I struggle for words to convey just how soporific, indistinct, and substanceless the Democratic National Convention was. If you have ever read a Notes apology posted on X by a celebrity after some embarrassing attempt at cancellation and winced at the sheer, groveling terror evidenced in its painfully safe prose, then all I can say is imagine that energy. In every speech. For hours.

Having lived through the Obama years, I confess I’ve come to expect that Democratic conventions will be affairs of merciless message discipline, soaring rhetoric, and artfully disingenuous attempts to mask their own extremism. Nothing like that was on display here. Instead, after watching the first night of the Democratic National Convention, I was bemused. What the hell did I just watch?

What, for example, was I to make of Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s speech, which started out by offering a contrast between Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s resumes, and then proceeded to note Harris’s work at McDonald’s as a point in her favor? Normally, a person’s stint as a burger flipper is the kind of thing you’d expect to see used in politics to mock her. Was this some bungled attempt at reaching the working class?

If so, then I’m afraid the Democrats are reaching in the wrong, but a telling direction. The people they have abandoned and need to reach again are welders, plumbers, tradesmen, autoworkers—you know, independent-minded and skilled people who work with their hands—not teenaged drones in headsets whose only physical and mental exertion comes in remembering to drop fries into the deep frier and how many orders need filled. Honestly, is that what they think the working class is? Or is it what they want the working class to be going forward? A bunch of visibly high teenagers who inform you in slow-motion cadence that the ice cream machine is broken? Oh, dear.

What about Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s painfully awkward and failed vice-presidential audition tape, which only served to raise the question of just how the hell this guy beat a Republican nominee for dog catcher, let alone governor of Kentucky. Beshear, by the way, has since said that he hopes a member of Republican vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance’s family goes through rape so that he’ll have to contemplate abortion. Which is bad enough on its own, until you remember that Beshear was introduced by Hadley Duvall, a rape survivor in her own right. That poor girl’s been through enough, Andy, without you wishing her experience on another person.

Or what about the bizarre choice to have a fourth grader introduce First Lady Jill Biden, who then introduced her daughter, who then left the stage without previewing the next speaker (leaving all of us wondering, for one brief shining second, whether they’d have the guts to let Hunter speak) just before yesterday’s man himself shambled onto the stage?

Finally, Joe Biden. I almost missed him … for the first 20 minutes of his speech. But unfortunately, Biden’s speech didn’t last 20 minutes; it lasted 50 minutes. In fact, at one point I had the insane thought that he was going to filibuster the convention until they nominated him again in disgust—just to make him shut up. And that’s not even touching on the speech’s content.

It’s hard to convey just how bizarre and off-putting it was but, in essence, imagine your grandpa forced you to sit through a 50-minute marathon of him and his high school garage band playing their “greatest hits” in the retirement home, all while audibly off-key, and you have some idea of the experience.

There wasn’t an anti-Trump hoax Biden didn’t touch. The “very fine people” Charlottesville hoax? Repeated with gusto. The idea that Trump called U.S. troops “losers and suckers?” Shrieked to the rafters. And when he wasn’t defaming Trump, Biden was tossing his own decades-long beliefs under the bus, too, particularly in one embarrassing moment when he said the anti-Israel terror sympathizers at the DNC “had a point.” For God’s sake, Joe, you spent half a century as the most pro-Israel senator and you’re not even running again! You can be yourself now. It’s okay. Corn Pop (not to mention Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi) can’t hurt you anymore.

And the really sad part? Biden’s speech was actually one of the less weirdness. I haven’t even touched on Hillary Clinton’s unsettlingly honest declaration of vengeance, for example, or on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Hugo Chavez impression—delivered with a buffet of first year drama school accents. Though I’ll say this for AOC: for all its cringe-worthiness, there at least seemed to be actual life behind her speech, if only the kind of life you expect to see from a corpse that’s had electricity run through its nerves: an irritable jolt of movement, followed by a relapse into oblivion.

I don’t say these things just to mock the DNC. I also want to drive something home: a convention like this only happens when a party has no idea what they are or why they’re here. And the Democrats don’t.

When they’re earnest and excited, it’s off-putting (AOC), senile (Biden), or just plain malicious (Hillary). When they’re trying to play it safe, they devolve into word salads so abstruse that it almost comes off as absurdist performance art.

It all puts one in mind of the literary critic Lionel Trilling, who once described conservatism as “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Judging by what we saw this week, the shoe is now precisely on the other foot.