But for a brief window, Biden the man nearly redeemed himself.

Whether he knows it or not — and based on the case he desperately made for himself the past weeks, Biden views esoteric foreign-policy matters like NATO expansion and AUKUS as his most important accomplishments — Biden’s presidency, in a strange twist of history, ended up playing a vital role in the ongoing political transformation of the country. Against all odds, Biden — a career-long conservative who welcomed the election of Ronald Reagan, voted for NAFTA, and once said that “[Bill] Clinton got it right” when he rejected “class warfare and populism” — advanced the fortunes of an organized left that he had never cared for.

Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden made amends with his socialist rival Bernie Sanders and brought him and some of his supporters into the fold. He adopted at least some of Sanders’s political program and ran, however half-heartedly and haltingly, one of the more progressive Democratic presidential campaigns in recent memory (a low bar, but still) — and won. He gained control of the Senate by promising to send checks directly to every American. He armed his administration with progressive trustbusters and allies of organized labor, and became outspokenly pro-union, becoming the first sitting US president to join a picket line and basking in the praise from many quarters as the most pro-labor president in nearly a century.

The career-long deficit hawk and bipartisan obsessive passed a bigger stimulus than his former boss had on a party-line vote and was rewarded with the best approval numbers of his presidency. For a moment, he seemed poised to make real the customary campaign-season Franklin Delano Roosevelt comparisons, as his immensely popular “human infrastructure” proposal — a major, long-overdue expansion of the US welfare state, and one crafted largely by Sanders — promised to, if not undo, at least make up for the profound damage Biden had inflicted in the course of getting to where he was.

And then he did what he had expressly said would be a mistake, splitting that bill in two, frittering away months on getting bipartisan Republican buy-in for its own sake, and dooming the ambitious proposal. As so often in his career, Biden proved his own worst enemy.

There is a tendency, even among the Left, to overstate the extent of Biden’s populism. This is, after all, a president who nickel-and-dimed Georgia voters on the $2,000 checks he had pledged, quickly abandoned his promise of a $15 minimum-wage increase that might have helped voters weather inflation, and refused to fight to keep transformative pandemic-era policies like Medicaid expansion and expanded unemployment insurance. However ambitious his Build Back Better legislation was, we sometimes talk about it as if it had actually become law, when the reality is it died — and did so in large part because Biden considered getting a handshake with Republicans a higher priority.

That his presidency became the unlikely vehicle for progressive economic populism tells us less about Biden himself than the state of the Left: a Left that, however disorganized and defeated, succeeded in dragging someone like Biden into adopting even a watered-down version of its political program. It did so not just through political pressure, but by changing the political landscape to such an extent that a man who had spent his life tacking right in the chase for political power came to realize there was a popular constituency for a left-populist agenda, and that it was worth his while politically, crucial to his legacy even, to give pursuing such a thing an honest-to-God shot.