What was the point of Joe Biden’s presidency?

When he was running for president, there was a platter of rationales. Progressive groups insisted Biden really was planning a transformational program to fix the country’s many long-simmering ills. Television talking heads told us he would turn around the deadly pandemic with a science- and expert-based approach quite unlike Donald Trump’s. For many, just getting rid of Trump was enough, with the added hope of simply erasing the last four years of policy and continuing on as before. Biden himself pitched his presidency in quasi-mystical terms, as if electing him alone would serve as a kind of nationwide exorcism of all the cruelty and bigotry of the Trump years.

Well, none of that happened. One year in, the most striking thing about Biden’s presidency, given the various threads of anti-Trumpism that powered his win, is the fundamental continuity between the two administrations in nearly every field of policy. Just as striking is how few are aware of this, with both die-hard blue and red voters convinced Biden’s White House is the antithesis of Trump’s, and an almost radical experiment in left-wing governance.