For several years I had a regular lunch with an Iranian diplomat – I suspect his real profession was otherwise – who worked out of the Islamic Republic’s mission to the United Nations.
Our conversations, always on background, were exceptionally candid. He almost surely sought me out because my pro-Israel stance represented, in the view of the regime he served, the core beliefs of Zionist-occupied Washington. In turn, I got a crisply articulated sense of Iran’s strategic thinking along with invitations to meet with various Iranian leaders, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
We detested each other’s ideas, distrusted each other’s motives and enjoyed each other’s company. I was sorry when he returned to Tehran.
Aristotle had a term for our relationship. He called it a “friendship of utility” – adventitious, opportunistic and usually short-lived. It’s the same type of relationship Joe Biden appears to have had with James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, two long-deceased segregationist senators, early in his own political career, when he was a junior member from Delaware.
Eastland and Talmadge were Democrats in a Democratic-controlled Congress. Biden had no choice but to have relationships with them, not least because he had to plead for committee assignments. At a fundraiser, the former vice president recalled, “We didn’t agree on much of anything,” and said of Talmadge that he was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew.” Biden added, “At least there was some civility. We got things done.”
Cue the histrionics of Biden’s primary rivals, the hysteria from parts of the progressive base and the inevitable media pile-on. The same people who think it’s a good idea to maintain an open line to foreign enemies apparently now believe it’s appalling for Biden to have observed collegial norms with fellow Democrats. The author Ta-Nehisi Coates went so far as to call it “a secondary endorsement, as crazy as it sounds, of Jim Crow,” on the theory that Biden’s civility meant making his peace with a racist system.
In fact, Biden made no such peace; all the landmark civil-rights legislation was passed before he arrived in the Senate in 1973. He simply dealt with the Congress as he found it and looked for opportunities to be constructive and consequential rather than destructive and obnoxious. That is now his brand as a presidential candidate, and it’s what his critics find so objectionable: How dare he try to work with his opponents instead of seeking to shun or annihilate them?
The goal isn’t simply to discredit Biden as out-of-touch or insufficiently transformational or otherwise gaffe-prone. It’s to purge the party of compromisers – to rid the Democratic Party of its democratic instincts.
This is what psychologist Pamela Paresky calls the “apocalyptic” approach to politics that increasingly typifies today’s progressivism. “It is an apocalyptic view, not a liberal one, that rejects redemption and forgiveness in favor of condemnation and excommunication,” she writes in Psychology Today. “It is an apocalyptic perspective, not a liberal one, that sees the world as needing to be destroyed and replaced rather than improved and perfected.”
Paresky contrasts that to what’s been called the “prophetic culture” in American politics, which takes human nature as it is and gladly goes to work with its crooked timber. Abraham Lincoln was a part of this prophetic culture, as was Martin Luther King Jr. John Brown was part of the apocalyptic one – as is, in its way, the new “cancel culture” of the left.
The irony here is that the left’s apocalyptic tendencies have everything in common with the behavior of the Trumpian right: the smash-mouth partisanship; the loathing for moderates on its own side; the conviction that its opponents are unbelievably stupid as well as irredeemably evil; the belief that the only political victories worth gaining are total ones.
Above all, it shares the same disdain for comity, civility and ordinary decency. It’s the politics of the clenched right fist and the permanently raised left middle finger.
To his credit, Biden has refused to apologize for his remarks and he’d be a fool to do so. The aim of those demanding he apologize isn’t to see him redeemed. It’s to watch him capitulate, and, in so doing, seize the right to declare who’s morally fit to be in the party, and who isn’t.
In other words, they want to be the excommunicators. Biden shouldn’t let them. Civility is never a vice among fellow citizens, especially when it’s in short supply. The last thing Democrats need is to allow the nasty left do to them in 2020 what the nasty right did to Republicans in 2016.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times.
