Carolyn Kaster/AP

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, take the stage after vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris spoke on the third night of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19, 2020, at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware.

Joe Biden is, in crucial ways, the most improbable major-party presidential nominee in modern American history. 

He’d be the oldest first-term president by more than seven years. His prior presidential campaigns, in the 1988 and 2008 cycles, ended early amid serious stumbles. And he has a very long public record – 36 years as a United States senator and eight as vice president – providing his opponent with almost endless fodder for attacks. 

He’s also a white man in a rapidly diversifying nation that, especially now, is acutely aware of the privileges that attach to being white and male, perhaps more than at any time since the 1960s. 

Yet as former Vice President Biden takes the virtual convention stage Thursday night to accept his party’s presidential nomination, he may end up being just what the Democrats need, political analysts and allies say. 

In many ways, Mr. Biden is the antithesis of President Donald Trump. He exudes empathy, amid his own struggles with stuttering and multiple family tragedies. He was also, while in the Senate, proudly at or near the bottom in terms of personal wealth. He didn’t attend elite schools. 

But arguably just as important, he’s also not Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee who fumbled away the presidency in part by losing the white working-class vote – big. 

“Hillary Clinton in particular, for better or worse, right or wrong, did not connect with people in the way Joe Biden has,” says David Redlawsk, political science chair at the University of Delaware, Newark. 

Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton lost white, non-college-graduate voters to Mr. Trump by a whopping 37 percentage points – 66% to 29%, according to the exit polls. That demographic was especially important in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that Mr. Trump won to pollsters’ surprise, handing him the presidency. 

Today, Mr. Biden is still losing white non-college voters to Mr. Trump, but by a much smaller margin – 40% to 55%, according to the latest Marist poll. Two and a half months before the Nov. 3 election, he leads Mr. Trump overall by about 8 percentage points. 

Bobby Juliano, a veteran consultant with strong ties to organized labor, knows both Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton well. The key difference, he says, is that Mr. Biden is himself in public, whereas Mrs. Clinton was more guarded. 

“When you’d have lunch or see her, she was much warmer – great sense of humor, huge laugh – than the more public persona,” Mr. Juliano says. “For whatever reason, there was a reluctance to show that side. Huge mistake.” 

Susan Walsh/AP/File

Then-Vice President Joe Biden watches President Barack Obama at Conmy Hall, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia, on Jan. 4, 2017. The former president urged voters to back his former No. 2 in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, saying, "12 years ago, when I began my search for a vice president, I didn’t know I’d end up finding a brother."

A gut-level approach

Many analysts saw an element of sexism in some voters’ resistance to Mrs. Clinton. But her presidential bid likely also suffered as a result of her decades at the highest levels within the Beltway elite, and eventual wealth. She boasted gold-plated Washington credentials right as a long-building populist backlash was cresting – stoked by an outsider with no political experience and a larger-than-life persona. 

The technocratic, and at times cautious, Obama presidency usually subsumed Mr. Biden’s more gut-level approach to politics and governing, which in a narrow sense makes the former veep a bit more like Mr. Trump than President Barack Obama. Mr. Biden’s history of gaffes can also be seen in that light. As vice president, he usually deferred to President Obama on policy. A notable exception came when Mr. Biden declared his support for same-sex marriage – now an unremarkable view in both parties – before Mr. Obama did. 

Ironically, Mr. Biden has actually been a Washington creature much longer than the Clintons. And he seems to have developed some of the blind spots that can come from operating at the top levels of government – including looking the other way when adult children use their government connections for private gain, just as Mr. Trump has done with his own children.

Mr. Biden’s son Hunter – specifically, his business dealings in Ukraine and China while his father was vice president – looms as a major Trump campaign talking point. Team Trump launched a seven-figure digital ad Thursday aimed at portraying the younger Mr. Biden as corrupt. Biden spokeswoman Symone Sanders told Politico the ad, which focused on Hunter Biden’s trip to China in 2013, was “a conspiracy theory.” Mr. Biden routinely says he has never talked to his son about his business dealings. 

The timing of the new ad campaign could have been better for Mr. Trump. Former senior adviser Steve Bannon was indicted Thursday for defrauding donors to an online crowdfunding campaign for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Mr. Bannon joins a long line of Trump associates who have landed in legal trouble and even prison. 

