Early in his stump speech for Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones in Alabama on Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden began to wax nostalgic, recalling a bygone era in Washington when our politics were more cooperative. “Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old fashioned Democratic segregationists,” he told the crowd in Birmingham. “You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”

“But today,” Biden lamented, “today it is terrible. Today everything is a personal attack. You can’t reach a consensus when you start off a discussion attacking the other person’s motive.” Jones “possesses what the American political leaders and system needs today,” Biden said, bemoaning a politics that’s “too mean, personal, petty, zero-sum game, blowing up the system.” He said that “today it takes more courage to engage in compromise to achieve consensus on both sides.” And distancing himself gently from his own side, he noted that the left “came after me because I didn’t insist on everything” in raising taxes on the wealthy. “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor,” he said. “I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.”

Biden’s message of unity is part of his broader branding as he prepares to embark on an “American Promise” book tour—and weighs a run for president in 2020. Though famous for his populist style, he’s begun to challenge some of the populist policy now in vogue on the left, including a universal basic income. Later this month, he’ll have a high-profile public conversation about “bridging the political divide” with Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich. Biden isn’t as explicit as some establishment Democrats in calling for the party to move back to the center, and he stressed in Alabama that “I have a very progressive voting record.” But many progressives aren’t interested in finding common ground with President Donald Trump’s extremist Republican Party. They’re only interested in consensus among those who absolutely oppose Trump’s agenda.

“If it was up to me, I would ask [Democrats] to be nice to each other,” said Congressman Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, when I quoted Biden’s remark about Sanders. “It’s actually pretty clear who’s the problem out there. I mean, if we haven’t figured out that Trump’s the problem, and the Republican agenda’s the problem, then we have not been paying attention.” He added, “You want to find common ground and build some consensus? Let’s talk about people who share some core values.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder and publisher of the progressive blog Daily Kos, agrees with Biden on this much: “The left’s effectiveness will always be constrained so long as part of it indiscriminately attacks those with money and success.” But Moulitsas also had harsh words for the former vice president after his appearance with Jones: “If Biden’s solution to eight years of Republican obstruction and conservative slash-and-burn tactics against him and Barack Obama is to talk about ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘consensus,’ then he might as well pack up and go home. Because if he’s that stupid to believe that shit, then he’s no longer got any business being in the public face. The various wings of the Democratic Party may disagree on a bunch of things, but the one thing that unites us is the realization that the right wants nothing more than a white supremacist autocracy that would rather see liberals dead or in chains. You don’t seek consensus with Nazis. You destroy them.”