President-elect Joe Biden in November of 2020 at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del.(Alex Gakos / Shutterstock.com)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
With the Electoral College confirming him as the next president, Joe Biden now faces his true test. Will he act swiftly and boldly to meet the calamitous crises he inherits? Or will his penchant for working across the aisle, combined with sobering down-ballot election results, lead him to fail what he describes as a “Roosevelt moment?”
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Biden embraced a remarkably progressive agenda during the campaign, but many of his early appointments—lacking vision or new ideas—and his skittishness about his executive powers augur poorly. It will likely fall to progressive leaders and movements to force Biden to step up to that Roosevelt moment. Unlike the early days of the Obama administration, they are rising to the occasion.
Thanks to growing electoral strength and successful protests, progressives enter 2021 with a growing consensus around a bold reform agenda. And they are urging Biden not to wait for legislation—a tough prospect given a likely GOP-controlled Senate—but to act in his first days in office through executive orders and other similar actions.
Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Katrina vanden HeuvelTwitterKatrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.