Still, it’s Mr. Biden’s identity as the “anti-Hillary” that could be most salient come November, especially among swing voters in battleground states. Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton entered the race having already been effectively demonized for decades in conservative media outlets. Mr. Biden, by contrast, has been a much harder figure for his critics to define. His public persona is more along the lines of “Uncle Joe,” who sometimes says the wrong thing – not unlike the older white man currently occupying the White House.

Notably, Mr. Trump’s most frequent nickname for Mr. Biden is “Sleepy Joe” – a far cry from “Crooked Hillary,” and a sign that he sees Mr. Biden’s advanced age as a greater liability than a hard-to-follow story about Ukraine or China. 

The Scranton connection

Unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Biden has held tight to his original home bases – Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the state his family later moved to, Delaware – as central to his story. 

That identity, rooted outside the power corridors of Washington, involved famously taking Amtrak back to Delaware every night to be with his family during his decades in the Senate. Mr. Biden’s image as a family man took hold early, after his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash right after his first Senate election. The 2015 death of his older son, Beau, once seen as a promising national political figure in his own right, added to the Biden story of persevering through personal tragedy. 

Andy Nelson/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Joe Biden stands with his three children (from left to right), Hunter, Ashley, and Beau, at a book signing event in Washington in August 2007. At the time, then-Senator Biden was making his second run at becoming president of the United States.

Through it all, Mr. Biden has maintained his home-state connection. From the state’s highest ranking leaders to small-business owners, Delawareans have their Biden stories. 

Former Democratic Gov. Jack Markell tells of meeting the then-senator in 1998, and how he offered to spend a day on the campaign trail with Mr. Markell as he made his first run for office. 

“It was an absolute master class in retail campaigning,” Governor Markell says. 

The lesson, he says, was not just to walk up to people and ask for their vote. That was “presumptuous,” the former governor says Mr. Biden told him. “You have to ask them to learn more about you, so when they go to vote, they have a sense of who you are. He was right.” 

Candace Roseo remembers how Mr. Biden treated her and her family when her sister, a state police officer, was killed in the line of duty three days after she started on the job. She recalls Mr. Biden saying he felt somehow responsible for her death, as the funding for her position had come through a crime bill he had pushed in 1994. 

“I won’t ever forget the empathy and genuine compassion that Joe showed,” says Ms. Roseo, the owner of a pizza restaurant in Wilmington, Delaware. “He sat there holding my mother’s hand.” 

Political demographers are still sorting through the reasons for the shift in polls away from Mr. Trump by some white working-class voters. But they are focused on the multiple national crises at play. 

“Supporters of Mr. Trump in this group in 2016 may be roughly divided into those who were primarily concerned with sending an aggressive cultural signal through their vote, and those who primarily believed Trump would actually make their lives better and bring back their communities,” writes Ruy Teixeira of the Democratic-aligned Center for American Progress in an email.  

“His failure to do so, made much worse by the current pandemic and recession, has caused significant defections among the latter group,” he says. In addition, Mr. Biden is also likely to benefit from the support of voters who backed third-party candidates in 2016, thinking a Clinton victory was a foregone conclusion, but who now feel compelled to vote against the president.

Another key group among whom Mr. Trump is losing traction is seniors. They are a relatively conservative population group, but “they’re not as conservative as their reputation suggests,” Mr. Teixeira says. 

They support raising taxes on those earning more than $600,000 a year by 44 points, paid family leave by 29 points, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage by 21 points, he says, citing data from the UCLA Nationscape survey. 

“Ultimately, this campaign is about values and decency,” says Moe Vela, who was a senior adviser to then-Vice President Biden on Latino and LGBTQ matters.

Among the large, diverse Democratic field that ran this primary cycle, Mr. Vela says, Mr. Biden offered more than all the others a sense of security with the electorate. 

“People are familiar with him,” Mr. Vela says. “Does he make you want to jump up and down with pompoms and a sign? No. But you won’t wake up worried.”

When, to kick-start long-delayed intra-Afghan peace talks, thousands of Afghan delegates gathered to consider a final release of hardened Taliban prisoners, Belquis Roshan held up a sign of protest.

The words on the female lawmaker’s banner were clear: “Redeeming” the Taliban amounted to “national treason.”

