Most people have to be drunk to speak as many truths as Joe Biden does, and to be forgiven so quickly. Liberals tolerate his outbursts – he’s the wacky uncle whose tipsy exploits make for family inside jokes – while conservatives see him as the neighbor who parked on their lawn and peed in the bushes out front.

On Tuesday night, Biden delivered critics and fans alike a bouquet of such divisive rhetorical antics. There was his egocentric dip into racial stereotypes: “I’m a white boy, but I can jump”. Then, even more explosively, there was his assessment of the wave of voter ID laws that have followed the Supreme Court’s neutering of the Voting Rights Act. He referenced laws requiring identification to vote – in North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin – as well as craftier methods of repression like the crackdown on early voting in Ohio. And he pegged the motivations of those behind the legislation directly to racism:

These guys never go away. Hatred never, never goes away. This is a constant battle. ... The zealotry of those who wish to limit the franchise cannot be smothered by reason.

To those of us who recognize voter ID laws and other anti-“voter fraud” gestures as a form of systematic disenfranchisement, it may be gratifying to hear the vice-president criticize them in such stark terms. But Biden’s incendiary language doesn’t aid the battle to roll them back. Voter ID laws do disenfranchise minorities, but their insidiousness lies not in malicious motivations so much as the way they capitalize on good intentions for support. The real tragedy of voter ID laws is that they are a sneak attack on democracy, a coward’s way out of the demographic and ideological corner into which the American Right has painted itself.

“Voter ID” laws have won popularity on the back of a cynical PR campaign that turns our basic affinity for fairness into a jihad against an invented foe. There is a whole right-wing voter fraud industry, from glamorized “investigative reporters” to groups that will happily kick-start voter roll purges for states that might not otherwise take action. The truly devious fillip on this campaign for “fairness” is that its masterminds can always cast criticisms of the outcomes as assaults on the motivations of its supporters.

In the most recent polling on the subject (pdf), 83% of white Americans say showing identification “in order to vote” is a “good thing”, and 82% of non-white Americans say the same. Polling on this subject is tricky; most people – apparently, even many non-whites – don’t realize the real-world bigotry buried in what’s pitched to them as equity.

But let’s stick with the conservative voters who put into office the politicians who write voter ID laws. A small minority of them might admit they are racist. A larger minority might actively harbor racist thoughts – and they might be afraid to admit as much. But accusing all of these second-hand disenfranchisers of racism – of “hatred” – is the kind of gut-punch that throws even the most mild-mannered moderate conservatives into the “wow, maybe Fox is right” camp.

The vast majority of people who support voter ID laws are not themselves racist; I’m not convinced that the laws’ authors are racist, either. I am fairly certain that the motivations of those who write the laws – and 19 states are currently considering some form of voting rights restrictions – are more nefarious than that those who simply hear “anti-voter fraud” and think, reasonably, “Great! Fraud is bad!”

Is it really hatred that brings wily voting restrictions onto the statehouse floor? North Carolina’s voter ID law roared into existence after a manufactured “exposé” of fraud. Ohio’s lawmakers have been goaded by repeated lawsuits from the attractively-named “True the Vote” and its alarmist “poll-watchers”. These politicians seem to be operating out of something closer to fear. “Voter fraud” is a fairy tale some on the Right have to tell themselves, or else they will have to confront the ugly reality that they’re losing. The fiction that there is something unfair happening – that Obama and other progressives can only win because a rule has been broken – is central to modern conservatism. To a certain degree, the paranoiacs have a point: the rules have changed ... and Obama changed them.

In the past two election cycles, young people voted, black people voted, progressives won elections fair and square. Voter ID laws seek to undo these specific victories. In Texas, the tenuous upward trajectory of liberal darling Wendy Davis stems from a Voting Rights Act challenge to election laws that would have prevented her serving in the state legislature to begin with. Now, Texas’s newly legitimatized voter ID rules will likely undo her; indeed, she was forced to sign an affidavit in order to cast her own state election vote last fall. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers have rallied support for voter ID based on Mitt Romney’s 0% showing across 59 Philadelphia precincts. (This in the place where voter ID was “gonna allow Governor Romney to win”, according to the head of the Pennsylvania state legislature.)

These reactions don’t percolate out of hate; conservatives’ response to Davis’s victory and Romney’s humiliation is sheer terror. They are facing extinction. Election rules have become, in general, more expansive in the last half-century. Even more important: the rules of the culture have changed. It’s not okay to be racist, it’s shameful to be homophobic, it’s weird to want to know a whole lot about a woman’s vagina.

Those people who support voter ID laws? They need to be addressed not as racists, but as simply wrong: The laws don’t work the way you think they do. The problem you’re addressing doesn’t exist. Here, these are the people who couldn’t vote. And here’s another group that won’t be able to.

Ironically, Biden provides a model for this expansiveness. Even though he often lapses into doomsaying in public, his core strength as a politician rests in his apparent inability to hold a grudge, his willingness to see the best in his colleagues. When Obama selected Biden as his running mate, to the surprise of many, Biden thought he knew why: “The reason I’ve been relatively successful is that I have never questioned the motive of other senators,” he told the New Yorker. “And [that generosity is] instinctively Barack. Barack doesn’t start off, ‘Well, you disagree, you must be a, you know, an S.O.B. or you must not care about the poor or you’re sexist or you’re racist or you’re a whatever.’ He doesn’t think that way.”

Biden, and the rest of us, should build on that success. Call out bigotry when you see it; be aware that there is only a small slice of humanity that clings to hatred once it has been exposed to honest interaction. Studies that show a decrease in animosity among vulnerable classes and the traditionally powerful are inevitably linked to cultural desegregation, to knowing a gay person, a black person, an immigrant. Laugh at me as a Pollyanna, but look around: in the end, the culture changes because those of us who led the way welcome into the fold those who were once afraid.