But Sanders is not the only useful idiot among contemporary Democrats. There are those who have been remarkably solicitous of every left-wing dictator on the world scene from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez (and their legatees), who confess the creed of socialism, who believe that American power is the ailment from which the world suffers: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the dingbat Trotsky of Yorktown Heights; Ilhan Omar, the Jew-hating weirdo from Minneapolis; Rashida Tlaib, the Jew-hating weirdo from Detroit; the Jew-hating weirdo from Brooklyn; the millions of Democrats who support them . . . etc.

Joe Biden may very well vanquish this strain of the party from a purely electoral point of view. But, as the frontrunner, it is incumbent on him to refute it morally as well as politically. Of course he will not do so—he will ally himself to it, profit by it, and attempt to subordinate it to his own ambitions. Biden is not a very bright man, but he is smart enough to realize that anybody who is not living in Delaware, or was not living in 1991, knows his name for one reason and one reason only: In 2008, the Democrats thought they needed a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency unobjectionable old white man on the ticket. Biden presented them with a brain free of contour and a soul infinitely plastic. If he had a single patriotic bone in his body or an ounce of courage in his soul, he would speak to the shift in his party.

But who said that every idiot had to be useful?