As Joe Biden delivered his first address to Congress last week, it was obvious that something had shifted. In place of the rhetoric of deficit hawks, Biden touted spending and economic expansion. Where the first Democratic president of the neoliberal age had lauded small government, he instead spoke of jobs, public infrastructure, and invoked the spirit of activist states during the Second World War. He spoke of cutting child poverty, raising the minimum wage, and the specter of climate change. With a cursory and characteristic nod to the personal virtue of people on Wall Street, he talked of blue-collar workers, unions, and the middle class, even calling on Congress to send the potentially transformative PRO Act to his desk.

In at least some respects, the speech represented a marked break from the language of the liberal consensus in the post-Reagan era — and also the rhetoric that has defined Biden’s own career at the vanguard of the Democratic center-right. What does it signify? What did it mean? And what does it tell us about the state of American liberalism as the Trump presidency, and the very worst of the deadly virus that ultimately defined its catastrophic final months, recede into memory?

Across partisan lines, swathes of the media have been quick to settle on an answer to these questions. The consensus (expressed with varying degrees of approval, caution, or disapproval, depending on the source) is that Joe Biden is, if somewhat improbably, a radically inclined figure, intent on bringing about lasting changes in the tenor of American life and swerving sharply from the ideological shibboleths that have defined politics since the Reagan revolution. It’s a tidy, compelling and, for many, an understandably comforting story in the aftermath of a presidency experienced by virtually all but its own committed zealots as a singular national trauma. It’s also, at best, a cart-before-the-horse exercise in preemptive political wish fulfillment; at worst a case study in the way intoxicating media narratives can overtake reality and inaugurate a new age before anything resembling one has actually arrived.