Joe Biden, to put it mildly, is an unlikely standard-bearer for a transformative policy agenda. He is deeply implicated in much of what is wrong with America and the world today: cheerfully working with segregationists in the 1970s, becoming an architect of crime legislation that led to mass incarceration, and a champion of the war in Iraq, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians as well as thousands of American soldiers. You can read about this depressingly conservative public figure in my Jacobin colleague Branko Marcetic’s fine book about Biden, Yesterday’s Man (Verso, 2020).

It’s worth asking, then, why, given this history, does Biden’s incoming agenda so far seem surprisingly decent? Some of it is explained by the damage done to our critical faculties over the last four years; admittedly, his predecessor, an aspiring dictator beloved by fascists around the globe, set a low bar. But that’s not the whole story.

Yesterday, his first day in office, Biden signed a raft of executive orders. Some of these were actions that any Democrat would have taken but are still worth noting as they’re crucial to human survival: he signed a mask mandate covering all federal properties, rejoined the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization, and restored the capacity of the federal government to address the pandemic in a coordinated fashion.