Earlier this month, the most conservative of the major candidates in the Democratic field all but secured the party’s presidential nomination. However one accounts for Joe Biden’s victory, it should not be controversial to say that it was not a win for the left or for progressive Democrats.

Biden neither campaigned on the left nor meaningfully sought the support of progressive groups, making a public habit of telling activists who even politely disagreed with him to take a hike and go vote for someone else. Thanks to the entire party establishment rallying around him, he won anyway, largely on his own terms and from within his own comfort zone: pitching himself as the safe, pragmatic choice who could be counted upon by an anxious electorate (and a nervous class of big donors and business interests) not to rock the boat or have rough ideological edges of any kind. “I need you very badly,” Biden told a hundred wealthy contributors at the Carlyle Hotel in New York’s Upper East Side last summer “[If I’m elected president] No one’s standard of living will change, nothing fundamentally would change.”

He could scarcely have put it any clearer than that.