Vance's undoing may be the power of a five-letter word

The US is built off the back of speeches, Donald Trump and his VP pick know this better than most as they stoke hatred and division at rallies. But they have met their match, enter Tim Walz and his magic adjective, writes Robert McCrum

- Robert McCrum

America is a great country whose troubles distress us greatly. We watch in fascination as our American cousins enact the rituals of an extraordinary society that’s been made and remade through the language of its people in the everyday traffic of a vigorous democratic argument. And 2024 has been a vintage year for this spectacle. Strange though it might seem, almost none of what we’re seeing today is actually so new or surprising, but more a case of business as usual in the great republic.

When the men – it was exclusively men, many of them lawyers – first invented their country in 1776, they wrote as the children of the Enlightenment. The “truths” laid before their people in the Declaration of Independence were, said Thomas Jefferson, “self-evident”. The United States has conducted its democratic experiment according to such “truths” ever since.

High noon in Philadelphia was a heady moment. American political rhetoric has lately become shrill, thin, bitter, and all-around depressing. At its height, however, the voice of “we, the people” has been thrilling. It was Jefferson’s clarity to which the great US speech-makers harked back. “I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King Jr, braiding his appeal with the cadences of the Bible.

When Lincoln intoned: “Four score and seven years ago… a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…” he was appealing to the good sense of a people confused by civil war. Since Gettysburg, Americans have come to expect their presidents to inspire.

FDR, memorably, pronounced that their only fear was “fear itself”. Subsequently, Kennedy picked up this torch with: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

Historic words, which smell of the lamp, but uttered in a spirit which lingered with Obama when, in 2008, he proclaimed “a more perfect union”, in his celebrated speech asking Americans to band together.