At the podium was President Ashraf Ghani, who had already released 4,600 Taliban prisoners in accord with a U.S.-Taliban agreement signed Feb. 29. He had convened the loya jirga, or traditional council, this month to gain popular approval to free 400 remaining prisoners – from a Taliban list that included men convicted of murder and of conducting high-profile attacks that killed Afghans and foreigners alike.

Ms. Roshan’s message was short-lived: She was tackled and thrown to the ground by a female security guard, silenced in an act civil society activists condemn as revealing the fragility of both freedom of speech and women’s rights in Afghanistan.

The intra-Afghan peace talks now hang in the balance – they were meant to begin Thursday, after a five-month delay, but have now been postponed indefinitely over the continued prisoner dispute.

Yet at the same time, analysts say, the government has sought in recent months to quietly roll back nearly two decades of increased freedoms by pushing conservative changes to laws governing the family, media, and nongovernmental organizations, moves that, in fact, aren’t too far from agenda items of the archconservative Taliban.

The analysts’ theories as to why range from Mr. Ghani’s past inclinations to centralize government power to a practical need to shore up conservative support ahead of negotiations. But his moves are colliding with the expectations of Afghans who have grown accustomed to expanding freedoms. Many also fear that bringing the Taliban into government – or Taliban battlefield victories – will inevitably lead to a new, less free era.

“Jirga is the place to raise voices without limitations; everyone has a right to raise their voice,” said Asila Wardak, a women’s rights activist and diplomat at Afghanistan’s United Nations mission, complaining from the stage about the treatment of Ms. Roshan the day after the incident. “A jirga is not a place to disrespect; it is not a place for beating women.”

Ms. Wardak’s speech was disrupted by the abusive shouts of several male lawmakers in the hall, including one man from the conservative southern city of Kandahar – where support for the Taliban remains strong – who stormed the stage and accused the women on it of being “too Western.”

“Convergence ... we don’t want”

“This shows that, at the jirga that is supposed to decide about peace, women had their voices curtailed significantly,” says a Kabul-based Western official who asked not to be identified.

“If they can’t even get their voices heard at the loya jirga ... how are [women] going to preserve their rights of the last 18 years?” she asks. “We’ve seen the government portray itself as very progressive, but when it comes to it ... the government barely did anything to sanction those people who tried to shut them up.”

The attempted changes to family law, the NGO law, and media law – the last, only made public and sparking an outcry over censorship and free speech concerns after it was quietly approved by the Cabinet and sent to parliament in June – illustrate the challenge ahead for Afghan civil society trying to solidify gains as the talks with the Taliban approach.

“This coincidence of the government – ahead of the peace process – getting more conservative ... these are exactly the things the Taliban would be doing as well,” says the Western official. “So ahead of intra-Afghan negotiations, we see convergence on issues we don’t want them to converge on.”

Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

Ashraf Ghani arrives at his inauguration as president in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 9, 2020.

Writing in The Washington Post this week, Mr. Ghani demanded that the Taliban acknowledge the “changed reality of today’s Afghanistan” and work to “preserve and expand the gains the Afghan people have made” since U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.

But analysts and civil society activists say fresh government efforts to change some rules amount to an unexpected bid to impose increasingly conservative restrictions.

Proposed changes to the family law, for example, include immediate forfeiture of maintenance by a husband for his wife if she refuses intercourse – for reasons beyond those permissible under sharia (Islamic) law – or even goes out without his permission. Underage marriage would become possible through a loophole that would require consent of a male relative and court approval.

One reason may be campaign commitments made by Mr. Ghani to conservative elements during his reelection campaign last September, before Afghanistan’s presidential vote.

Broader support

Another may be a bid to broaden the appeal of a government that is accused by the Taliban of being a pro-Western U.S. puppet and is perceived to have ushered too many liberal changes into a traditional society.

“I imagine it is a signal to actors on the pro-government side, but that are quite socially conservative, ‘Look, you don’t need to go over to the Taliban to get some of what you want,’” says Andrew Watkins, senior Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group.

“The palace is worried about various factions of Afghan politics and society splintering off if they believe that the Taliban is going to end up winning this thing,” says Mr. Watkins, referring to years of steady insurgent battlefield advances, and the Taliban yielding few compromises in negotiations with the United States.

Yet he notes that, contrary to the all-conservative appearance of the law changes, the government in recent weeks also issued a decree to create the post of second deputy governor for each of the country’s 34 provinces – and to reserve those posts for women.

