George Washington was often asked after the revolution how he managed to keep his rag-tag and often starving Army together for so many years, and how had he kept his composure in the face of so divided and quarrelsome a country.

Again and again, he called for perseverance and spirit, for “unremitting courage.” In a letter to his wife Martha that he wrote after one victory, he said “a people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove.”

I think of this when I see the fights about masks and shutdowns and the politicized governor and the school openings.

I think of Andrew Cuomo’s repeated acknowledgments that he could give all of the orders he wanted when the pandemic struck New York City, but people had to trust and believe him, or his orders could never succeed.

Cuomo understood the limits and nature of true leadership.

He led the people through this awful pandemic in his very quarrelsome state and they mostly followed. There were no new deaths in New York City last week.

Again and again, Cuomo chose to lead, not bully or demand.

Because he chose to be honest and fact-driven and was not afraid to deliver bad news, most people did choose to believe him. He is believed to have saved tens of thousands of lives and saved a great city about to be overwhelmed.

It all really comes down to leadership, not rhetoric. It really comes down to trust, not manipulation. People have to be led, not drove.

Watching the Democratic Convention last night, I was struck by the realization that while half of the country celebrated Barack Obama’s eloquent speech, and the first Black Vice President nominee in American History, half of the country didn’t and don’t.

Like him or not, Donald Trump is a leader also and almost half of the country trusts him and may follow him blindly, just as Washington’s troops followed him, and Cuomo’s citizens followed him.

I’ve read and thought about leadership for much of my life, from Washington to Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela and Lincoln.

Donald Trump is nothing like any of these people. Because he can’t or won’t lead, the pandemic runs along, stopping here and there, every state making its own way. A tragic mess.

If there is one single thing that unites each one of them, it is empathy, the quality Joe Biden and Obama and Kamala Harris have been seizing on all week.

It is also Donald Trump’s great and fatal flaw.

He is just not capable of empathizing, and in a nation, as wounded as ours is now, that cannot and will not work. People are desperate to feel their leader cares about them and sees them. They need empathy. They demand it.

People must feel like they are known, and in return, will sacrifice and follow.

The thing people say most often about Joe Biden is that he sees them, and in the United States, in August of 2020, that is critical.

Cuomo, an often unpopular politician,  cared about the people when he needed to care.  His sincerity was evident. So did Washington care about his soldiers. So did all of the others empathize.

Trump has drawn an army of cynics and the aggrieved, they simmer with racial and “other” resentments. They are the army that reflects him, they fight for the past, not the future. They reject empathy. He didn’t create them, they created him.

The future always wins and has to win.

I don’t know Biden or Harris.

If these new Democratic leaders are true leaders, then what their colleagues say about them is true:  their empathy will be sincere and visible, not just more promises and rhetoric.

If it is true, that will win, because empathy is more important than anything now.

No one who ever knew Donald Trump describes him as empathetic, not a single person.

At the beginning of one of the most important battles of the American Revolution, half of Washington’s unpaid and starving army began to leave and head for home.

Washington, desperate, rode before them on his big beautiful horse.

“Parade with us, my brave fellows,” he said to have said. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly.”

“I shall never forget what I felt,” wrote one of the soldiers to his wife..” when I saw Washington brave all the dangers of the field and his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him. Believe me, I thought not of myself.”

That was the other side of empathy, what people feel for leaders who care about them.

And the soldiers all stayed, and they won the battle.

When Churchill walked the streets of bomb-devastated London, he told the people to hang in there, it would be all right.

And they didn’t argue with him, they believed him.

When Mandela asked the long-suffering people of South Africa to forgive their oppressors, they did. At the time, it seemed unthinkable.

Does this have any relevance to America in 2020, when so many Americans feel betrayed by the idea of the American Experience, which even in 1776, favored the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of slaves and working people?

It does have relevance for me, the grandson of immigrants who gave up and risked their lives so that I would be safe and free. And I have been safe and free.

