When V.P. Joe Biden decided to run for president, he said it was about restoring the nation's soul.

You may remember when George Bush Sr. mocked "the vision thing."

Not Joe.

It was important to him and important to the nation.

Joe turns the pages of the good book and draws strength from his faith.

Proverbs say –

"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."

We are accustomed to transactional politicians suffering a myopia about public service that fails the nation.

Their vision ignores the law – and, as proverbs warned, the people have not been "happy."

Biden's vision lifted the spirits of a beleaguered nation.

He has shown us a path forward.

He has made it clear that the law and good and fair process will make the difference.

We have to be wary and watch, however, what the Republican leadership actually does when, by speech, they mislead so extravagantly.

The nobel prize winning writer and poet, Toni Morrison, has an easy and apt phrase for the most painful assaults upon our rights and liberties.

Toni once said "we live in a world …where the body of civil liberties, won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead withers in the searing heat of 'all war, all the time…'"

Toni called the nation to "war against error."

She called us to arms to "[a] deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies."

I listened to an exchange at the recent CPAC conference reassuring those would listen how these Republican advocates, favoring an autocratic government, doing so openly, are not racists.

Caution: Judge them by what they do, not by what they say!

Still fresh in our collective consciousness from last year are the widespread efforts by Republicans from the Chief Executive and the Republican leadership down to the states, counties and republican election precinct captains, to suppress votes in the presidential election by persons of color.

As I write this, a score of legislatures are drafting and passing legislation that would suppresses the vote of persons of color.

The current Republican leadership has to know that Biden is right – the soul of the nation has been compromised.

Aristotle said nothing improves your aim like having a target.

Our national vision is that we are all equal before the law and we said so in our declaration of independence and our constitution and its amendments.

We are equal, all of us, no matter the differences that unite us.

What prompted candidate Joe Biden's decision to get in the race, I'm sure, was the racist abuse he observed in Charlottesville, supported by our chief executive, Donald Trump.

Trump was just fine with the excesses that occurred, associating himself with far right white supremacists, racists, bigots, xenophobics, who believed in violence; one of these terrorists used his car as a battering ram, killing a peaceful protester in Jefferson's neighborhood.

As a model for others, Trump taught each person who followed him, to be individually selfish, to do what makes one feel good, to look out for oneself, to do whatever you want, no matter how it affects others.

Trump inspired a woeful mimicry, to disregard law and order, to create chaos, to seek advantage in an unsettled state, and to sanction pain and hate against those not like you, against persons of color, of different religions, of different gender orientations.

The Nixon Republicans calculated a Southern strategy in the 60s, and the strategy has grown more offensive and transparent each election cycle since.

The Greeks, especially Plato, warned us of the imbalance that can occur in a constitutional government.

A mixed constitution, as Aristotle favored, and as our founding fathers implemented, requires every group in society to pull its own weight.

If any one element, the monarchical, the democratic, or the aristocratic gain undue influence over the other parts, that can become a death knell for the democracy at hand, can be the end of any self-governing republic.

The lesson from history, from the post-mortems of failed democracies, is that sooner or later the overbalance occurs.

The Romans could not figure how to stop it.

From 133 to 85 BCE seven consuls and four tribunes of the plebs were murdered in street violence.

Our recent insurrection resulted in deaths on Capitol Hill.

This was the culmination of an inappropriate arc toward monarchy.

We have to secure ourselves against autocrats reaching that perverse political high water mark again – if we value our democracy.

We have to succeed where other democracies in histories have failed.

A hole appeared in our nation's soul.

The forces of disorder flowed through that hole.

Disinformation flowed through that hole.

Men and women without character flowed through that hole.

Whatever Biden's unity means it cannot mean finding common ground with those who would overthrow our government.

We must be clear sighted to the risk of gullible pollyanish hopes.

James Baldwin had a wonderful expression for where we find ourselves – "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

We have work to do if we accept Benjamin Franklin's challenge – "You have a Republic if you can keep it."

We can keep it but we have to work at it.