I thought Joe Biden’s announcement video was interesting. Not for anything intrinsically of note in the content. The central theme was that “America is an idea,” one of the most thoughtless tropes in American life. In keeping with this, much of the rest of the brief video was clichéd, lowest-common-denominator American political rhetoric. But in the current environment, this pitch acquires greater political charge than usual. Both because Trump rarely talks in these terms (and Biden was openly targeting him, of course) and because the Left has a much darker view of America as a place of systemic class and racial bias. So Biden wasn’t just explicitly contrasting himself to Trump but implicitly contrasting himself to his own party’s left.