“The government is also trying to simultaneously keep international audiences and more progressive parts of its civil society happy as well,” says Mr. Watkins. “You have the government trying to send out whatever will stick, to keep different constituencies happy.”

Still, the proposed changes to the family law appear far-reaching.

“The provisions, on the surface, appear to be congruent with sharia law and proper family law, but there have been slight tweaks made that actually disadvantage women severely,” says the Western official.

Yet even as the family law is debated, Mr. Ghani a week ago announced the establishment of a High Council on Women – a step meant to officially incorporate women’s views in the peace process and empower them.

National Security Council of Afghanistan/Reuters

A Taliban prisoner (left) is released from Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 13, 2020.

Criticism has come quickly, though, from women’s activists complaining that the move was only symbolic, because similar bodies designed to empower women exist already.

“It is supposed to help women be reassured that their rights will be observed in the peace process, but there is no real connection between that council and the peace process,” says the Western official.

Media law on hold

Similar confusion also reigns over the how and why of proposed changes to the media and NGO laws, both of which would have imposed stricter government controls. They have been put on hold after public criticism.

Afghan journalists reacted noisily when the changes to the media law became public in mid-June, for example, as they accused the government of trying to impose censorship, block freedom of speech, and force journalists to reveal sources to intelligence and government agencies.

“Undoubtedly there are certain circles within the government who want to suffocate press freedom through the proposed amendments, [and] this indicates censorship of media in the country,” Mohammad Elham, the head of Rah-e-Farda TV, told TOLOnews, Afghanistan’s largest television channel.

“There are many forces in Afghanistan and outside who wish to curb free media and access to information in our country, but we certainly did not expect the government to be a front-runner in this league,” Lotfullah Najafizada, the head of TOLOnews, told The Guardian.

The government responded that it was “strongly committed to our free media and will remain so,” and withdrew the proposal.

Likewise, the draft NGO law that emerged in June was an updated version of the one approved by the Cabinet in December 2019, which requires registration and sharing detailed financial information with authorities.

Amnesty International panned it as a “serious threat to the existence of civil society” groups in Afghanistan, which “imposes unnecessary and disproportionate restrictions ... and would exert undue influence and control over NGOs.”

In the late 1990s, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the hard-line Islamists imposed a range of restrictions on Afghan society. Recently, Taliban members have noted to Western officials and analysts that both the media law and NGO law, as well as some of the family law changes, are “something we would have done.”

The loya jirga, meanwhile, endorsed the release of the Taliban prisoners. But after freeing 80 of the men earlier this week, the government stopped the process, saying the Taliban had yet to release all 1,000 captured Afghan security forces it was meant to – a claim denied by the insurgents.

In June, Auburn High School science teacher Erik Berg found himself at a town meeting like no other.

It took place on Memorial Field, home of the Auburn High School Rockets football team, with chairs spread out across the turf and a lectern set up in the bleachers. Attendees could also participate, drive-in style, by parking along the fence and tuning in with their car radios. To vote, they stuck color-coded paddles out the window, flashing green for “yes” or red for “no.” Other than a 4-minute bout of rain, the meeting ran smoothly, with the Massachusetts town passing a 2021 budget and advancing a senior housing plan. In fact, Mr. Berg says it was one of the most efficient and well-attended town meetings in which he has participated.

To some political scientists, this kind of participatory government is behind New England’s relative success in managing the coronavirus. The region has hardly remained unscathed by the pandemic. Massachusetts, in particular, became an early epicenter and has had the third-highest per capita COVID-19 death rate, after New York and New Jersey. But since that initial peak, the Bay State and Greater New England have largely brought the spread of the virus under control.

Even states that saw a late-summer uptick in reported cases have remained well below their April peaks. Massachusetts, still the New England state hit hardest by the virus, has seen about 3,400 cases in the past week, or 1 for every 2,000 residents. Over that same period, Florida saw roughly 1 case for every 550 residents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Compared with other parts of the country, New Englanders from across the political spectrum have been largely willing to limit travel, wear masks, and practice social distancing.

“There’s some people that might grumble about having to do things in a new way,” says Mr. Berg. “But I haven’t seen or heard of anybody actually just not following the rules.”

