One of Joe Biden’s most lasting accomplishments may be that he has done a service to people who had traditionally regarded him with deep skepticism. During the 2020 primary season, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party exhibited contempt for the former Vice President, reaching a point of hostility so pronounced that liberal stalwart Michael Tomasky described their “hatred” of Biden as “way over the top.” But Biden’s actions since assuming leadership of the Democratic Party have improved the left’s political health and made it a more potent, and enduring, force as it seeks to reshape America.

For about a decade starting midway through Barack Obama’s second term, the American left was in a very unhealthy place. The progressive movement in America has always been most vibrant when it positioned itself as a demographic-spanning working-class movement. It has faltered when it has become too closely identified with the elite cultural left, as in the years of the New Left in the Long Sixties and the dread “interest group politics” when it wandered the wilderness of the 1980s. From 2014 to the early Biden years, the left inhabited this upscale, extremely coastal niche, and was often indistinguishable from elite academia. This identification with an unpopular cultural vanguard made potent contributions to the abandonment of the Democratic Party by many working-class voters.

The ailing of the left reached its nadir in the 2020 primary. As a liberal, I often found that primary’s party debates to be painful viewing. Debate after debate, Democratic candidates stumbled frantically to get to the farthest-left position on the most polarizing issues. Perhaps the iconic moment of the primary came in its second debate, when all but one candidate embraced decriminalization of America’s international borders. This is a policy with public support that’s always crested at an absolute minimum and would have damaged the Party’s prospects for ejecting Donald Trump, the most anti-immigrant president ever to live in the White House, from the presidency.

Again, every candidate but one embraced this radioactive policy. But who was the lonely holdout? The answer, we know, is Joseph Robinette Biden, future president of the United States. And Joe Biden would proceed upon winning the nomination to perform a kind of reconstructive surgery on the struggling progressive movement. Led by longtime aide Ron Klain, Biden campaign officials made a successful effort to heal the Biden-Left division, and having gained progressives’ trust, Biden guided them closer to their historical strongpoint.

The left under Joe Biden has become less fixated on extirpating cultural impurity and more likely to conciliate with differing opinion within the broad Democratic coalition. It has embraced economic reconstruction of the heartland as a central goal, and expanded its reach to working-class politicians such as Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. To be sure the left has met Biden in the middle, with progressive leaders like Washington State’s Pramila Jayapal leading the Congressional Progressive Caucus along towards the party consensus. Both the left and the center have adopted a more pragmatic spirit. Far from a perfect politician, Joe Biden has proved surprisingly adroit, and the left owes him a debt of thanks for midwifing a new progressive sensibility that’s better situated than it has been in decades to make our society a more compassionate place.

Alexander H. Jones

Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.