Fourth, and perhaps most important, attacking Biden as a segregationist sympathizer allows the left to dodge the substance of what he actually said. In addition to criticizing the “you’re the enemy” attitude of our current politics, Biden added: “I know the new New Left tells me that I’m ― this is old-fashioned. Well guess what? If we can’t reach a consensus in our system, what happens? It encourages and demands the abuse of power by a president. That’s what it does.”

The new New Left understandably does not like being attacked in this way, particularly while Biden is leading in the polls. The new New Left have abandoned Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s frame that the American experiment is great and black Americans want to fully participate in it. Instead, the left is embracing an identity politics rooted in the idea that America is irredeemably founded in white supremacy and plunder and thus must be torn down in favor of some revolutionary replacement.

Politics is often called the art of compromise, but identarianism politicizes All The Things and renders every disagreement a personal attack. Ironically, Biden is critiquing the reasoning by which President Obama tried to use his “phone and pen” to unconstitutionally make immigration policies Congress rejected.