President Joe Biden made his first public address to Congress last week. Speaking to a sparsely attended chamber, he repeatedly linked his expansive domestic policy agenda with a call to confront China in a battle of “democracy versus autocracy.”

Since taking office in January, President Biden has wrong-footed observers across the political spectrum. Mitt Romney responded to the address with puzzled sarcasm: “China represents an extraordinary threat to the world, and we’re going to apparently deal with that by providing for free pre-K.” For its part, the Left has tended to view the first hundred days of the Biden administration as something of a contradiction, a “tale of two presidencies” instead of a coherent project.

Neither sarcasm nor balance sheet accounting will help us make sense of what the Biden administration is attempting to achieve. We should take the president at his word. The domestic and foreign sides of Biden’s agenda are deeply connected to each other, and reflect a growing recognition, at least within certain sections of the American ruling class, that they have a major legitimacy crisis on their hands.