Adam Serwer on Joe Biden

“Some of the worst violence in American history occurred during the period of low partisan polarization stretching from the late Progressive era to the late 1970s-the moment for which Joe Biden waxed nostalgic. In Ivy League debate rooms and the Senate cloakroom, white men could discuss the most divisive issues of the day with all the politeness befitting what was for them a low-stakes conflict. Outside, the people whose rights were actually at stake were fighting and dying to have those rights recognized.”

“Change is possible, even for an old hand like Biden. Ulysses S. Grant married into a slave-owning family and inherited an enslaved person from his father-in-law. Little in his past suggested that he would crush the slave empire of the Confederacy, smash the first Ku Klux Klan, and become the first American president to champion the full citizenship of black men. Before he signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts as president, Senator Lyndon Johnson was a reliable segregationist. History has seen more-dramatic reversals than Joe Biden becoming a committed foe of systemic racism, though not many.”