Wendy Schiller, chair of the political science department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says the “all-in-this-together” attitude is a fundamental part of New England’s political culture, predating party politics. She traces it back nearly 400 years to the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Some charters required colonists to return to England to conduct their business, but King Charles I made Massachusetts Bay a “charter colony,” meaning the administration was elected by colonists, and that government was allowed to reside in the New World. Puritan settlers, who were increasingly persecuted back in England, jumped on the opportunity to create a system that reflected their values.

“Governance in New England retained that character, that where you lived and who you lived with would be part of how you were governed,” she says, adding that the southern colonies were settled by Anglicans and relied more heavily on slavery. “You had a hierarchical social structure, a hierarchical religious structure, so they just didn’t really develop the same participatory, community-based way of governing that New England did.”

A moral political culture

Massachusetts Bay Colony had its charter revoked in 1684, in part for creating several laws that did not align with England’s. But it was too late to turn back the culture of local governance. As borders shifted, forming the modern New England states by 1820, communities held onto the idea that government is an egalitarian institution looking out for the common good.

Daniel Elazar, the political scientist who identified three dominant political subcultures in the United States, called this a moralistic view. Other cultures include individualistic, which sees government as a mechanism for protecting the marketplace, and traditionalistic, which sees government as an elite endeavor to maintain the status quo. Individualistic views originated with Anglican and Protestant settlers from England and Germany, he argued, and are common in states from New York to Wyoming. The traditionalistic culture developed in Virginia and Kentucky before spreading to the Deep South.

Joined by other Northern European immigrants, Puritans carried the moralistic values westward from the Great Lakes to Washington. Throughout the upper U.S., Elazar said people tend to trust government officials and view public service as an honorable profession. 

Critics of Elazar’s theory say it fails to consider the impact of recent immigration patterns, and that defining a state’s political culture is a futile task. Nevertheless, New England – where the moralistic culture originated – remains a hub of strong local government.

Today, major decisions are still made by town meetings. Counties play a minimal role in New England life, unless someone’s heading to court or the DMV. Rhode Island, the smallest state in the nation, has 39 municipalities and no county government.

In this together

Peverill Squire, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri, sees a distinction at the state level, too. New England prefers less professional legislatures, with the exception of Massachusetts, which has a full-time legislature but pays members roughly half the salary of New York or California. The other New England states follow a part-time or hybrid model. New Hampshire has 400 representatives – the most per resident than any state in the U.S. – who get paid $100 a year.

Observers say the stubborn belief in good government has helped New Englanders resist anti-government sentiment and extreme polarization, with moderate Republican governors excelling in traditionally blue states like Massachusetts and Vermont.

“The technical term we use in political science is sticky, and these are sticky notions. They don’t change quickly or easily,” says Professor Squire.

It doesn’t mean there’s no objections to state mandates.

On the Rhode Island coast, Narragansett Town Council President Matthew Mannix made headlines with a proposal to defy the governor’s lockdown orders. He quickly dropped the effort due to a lack of support. In June, Gorham, Maine, passed a resolution declaring all businesses “essential,” allowing the town to fast-forward in the state’s reopening plan. In Massachusetts, a lack of compliance led to new virus clusters, prompting Gov. Charlie Baker to delay reopening.

But overall, the nonpartisan, local approach has been essential in getting rural and urban communities on board, says Julie Jacobson, Auburn’s town manager. Massachusetts has 351 cities and towns, each with its own board of health, which adapt state regulations to their own needs. The Baker administration has involved local leaders from the start, she says, meeting with the Massachusetts Municipal Association to discuss new data and challenges every week for the first four months of the crisis.

“The state has been very good about giving local government guidance and not directing us as to how to do our operations specifically,” she says. The main challenges are coordinating with neighboring municipalities and communicating with the public.

“Whether you’re talking about a dog park, or a new school, or in this case, a pandemic, it’s really critical to keep your residents informed and educated on what the issues are, so they feel confident that we are making decisions in their best interest,” she says. “At certain points [information is] changing on an hourly basis. And we all need to be flexible.”

That flexibility requires a deep well of public trust. Mr. Berg, the high school science teacher who grew up in Auburn, says there’s plenty. 

“I guess if I lived in a community where the local officials have historically made a lot of blunders or done things that weren’t in the public’s best interest, I would feel more skepticism,” he says. “But at least in this community, I know that the town [officials have] built up a lot of goodwill.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Abandoned letters spill out of post office boxes in Juba, South Sudan, in August 2017.

