Joe Biden’s workaday problems are obvious and specific to him: He is elderly and diminished, a fact about which Democrats have suddenly decided it is permissible to speak. The only kind of politics Biden really knows how to do is politics among senators, having been first elected to the Senate back in the Age of Disco when John Ashbrook was challenging Richard Nixon. He is a creature of the 20th century at odds in his tone and his temperament with the catharsis politics of the contemporary Left. But while his roots are in the post–New Deal Democratic Party, he does not seem to have any very strong commitments but is instead willing to be carried along wherever the political currents take him. Biden’s “leadership” is the opposite of leadership. Barack Obama made Democrats proud to be Democrats, whereas Joe Biden makes Democrats wish they were Canadians.

But the problem with Biden is not that his administration will not aggressively pursue the kinds of policies progressives want. The problem with Biden is that his administration is doing just that. The Democrats may need to dump Biden for reasons of political survival, but dumping Biden will not solve their problem, because their problem is fundamentally a policy problem.

If Biden had been a more able and energetic champion of the policies his administration has put forward, what would we have? Probably a couple of trillion dollars more sloshing around the economy making inflation much worse than it is, a bunch of wasteful make-work projects, and a catastrophically stupid tax scheme. If a more committed and vigorous Joe Biden had been installed in January 2021, there would be more chaos in our economy and in world affairs rather than less. If Biden were more solicitous of progressive priorities, he might have made Afghanistan even more of a debacle than it was.