By Maggie Astor in the NYT.

We have never, it is safe to say, had a convention like this before.

With the coronavirus pandemic still raging, it will be almost entirely virtual. Delegates will not be in Milwaukee. The stars of the week, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris, will deliver their speeches from Wilmington, Del., nearly 700 miles away.

But the important business of the convention — the speeches from Democratic leaders past and present, the adoption of the official Democratic policy platform and, of course, the votes that will turn Mr. Biden from presumptive to official nominee — is still happening, and you can watch it from your couch.

Michelle Obama, the former first lady, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the runner-up in the Democratic primary, will headline the first night on Monday. Scroll down for a full list of speakers.

How to watch

The convention will air from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time every day, Monday through Thursday. There are several ways to watch:

• The Times will stream the full convention every day, accompanied by chat-based live analysis from our reporters and real-time highlights from the speeches.

• The official livestream will be here. It will also be available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Twitch.
• ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News will carry the convention from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. each night. C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC and PBS will cover the full two hours each night.
• Streams will be available on Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV by searching “Democratic National Convention” or “2020 DNC,” and on Amazon Prime Video by searching “DNC.”
• The convention will air on AT&T U-verse (channels 212 and 1212) and AT&T DirectTV (channel 201). It will also air on Comcast Xfinity Flex and Comcast X1 (say “DNC” into your voice remote).
• You can watch on a PlayStation 4 or PSVR through the Littlstar app.
• If you have an Alexa device, you can say “Alexa, play the Democratic National Convention.”

Who’s speaking

• Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. He is the highest-ranking Black member of Congress and a hugely influential figure in South Carolina politics, and his endorsement helped lift Mr. Biden to a dominant victory there after losses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
• Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. She is the first Latina to serve in the Senate and was an early contender to be Mr. Biden’s running mate, but she chose to withdraw from consideration in May.
• Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York. The leader of one of the country’s biggest blue states, he gained national attention this past spring for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, although his response has also drawn criticism.
• Senator Doug Jones of Alabama. His victory in a 2017 special election in one of the nation’s most conservative states was a huge upset, and he is now the most vulnerable Senate Democrat up for re-election.
• Former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. He was a Republican presidential candidate in 2016 and opposes President Trump, and his presence is meant to demonstrate bipartisan support for Mr. Biden. Some voters are upset, though, that he is getting more speaking time than progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
• Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. She surged to finish third in the New Hampshire primary, then dropped out and endorsed Mr. Biden before Super Tuesday. She was briefly under vice-presidential consideration but urged Mr. Biden to choose a woman of color after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
• Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin. She is a co-chairwoman of the convention host committee and has represented Milwaukee in Congress for 15 years, including as a former whip of the Congressional Black Caucus.
• Michelle Obama, the former first lady. She delivered one of the most memorable speeches of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, famously declaring, “When they go low, we go high.”
• Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The runner-up in the Democratic primary and the leader of the party’s progressive wing, he has a loyal base that Mr. Biden needs to win — and while Mr. Sanders has endorsed Mr. Biden, some of his supporters are reluctant.
• Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. He is the convention chairman and leads the House Committee on Homeland Security, and has represented Mississippi’s Second Congressional District for more than 25 years.
• Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. A rising figure in the Democratic Party, she has grown further in prominence for her response to the coronavirus pandemic and was a finalist to be Mr. Biden’s running mate.

by David Brooks in the NYT who is “on the extreme right-wing of the left-wing movement!”

Radicals are not my cup of tea, but I’m grateful for them. The radicals who brought us Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign gave the problem of income inequality a prominence it wouldn’t have had without them.

The founders of the Black Lives Matter organization put racial injustice at the top of the national conversation. The radical populists who ultimately produced Donald Trump showed us how much alienation there is in Middle America.

Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.

But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.

In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.

Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.

They also tend to divide the world into good people and bad people. They think they can bring change if they can destroy enough bad people, and so they devolve into a purist, destructive force that offends potential allies

The people who come in their wake and actually make change are conservative radicals. They believe in many of the radicals’ goals, but know how to work within the democratic framework to achieve them.

