But there’s more in the post to decipher. Biden criticized the “Silicon Valley executives” who have championed universal basic income for “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work. He recoiled at rhetoric, often wielded by Senator Bernie Sanders and his acolytes, that demonizes corporations (“Some want to single out big corporations for all the blame. … But consumers, workers, and leaders have the power to hold every corporation to a higher standard, not simply cast business as the enemy.”) And he cut against the prevailing sentiment among Trump-friendly working-class whites that not everyone should go to college: “Cognitive capacity—as opposed to brawn—continues to become a surer path to climb that ladder into the middle class.”

A few days earlier, the former vice president published a New York Times op-ed deriding President Donald Trump’s nationalistic foreign policy. “[T]his White House casts global affairs as a zero-sum competition,” he wrote, calling this line of thinking “disturbing.” Moreover, America’s global standing had eroded due to Trump’s “shameful defense of the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.” “Not since the Jim Crow era has an American president so misunderstood and misrepresented our values,” wrote Biden.