The intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s presidency, so far, pits a growing camp of Biden enthusiasts who are harking back to liberalism’s golden age – comparing the new President’s free-spending ambitions to Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s – against a shrinking cadre of leftists who insist that Biden is still just another neo-liberal centrist, another Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Here’s a somewhat different, more provoking way of thinking: we should regard Bidenism, in its current outline, as an attempt to build on Donald Trump’s half-formed, never-finished policy agenda, in the way that elements of Jimmy Carter’s program found its fullest expression in Ronald Reagan’s presidency.