The jubilant mob celebrating in front of the White House on Saturday was impressive for its size but also for its heterogeneity—as though a wide sampling of Washington, D.C., residents had been dumped on Black Lives Matter Plaza to celebrate Joe Biden’s victory. There were crop-topped Code Pink protesters, dancing Black teenagers, and consultant types in their blue-checked dress shirts. Women in Lululemon leggings carried biden 2020 signs, parents carried babies, and grandmothers carried tiny, quivering dogs through the crowd.

But a sense of impermanence hung over the revelry, like the few moments of stillness before a summer storm. For Democrats, this election was an exercise in setting aside differences in support of a broader goal: ending the reign of Donald Trump. Now that this goal has been accomplished, the Democrats’ truce is over.

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Progressives have been spoiling for a fight over Biden’s administration appointees since well before the election. Leftist lawmakers and activist organizations have sent a seriesof letters to the Biden transition team, urging it to fill the administration with women and people of color, and demanding that Biden shun lobbyists and top corporate executives. Lefties want to see kindred spirits such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts given top positions in the Biden government. But moderates argue that if Democrats ban appointees with corporate backgrounds, they could also be excluding some of the Democratic officials with the most experience running the federal government, as well as many qualified candidates of color. Biden’s “first priority is going to be a Cabinet that reflects the full diversity of the party and the country,” Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy and politics at the centrist think tank Third Way, told me. “Putting other litmus tests on top of that makes it harder to get the diverse Cabinet [he] might want.”