The trouble with evaluating Joe Biden’s presidency on the domestic front is that it both was so much better than anyone had a right to expect and fell far, far short of both what the moment demanded and what the president’s most ardent boosters kept telling us it was.

A Joe Biden presidency was always going to be something of a paradox. As one of the leaders of the Democratic Party’s lurch to the right, Biden had been, without exaggeration, a key figure in virtually every ailment that led to Donald Trump: mass incarceration, the shredding of the New Deal, deindustrialization, endless wars, the zeal to slash budgets at all costs, a society chained to debt — the list goes on and on.

The man who helped create these problems over four decades was suddenly tasked with solving them in the Oval Office; the politician who had proudly declared his distaste for radicals, class warfare, and populism was now trusted to steer the country through a radical, populist era of class war — all while exorcizing Trumpism from the American psyche and forging a new New Deal on the back of the most expensive, oligarch-financed campaign at that point in American history. It’s no wonder he failed.