Obama and Kamala Harris make the argument that this is the promise of the country, that all of us will one day share in the freedom and some version of equality.

I don’t know if this is possible or will come to be.

I like what I’m hearing so far, but the obstacles are just as fierce and ingrained as Washington faced while struggling to keep his tattered Army together.

I insist on being hopeful. And I like the plan. It’s the best idea around.

Wednesday night, Barack Obama evoked the creation of the U.S. Constitution when he urged Americans to fight for their democracy and to vote as soon as possible.

He acknowledged that in our partisan world, he did not expect to change many minds, it made me sad to think how many times the writers of the Constitution changed their minds and the minds of other members of the convention.

So I went back and read David McCullough’s wonderful book about the first year of the American Revolution, 1776 to see how George Washington, who was credited with saving the Revolution, held himself and his Army together for more than seven brutal years.

I wondered if there were any lessons there for me or for people who are traumatized about Donald Trump’s White Peoples Revolution.

Washington led by being decent and honorable. He was no genius or battlefield wonder. He had great courage and presence.

Many Americans have this distorted idea of our own revolution, about which most people know little or nothing.

There is the image of a civilized and spirited debating society arguing for months in gorgeous period buildings and meeting houses, writing eloquent letters, and giving noble speeches.

We are a selfish people, we take what we want from the constitution and leave the rest behind. We take our freedoms for granted, we even abuse many of them.

The American Revolution – and the Civil War that followed- were both far worse than anything we are going through now. But Obama reminded us that this is serious enough.

The Revolution, writes McCullough, was a longer, far more arduous and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or fully appreciate.

By the time it ended, it had taken the lives of an estimated 25,000 Americans, or roughly 1 percent of the population. In the percentage of lives lost, it was the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.

Tens of thousands of homes and farms were destroyed, many thousands of women raped or assaulted, thousands of prisoners bayoneted, or left to rot and die in prison ships with little food or medicine.

The American soldiers endured years without pay or even shoes, they sustained prolonged suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, disillusionment, cowardice, torture, slaughter, and fear they would never forget.

It was an awful sacrifice for so many people, hardly any of us alive today apart from our soldiers have been asked to make sacrifices like that.

Washington contended with fiercely independent states, a dysfunctional congress, and no money to buy guns and ammunition or to pay or clothe his troops, many of who froze to death on their marches.

Even Washington said the outcome seemed a little short of a miracle.

We citizens in 2020 are far from the suffering and sacrifice of the people who fought for their country. Slavery stains almost everything the Founding Fathers did, but still, there was considerable honor, sacrifice, and courage.

People of color and immigrants and women and gay people seem to me to be demanding the same privileges and security that white people have, nothing more.

They don’t want to destroy our country, they want to share it with us. They want to live alongside of us in peace. and freedom, and without fear. That is a noble idea for me.

Today, we are being asked to sacrifice, not our lives but our peace of mind, our time and energy, our indifference, and comfort. We are all being asked to do something.

To sacrifice our illusions that peace and freedom and prosperity are all free without a struggle.

Kamala Harris’s idea about America is not everybody’s idea.

It is not Donald Trump’s idea or the idea of his followers. They reject the wonder of the immigrant experience that Kamala Harris evoked so joyously Wednesday. They reject the Black Lives Matter movement.

So the lines are clearly drawn and will be clearer still next week when Donald Trump is nominated to run for President again.

He has a very different idea of America than the one George Washington talked about.

I am willful but clear-headed, I believe.

I am grateful for the opportunity later in life to understand what patriotism is, and just what it is that our country at its best has stood for and may stand for again.

You can see Donald Trump as a menace eager to wreck our democracy, or you can accept the challenge he has put before all of us, and what Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have outlined so powerfully.

I don’t know what Joe Biden will say Thursday night, but I will be surprised if he presents a different vision than theirs. Really, he is running for nice.

I accept Washington’s wisdom.

People have to be led, not drove. It really is time to stop the wringing of hands and go do something.

I’ll be getting my ballot in the mail soon. I’ll send it back right away.