Abdulaziz Omar stood motionless, staring at a gridded wall with hundreds of blue boxes in a post office in the middle of Nairobi. He gripped a brown envelope in his hand – an envelope that had a job offer of a lifetime, but that he’d opened three months too late.

Being selected for a government position is a jackpot, in many Kenyans’ eyes. For Mr. Omar, then a young MBA graduate, securing a job at a state-run company meant coming one step closer to achieving his professional and financial dreams.

But Mr. Omar and his extended family, like many relatives in Kenya, shared one mailbox – and at the time, their only key was 300 miles away. He had to journey from Nairobi to the coastal city of Mombasa to retrieve it, only to come back to bad news.

“I was extremely disappointed. I felt really low. I wondered why didn’t the post office alert me that I had a letter? Why did I have to receive it this late?” Mr. Omar recalls.

That’s when an idea for a business venture sprouted. Five years later, in 2016, he quit another government job to found MPost, short for “mobile post office” – a digital service that helps Kenyans track and manage mail access.

Even in a world where snail mail has been overtaken by email and texting, not having regular postal service presents an economic hurdle – for individuals, as well as their communities. But most African countries, including Kenya, depend on a centralized physical office system that is not scalable, especially in far-flung areas. Around the world, more than 4 in 5 people receive their mail at home, according to a 2014 report by the Universal Postal Union, a United Nations agency. In Africa, only 1 in 5 do.

For many people, a shared post office box is the norm. Others rely on mail offices at nearby institutions like a school or a church. Either way, the chances of lost or delayed deliveries is high, and a barrier to business, official documents, and simply letters from loved ones.

But increasingly, governments and entrepreneurs are harnessing online tools to improve and extend offline service. Mobile and smartphone access across sub-Saharan Africa has soared in the past decade, lowering barriers to other services, too, like banking. In Kenya, for example, 80% of people own a cellphone, according to a 2017 Pew Research survey.

The benefits of securing post office boxes are high, advocates say.

“Pension payments, e-government and health services are some of the many services that the post office provides to its community. Lack of access to a post office in many ways represents economic marginalization,” says a UPU spokesperson. “Indeed, access to postal services is a contributor” to several of the U.N.’s sustainable development goals, including economic growth, innovation, and sustainable communities.

Mail by text

Sub-Saharan Africa has an approximate ratio of 25,000 people per post office box, according to the UPU spokesperson, as compared with more developed regions with 2,000 people per post box. “The vast geographical size and the low connecting infrastructure makes providing postal services a challenge,” they say. In Kenya, according to government statistics, there are 400,000 boxes in a country of about 50 million people.

MPost, which Mr. Omar built under his company TAZ Technologies, has a partnership with Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecommunication company, and the government-owned Postal Corporation of Kenya. The service generates a unique address code for each user based on a user’s mobile phone number. When letters or packages are sent to the post office of their choice, users get a text message alert. It’s $3 per year, though for an extra cost, items can be delivered to users’ doorsteps.

Despite minimal marketing, MPost has clocked more than 200,000 users, says Mr. Omar, and is a big hit with younger Kenyans. More than half of people on the platform use it for overseas e-commerce orders, including Reuben Kiarie.

Mr. Kiarie, a resident of Nairobi, has been using MPost since its inception. He runs a business ordering beauty products from online shops, such as Chinese retail giant Alibaba’s AliExpress, and reselling them in Kenya. Previously, he shared a physical post office box with his father. He had to arrange to pick up items from his dad’s house, and visits could be weeks apart. But the virtual system has given a boost to his business.

“With the old system, you didn’t know if mail had arrived at the post office. But with this new digital system, I can be alerted when my parcels have arrived,” he says.

Public programs

African governments, too, are pivoting toward digital mail services. The Postal Corporation of Kenya is pushing its own virtual post office addresses, titled e-Njiwa, starting at $20 per year. Similar to MPost, users receive alerts when mail arrives, and can pick it up at the designated office. BotswanaPost App originally enabled users to buy prepaid electricity tokens, but aims to add several postal services and other purchases. In 2016, the South African Post Office launched a free mobile app that allows customers to track their parcels.

