Politically, Biden’s position made sense. Most white voters in Delaware opposed busing. And just three years earlier, in 1972, the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, had prompted a revolt among working- and middle-class whites with his defense of the policy. McGovern tried to reframe the issue, asking white voters if “stopping the buses is really going to give them all the other things they want: jobs, homes, healthy families, better schools, safe communities — futures to look forward to with pride.” It didn’t work.

“Support for it was a difficult case to make to white working people who felt that integration was taking place on their backs,” the historian Jefferson Cowie explains in “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.” “Immediate defense of white identity, home, and school readily trumped the abstract hope of a better world someday.”

Biden’s sensitivity to the fears and anxieties of his white constituents helps explain his positions on drugs and crime in the 1980s and 1990s. He was an ardent drug warrior and “tough on crime” Democrat who hoped to outflank the Republican Party on those issues, winning ground from worried white voters. “One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail,” he said in 1990 when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

That line, which refers to a notorious political ad from the 1988 presidential election, gets to the heart of Biden’s appeal in that era. He was working for voters who viewed cities and their denizens as carriers of crime and disorder who should be controlled if they couldn’t be isolated. His central work on the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, like President Bill Clinton’s later support for welfare reform, was part of a larger effort to position the Democratic Party as both a defender of white middle-class interests and as a disciplinarian — in clamping down on assumed black pathologies of criminality, promiscuity and dependency. Biden himself was trying to take this path in the 1988 election, before he derailed his campaign by plagiarizing a British Labor Party leader.

No one is their past, however, and it’s possible Biden has morally and politically redeemed himself through his association with Barack Obama’s historic presidency. And Biden has been supportive of civil rights laws as well as a strong ally to groups like the N.A.A.C.P. At the same time, however, the former vice president has only tentatively addressed his intimate role in building the modern incarceration state, and he still defends his position on busing.

The questions, then, are simple: Are Biden’s politics still racialized? Is his blue-collar and Middle American appeal still an implicit affirmation of white racial privilege?

If it is, then a Biden candidacy may be one where he tries to capture the supposed center of American politics by presenting himself as the real embodiment of working-class white identity against Trump’s inauthentic embrace of the blue-collar worldview.

Consider the message this would send. For decades Biden gave liberal cover to white backlash. He wasn’t an incidental opponent of busing; he was a leader who helped derail integration. He didn’t just vote for punitive legislation on crime and drugs; he wrote it. His political persona is still informed by that past, even if he were to repudiate those positions now. Biden could lead Democrats to victory over Trump, but his political style might affirm the assumptions behind Trumpism. The outward signs of our political dysfunction would be gone, but the disease would still remain.

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