In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, there was a momentary fear on the Left that the Trump administration could seize on the crisis to lethal political effect. With news of a federal evictions freeze and initial buzz about massive stipends to the unemployed, would the Republican Party, traditionally sycophantic towards its corporate paymasters, embrace a populist welfarism and outflank the Democrats?

In retrospect, the question feels absurd. Trump, true to form, quickly returned to his preferred theatre of the culture war and has proven too politically and ideologically lazy to take the kinds of measures that might boost his flailing poll numbers and salvage a victory in November.

Over roughly the same period, a parallel story was being told in liberal media circles about the Democratic Party’s then all-but-certain presidential nominee Joe Biden. A lifelong moderate (the word liberal pundits use when they actually mean “conservative”), could the former vice president remake himself as the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and usher in a suite of reforms as ambitious as the New Deal?