Post offices across the continent are experimenting with technology to extend services, according to a UPU report published last year. Seven of the top 10 digital mail services, such as tracking packages or offering web access in offices, have been implemented by more than half of African postal systems.

Yet small postal budgets struggle to sustain innovation, according to Hamilton Ratshefola, the general manager for IBM South Africa. Through TradeLens, a shipping supply network, IBM is using technologies such as blockchain to smooth out the global shipping process.

“The challenge with postal services is that they do not have investment muscle. It is the private companies like DHL and Amazon who can make investments,” he says, adding that public systems can benefit from business innovation. Blockchain and the Internet of Things are the future of shipping and postal services, he says.

For now, back in Kenya, Mr. Omar is trying to ensure other Kenyans won’t experience significant mail mix-ups like his. His company and their partners’ goal? To provide 5 million digital boxes.

On his new album, Gordon Koang wrote a song to the young daughter he has never met.

She knows her father by reputation. Mr. Koang has been hailed as the “king of music” in his homeland of South Sudan. That renown led to a series of international shows in 2013 and 2014. While touring abroad, the musician realized that growing ethnic violence in his country would make returning home unsafe. While his family took refuge in Uganda, Mr. Koang and his cousin, who is also a bandmate, accepted an offer to perform in Australia and applied for asylum.

The musician’s 11th record, the first he’s released in exile, is titled “Unity.” It’s not only a prayer for reunification with his own family – whom he hopes will be granted permission to join him soon – but it’s also a plea on behalf of refugees everywhere. His message is reaching new audiences, as Mr. Koang won the prestigious Levi’s Music Prize at last year’s BigSound festival and music industry conference in Brisbane, Australia. Now his album is garnering attention in international music publications such as NME and Pitchfork. Its jubilant music conveys what Mr. Koang says is his core message: “If the world unites itself, no one will say, ‘I am alone.’”

“While many of us struggle with instability and view it as a state we need to get through, his music suggests that he has, at the very least, figured out how to accept being between states, and that he’s determined to find joy and peace and happiness even when the world doesn’t want to give it to him,” says music critic Marty Sartini Garner, a contributing writer to Pitchfork, who reviewed “Unity” for the publication.

“A friend to everyone”

After a lifetime of alternating between singing in his native language, Nuer, and Arabic, Mr. Koang has been writing a few songs in English, including “Stand Up (Clap Your Hands).” One of several songs on “Unity” about the power of community, Mr. Koang says it expresses his sentiment toward the Australians who’ve embraced his performances at major music festivals: “I am a friend to them. My music also is a friend to everyone.” 

Mr. Koang, who is blind, started his musical journey accompanying the choir at his Presbyterian church in his hometown of Nasir. His instrument of choice is a thom (pronounced “tuhm”), which he was introduced to at a young age by a relative who wanted to help Mr. Koang feel less lonely while his family was out working. His custom-made version resembles a box-shaped acoustic guitar with a six-stringed lyre affixed to it. Eager to start composing songs of his own, he prayed for help. One night he had a dream in which a man taught him a melody. When Mr. Koang woke up, he quickly replicated the tune on his instrument. He still writes his songs this way.  

“I thank God for it so much, because I call myself a songwriter. But I’m not writing them. They come in a dream. When I wake up in the morning, I get them in my heart,” he says in a video call from his apartment in Melbourne, Australia.

Mr. Koang eventually ventured to larger Sudanese cities such as Juba and Khartoum. He was accompanied by his cousin and best friend, Paul Biel, a percussionist. The duo built a fan base the old-fashioned way: gigging. They played gospel songs to a network of church communities and played secular folk songs on the city streets. They handed out free homemade compact discs. Radio play followed, as did opportunities to play in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and, later, shows overseas. 

In 2011, South Sudan became independent from Sudan. Two years later, a civil war broke out in the fledgling nation. After a 2013 tour of North America, Mr. Koang and Mr. Biel flew to Uganda to reunite with their families at a camp in Kampala. Soon after, they toured in Australia. When the pair requested asylum in that country, they thought it would be a quick process that would allow their families to join them. But it was the start of an arduous limbo. They couldn’t seek employment until their new country granted them residence. 

“We decided to be in this problem, because this problem is very little [compared with] the problem we moved from,” says Mr. Koang. “We kept hearing that all our friends and relatives had been killed.”  

