The Democratic Party was drubbed in November. This after presiding over a historic wave of infrastructure spending and innovative new industrial policy mechanisms. After the “most pro-union president” of our lifetimes provided a tight labor market and a friendly organizing environment for union activists. The Democrats, facing down a wave of inflation, failed even to match their vote totals from 2020. For all the hope that Bidenomics signaled the birth of a new New Deal, in the end, the Joe Biden presidency proved to be a different kind of interregnum, a way station between two Donald Trump terms.

So what’s to be learned? For some in the liberal mainstream, the lesson is simple: wokeness pissed off voters, and Biden’s generous social policies overheated the economy and caused tremendous inflation. To fix it, just go back to Clintonism and offer free markets, low taxes, and sleek, professional, frictionless politics.

For many on the progressive left, of course, the exact opposite conclusion has been reached. It’s not that Biden’s plans were too generous; it’s that they were never attempted. If only the Democrats had passed the Squad’s Build Back Better bill, they would have sailed to victory. It was because Democrats ran away from progressive appeals that voters abandoned them. Besides, no one cares about wokeness anyway. (Curiously, after years of insisting that a strictly universalist economic program must be supplemented with expansive identity politics appeals, they now argue that no one cares about those appeals one way or another.)