Acceptable Bigotries

But the glib and fashionable double standard against traditionalists and orthodox Christians isn’t what I have in mind. It’s the far more widespread and fashionable bigotry against the past.

If a visitor from Sudan comes to your house for dinner, it’s simply good manners to make allowances for the cultural differences. If you go to a foreign country, it’s understood by most decent people that you should be making the lion’s share of adjustments to how people do things. The quintessential ugly American refuses to bend to — or even respect — the norms of foreign cultures, norms that can sometimes be ugly, nasty, or backward by a lot of Western standards.

The arguments in favor of deferring to foreign cultures ranges from Emily Post bromides about etiquette to swirling torrents of words about colonial this, patriarchal that, and imperial the other thing. Fine.

But now imagine that someone comes from the past, which is a kind of foreign land as well. For some people, particularly those wielding the “nightstick of wokeness,” as Peggy Noonan calls it, carrying any old values or assumptions into the present day is a form of heresy or, really, contamination. Beto thanks his wife, and the thronging wokesters shout the equivalent of “2319!” and bust out the cultural hazmat equipment.

Again, Biden’s habits are unappealing to me, and I understand why people accuse him of being insensitive to other peoples’ comfort with his antics. But there’s a remarkable amount of insensitivity going the other way as well.

Forget Biden for a moment. I’ve never understood why we immediately assume that young people are more open-minded, forward-thinking, or moral than older people. Sure, sometimes they are. But sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re just open-minded about the things they believe and closed-minded about everything else. And there are few things they are more closed-minded about than the past. I don’t just mean the iconoclastic goons tearing down statues on college campuses, I mean many generally decent and intelligent young people who seem to take it as a given that moral progress has advanced in lockstep linearity with technological progress. Today, people — at least the right people — are simply better people than those from earlier generations

I think there’s a lot of mythmaking about how Biden simply represents a bygone style of politics that was common for men of his generation. I don’t recall Sam Nunn or Bill Bradley Eskimo-kissing anybody. And his case is by no means the best illustration of my point. But there’s just something about the smug self-confidence of the most socially awkward generation in American history, many of whom struggle to talk on the phone, never mind go on a date, asserting with moral righteousness that their customs and norms are so obviously superior. If Biden were a visitor from another country, we’d hear how charming his customs are. But because he allegedly comes from the past, it’s fine to give a full airing to your bigotry against those kinds of people.