Influenced by family

Mr. Koang started playing for small groups of people to make money to send to his family. He wrote “South Sudan,” a tribute to an aid worker he’d known in Africa, and also “Asylum Seeker,” a song of encouragement for those awaiting a ruling on their legal status. Mr. Koang’s voice performs a promenade dance with the thom, sometimes spinning twirls around the twanging melody lines.

He attributes his outlook to the home in which he was raised. “My mother and father told me that you have to do a good thing in the world,” he explains. “That’s why I decided to have love in my songs, and then to have unity in my songs, and to have peace in my songs.” 

All that reached the ears of Joe Alexander, the founder of Music in Exile, a nonprofit record label for refugee musicians in Australia. He set up the recording session for Mr. Koang and seven musicians, ranging from keyboardists to violinists, that led to the making of “Unity.”

“I have never met a man that continues to be so positive, and so warm, despite the most difficult and trying circumstances,” says Mr. Alexander in an email. “As soon as we sat down in the studio, he began dictating parts left, right and centre. He would sing a drum part, followed by a bass line, and a keyboard or guitar melody, and then join in with a completely unique and unexpected thom line or vocal melody.”

Mr. Alexander says that his record label’s mission doesn’t include overtly opposing xenophobia. But, he adds, “ultimately, the space that these musicians will occupy in the Australian scene will help to combat those feelings.”

Sweetness and lament

The final track on Mr. Koang’s album is titled “Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial,” a prayer for his family’s safety and provision that he composed for his daughter in 2013 but hadn’t recorded until now. It stood out to Mr. Sartini Garner, the music critic, when thinking about the album. 

“The sweetness and fun of much of ‘Unity’ frames the laments, and that contrast makes songs like ‘Te Ke Mi Thile Ji Kuoth Nhial’ that much more heartbreaking,” he says.

Last year, Mr. Koang and Mr. Biel were finally granted Australian residency. Now they’ve submitted paperwork to bring their families to the Southern Hemisphere. 

“They’re waiting for us,” says Mr. Koang. “We tell them when God finds a way, we will come to you.”

Reuters

Senator John McCain is awarded the Liberty Medal by former Vice President Joe Biden at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in 2017.

In a new book, “American Rage,” political scientist Steven Webster of Indiana University contends that anger is now the primary emotion of politics in the United States. The elite in both major parties find it convenient to stoke anger, he says, “because an angry voter is a loyal voter.” Voter identification with a particular party is now driven more by negativity toward the other party than by a positive association with one’s own party, polls show.

Yet this mutual loathing between Democrats and Republicans also feeds on itself – to the point of absurd perceptions. A poll earlier this year by Beyond Conflict, a Boston-based nonprofit, found 79% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans overestimate the level at which the other side dehumanizes them. By a wide margin, voters on each side hold false beliefs about what the other side really thinks of them.

This needless aspect of the current polarization makes “it more difficult to find collaborative ways to address urgent challenges,” the Beyond Conflict study concluded. On national issues, too many politicians aim to represent their most partisan voters rather than a broad array of constituents. Leaders abandon the long tradition of knowing when to stop competing and to start cooperating. They add fuel to voters’ fear – the main emotion driving the anger.

This is why it is so important to watch for hints of bipartisanship and national unity during each party’s conventions in August, the official kickoff of the presidential campaigns. This year, the need for consensus is unusually high. If the ballot count in November is hotly contested, for example, Congress may need to decide who won (as has happened three times in U.S. history). If the recession deepens further, Washington must agree on a recovery plan. And if the pandemic worsens, partisan posturing could only prolong it.

On the Democratic side, Joe Biden is under pressure from the far-left to abandon his long record in the Senate of working with Republicans to find compromise on legislation. He has said that without bipartisanship, the country would be “dead.” During the convention, a video showed how Mr. Biden and John McCain, the late Republican senator, worked together to make deals. “This nation cannot function without generating consensus,” Mr. Biden said in May.

The Republican convention may try to make similar points about unifying the nation. President Donald Trump, who prides himself as a deal-maker, is under pressure from far-right groups to not compromise on certain issues.

Anger is a tiresome emotion to hold for long. It can be replaced by humility, or the willingness to listen and respect the other side, even to find interests and values that have no sides in order to establish trust. While differences on issues certainly exist, shedding the belief that the other side means harm is a good place to start.