Now that former vice-president and current president-elect Joe Biden has defeated Donald Trump, challenges of an astronomical scale punctuate his path. A generation-defining intersection of social justice, healthcare and economic crises in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to define at least the first year of his presidency.

Trump may have been voted out of office but the specter of Trumpism continues to haunt the U.S. and the world. After all, despite four years of incompetence, disregard for democracy, constitutional indifference and international humiliation, over 72 million U.S. citizens still voted for the incumbent — soon to be former — president in an election which was largely seen as a referendum on his first term.

With almost half the country still voting for Trump in 2020, it is evident that the anger against the current political system and party apparatus that enabled Trump to rise is still intact. Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was not a fluke, as much as the Democratic establishment might want to believe that. It was a confluence of rising anti-establishment sentiment on both the right and the left in the working class of the country. That culminated in the energized populist campaigns run by Senator Bernie Sanders and President Trump. While the two parallel campaigns represented the polar opposites of each other on the political spectrum, one common thread that ran through both was a sense of being left behind by the mainstream of both the Republican and the Democratic parties. With Trump, this resentment took shape of a right-wing xenophobic shift in the Grand Old Party. With Sanders, this resentment mobilized into a diverse multi-racial working class-driven movement that shook the echelons of the Democratic Party. Unlike the Democratic Party, the GOP embraced this distorted brand of economic populism which led to Trump’s victory in 2016. Regardless, to think that the same system that gave us Trump will defeat Trumpism is a self-defeating strategy.

It is important to note, however, that Biden ran a campaign driven by ambiguous rhetoric of “reviving the soul of the nation”, instead of comprehensive policy proposals. His campaign aimed at contrasting the personalities of the President with himself, evidenced by the Democratic National Convention held in August, which was just a week-long advertisement of Biden’s “decency.” Suffice it to say, the expectation of sweeping systemic reform from a Biden administration is one that is likely to be met with disappointment.

As much as Biden’s opposition to Medicare for All during a historic global pandemic and his continual insistence to not ban fracking are nonsensical, to be fair, his platform does have a few redeeming characteristics. He has endorsed the legalization of marijuana, the end of the death penalty, a 15 U.S. dollar minimum wage and investment in clean energy and jobs. His presidency will oversee a reversal of controversially outrageous Trump-era policies such as the Muslim travel ban and the caging of children on borders. However, as Colleen Mader, a U.S. American student from the Class of 2024, noted, “If progress was a building, Trump was the negative tenth floor while Biden is closer to ground level.”

The presidency of Donald Trump saw a sharp rise in resistance liberalism that formed the primary opposition to his first term. For the last four years, the Democratic Party has used the anti-Trump sentiment to galvanize its base without promising a progressive economic agenda that truly benefits the working people of the country. The thing about resistance liberalism is that it is almost wholly reactionary. But this reaction is easier to sustain when the party is in opposition, which is soon likely to change. However, the party has seen a significant shift in how it responds to social justice movements from its wholehearted support for the post-inauguration Women’s March and the student-led March for Our Lives to the recent criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement this year, with centrists deeming it to be electorally disastrous in an election year.

This, of course, is not true. During the epicenter of the BLM protests in June, the party saw a huge spike in voter registration, partly because of Trump’s abysmal authoritarian response to the protests. The point is that the party can not run away from these social justice movements any longer because after Trump is gone, a solely anti-Trump platform is not going to be enough to mobilize their base at a scale that is required to defeat the Republican political machine and media ecosystem in the mid-term elections of 2022, and later, in 2024. The Biden-Harris ticket won in large part due to record black voter turnout in the cities of Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Minneapolis. The grassroots organizing of the Navajo Nation in Arizona gave Biden that state. Thus, investing in an infrastructure that supports Black, brown and indigenous communities as well as working-class people is not only the moral thing to do, but it is an electorally smart and politically expedient strategy.

It is also important to note that the election was not a resounding success for the Democratic Party. Trump’s chief enablers Senator Lindsey Graham and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, among others, handily won their re-elections. The party failed to flip any of the state legislatures, shrunk their majority in the House of Representatives and will be facing two run-offs for the Senate. Joe Biden was not the down-ballot savior many moderates deemed him to be, and if anything, this should be a clear indication for the party that going back to “bipartisan unity” without actually addressing the issues faced by working people is not the way forward.

With a potentially divided Congress, the executive branch of the U.S. government is going to be more important than ever before in policymaking. A Biden-Harris administration can either be the gateway to a new era in U.S. progressive politics, or it can be a catastrophic reverse gear to what could be best described as a third Obama term.

The incoming administration is set to announce its new cabinet in the upcoming weeks. It remains to be seen which direction the administration takes with this cabinet, but it is safe to say that there will be disappointments all over the place with Biden’s broad coalition of moderate and progressive Democrats, and Never-Trump Republicans.