental progress was back in. Listening to these people, you would have never guessed that only a month ago the left was playing footsie with a cultural revolution.

The Democrats are thus making a play to be the Americanist party, conflating the United States with its democratic character and painting its president as a sinister and (ironically) almost foreign outsider. Trump next week will have to turn that on its head, to show that Democratic governance in fact impoverishes the marginalized and imperils democracy through chaos. Yet that’s still two days away. In the meantime, the parties have logged off and I’ve been left feeling jilted. I’m no Democrat, but everything I grew up liking about the left—its opposition to the Iraq war, its hatred of the imperial executive, its support for civil liberties—was MIA this week. Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t invited. Foreign policy was subordinated to the greater theme of democracy, as speaker after speaker promised that Biden would push back on overseas dictatorships. Biden himself threatened to break a pool stick over Vladimir Putin’s head.

The Democratic Party has moved on from the mid-2000s. That might be wise politically, but it will always leave some of us looking not forward but back.