No Time to Celebrate: Progressive Politics in the Pandemic’s Wake Getty/Tayfun Coskun
Sam Hananel
Introduction and summary
Progressives around the world are asking what lessons can be taken from Joe Biden’s presidential victory as they look to push back against populism and nationalism and set out an agenda to recover and rebuild following the COVID-19 pandemic. What were the decisive factors of Biden’s winning political strategy and agenda, and how do they overlap with more general concerns about how the pandemic has transformed the environment in which progressive politics coheres?
In many ways, the impact of Biden’s victory is already beginning to be felt beyond the United States, particularly in Europe. For one, the sense of inevitability that nationalism is in the ascendancy and that populism is impossible to beat without at least playing along with the populists’ agenda no longer holds. Where once the nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán may have