If Joe Biden dined with racists then you can text with your friend from high school

Don't be weird. Just be normal. Ad infinitum.

Earlier this week on MSNBC, Jonathan Capeheart asked Joe Biden a rather stupid leading question about whether or not “our democracy can survive” when “the Republican party cares only about power.” Bla bla bla. You know, if the Republicans “care only about power” then they’ve certainly got a piss-poor showing for it after all these years. But I digress. I think Joe Biden’s response was characteristically incoherent and somewhat meaningless, but if you squint you can pick up the point he’s making:

“Look, I don’t agree with anything that Liz Cheney believes about the substantive issues but I admire the hell out of her. She means what she says. She doesn’t support the notion of the use of violence. She insists there are basic fundamental rules. It used to be that way all throughout the Senate. I mean, I served with Jim Eastland and Strom Thurmond. I served with really conservative members of the United States Senate. But afterwards, after we had argued like hell, we would go down to the Senate dining room and everybody would eat together…

I’m not really sure what this has to do with Capeheart’s silly question. What I think Biden was trying to say was that there used to be a time in the United States when people could profoundly disagree with each other and still not lose their minds over it. And’s he’s right. Many more people used to recognize that you can agree on pretty much nothing of practical substance with another person and yet still get along with that person in a functional and meaningful way, up to and including having lunch with him.

Biden actually brings this up somewhat regularly, reminiscing about eating Senate Bean Soup with Strom Thurmond back in the Reagan years, and every time he does, conservative media really roast him for it: “BIDEN FONDLY RECALLS EATING LUNCH WITH SEGREGATIONISTS.” It’s hard to imagine a dumber and more self-defeating hook than that: The one sector of the media that consistently criticizes our miserable cancel culture is going after a president for basically advocating against cancel culture itself. You know, sometimes even a president you don’t like can be right about something. Actually that’s kind of the point!

You could argue that it’s pleasant to hear about Biden’s fond recollections of dining with racists only because the racists themselves lost, and comprehensively so; if schools were still segregated then it would be a different matter. I think that’s probably true, but it also underscores a broader principle in play here, which is that you never really know how things are going to go one way or the other, so being kinder and more agreeable to your opponents whenever you can is not at all a bad way to hedge your bets.

The younger generations—the “Zoomers” and mostly the Millennials too—have largely rejected this paradigm in favor of something much more hostile and angry and uncompromising; disagreements among them are very easy cause for severing friendships, sometimes lifelong friendships, comprehensively. The presumption, I think, is that they’re building a better world, or at least they’re building their own world better, systematically ridding their presence of anyone and everyone who disagrees with them about pretty much anything. I understand, in theory, how that can seem appealing. But in practice it seems to result in little more than a desperately lonely, stunted, paranoid, unhappy life. Joe Biden doesn’t remember much anymore, but he clearly remembers when life wasn’t like this, and he doesn’t regret it. Take my extraordinarily rare piece of advice here and be more like Joe Biden.