Our noisy national nominating conventrions are a distinctive element of American culture and identity. At times they look like revival meetings, and that’s not a coincidence: James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution contains a fascinating discussion, based on the work of several academic historians — including Harvard’s Perry Miller and Russell Nye, who taught at Michigan State University for many years and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 — about the influence of the Second Great Awakening on American politics.
Piereson notes that the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening provided the model on which the nominating conventions were based. Doesn’t that make it more understandable? The spirited singing and dancing, the loud cheering, the emotional speeches and exhortations, the ecstatic responses, the melting tears, the raucous laughter, the healing of rifts, the renewal of faith, and so on? And then on the fourth day comes the ultimate catharsis — the deliverer who unites everyone in singleminded conversion to the cause.