Conservative radicals, like Hamilton, Lincoln and T.R., begin with moderate dispositions. They have a reverence for the collective wisdom of the past. They have an awareness that the veneer of civilization is thin and if you simply start breaking things you get nihilism, not progress. They are acutely aware of the complexity of the world, and how limited our knowledge of it is. They are pragmatists, experimenters, liberals.

But they also understand that in moments of historical transition, it is prudent to be bold. They understand that when your society is crumbling the only way to restore stability is to address the problems that are breaking it.

When they are making big change — the American Revolution, busting the trusts — these conservative radicals channel revolutionary impulses into reformist action. Lincoln had to slowly bring a whole nation around to the abolition of slavery. He had to compromise and gather a broad coalition to pass the 13th Amendment.

Today, we’re in the middle of another historic transition when dramatic change is necessary if we are to preserve what we love about America. The crises tearing our society are well known: economic inequality, racial injustice, dissolving families and communities, a crisis of legitimacy.

To some, this feels like a revolutionary moment. In Commentary, for example, Abe Greenwald argues that the radicals have seized control. They are pushing radical agendas (No police! No rent!). Worse, they undermine the liberal fundamentals of our democracy — the belief that democracy is a search for truth from a wide variety of perspectives; the belief that America is a noble experiment worth defending.

Many people smell in today’s radicalism the whiff of revolutions past: the destructive brutality of the French Revolution, the vicious thought police of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the naked power grabs of Lenin’s Soviet revolution.

I am not as alarmed. I’m convinced that the forces that brought Joe Biden the nomination are far more powerful than a few extremists in Portland and even the leftist illiberals on campus. I’m hopeful that if given power, Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer will forge a new conservative radicalism.

They have spent their lives within the liberal system, understand politics, understand radicalism’s advantages and dangers. They’re drawing support from an astonishingly wide swath of the ideological spectrum. I’m convinced that if Donald Trump is defeated, revolutionary zealotry will fade as debates over practical change and legislation dominate.

During crises like these, each of us has to take a stand, to be clear on which causes we champion and which position we occupy on the political landscape. This is hard, because we’re in a period of flux.

If your views haven’t shifted over the past four tumultuous years, you’re probably not doing much fresh thinking. I find I have moved “left” on race, left on economics and a bit “right” on community, family and social issues.

Mostly I find myself supporting the conservative radicals, leaders who are confident that we can push for big change while defeating the illiberalism of radicals on left and right.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said he occupied the “extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement.” If that’s good enough for Isaiah Berlin, it’s good enough for me.

From Heather Cox Richardson:

The most striking news of the day was not that Trump has suggested he wants his image on Mt. Rushmore but rather that such an outrageous statement has garnered so little attention. That says something about his presidency.

This weekend, the New York Times ran a story by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman laying out Trump’s apparent interest in adding his face to those carved on Mt. Rushmore. He’d like to be up there next to Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. After Trump told the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, that he hoped to have his likeness there next to his predecessors, an aide reached out to the governor’s office to learn about the process of adding an additional face. When Trump visited the monument last month, Noem greeted him with a four-foot replica of the monument with his faced added.

This entire concept is moot. The rock face cannot support more carving, which answers the question definitively. Even if it could, though, the sculpture is carved on a mountain that is part of land that the United States government took illegally from the Lakota people in 1877. The monument remains embroiled in the legal dispute over this land grab. The chance that anyone would now attempt to add a new carving to it is pretty close to zero.

Not to be deterred, on Sunday night Trump tweeted a picture of himself positioned in such a way that his face was superimposed on the structure, beside Lincoln. Yet the story that the president wanted his likeness added to Mt. Rushmore had no sticking power.

A similar fate met Trump’s statement that last week’s devastating explosion in Beirut, caused when an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate blew up, was a “terrible attack.” “I’ve met with some of our great generals and they just seem to feel that it was not a — some kind of manufacturing explosion type of event. This was a — seems to be according to them, they would know better than I would, but they seem to think it was an attack. It was a bomb of some kind.” U.S. Defense Department officials said there was no indication that the explosion was an attack. The statement came and went.