Joe Biden will be inaugurated as America’s 46th president on January 20, after a year of turmoil. We are in the midst of the worst public health disaster in a century, with more than 300,000 dead from Covid-19 and tens of thousands more expected to succumb before mass vaccination can end the pandemic.

The turbulence has been political, too, with a presidential election in which the losing candidate refused to accept the results—and, even more ominously, his repeated attempts to overturn those results were backed by an overwhelming majority of the Republican Party’s elected officials and voters.

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Nothing has exacerbated our country’s obscene inequalities quite like the pandemic, during which some 40 million Americans filed for unemployment, even as billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars. Nation editorial board member Zephyr Teachout and our strikes correspondent, Jane McAlevey, recommend measures that Biden can adopt whether or not Democrats gain control of the Senate. Teachout suggests regulatory changes that would reverse four decades of monopoly abuse. McAlevey argues that, while Biden can reorient the National Labor Relations Board in a more worker-friendly direction, the labor movement must find ways to counter the right’s impressive mobilization efforts in the fall elections.

Biden will have more room to maneuver on foreign policy, but as David Klion notes, he’s already stacked his team with Obama-era advisers wedded to the corrupt arms industry and implicated in our post-9/11 forever wars. The public mood, however, has shifted dramatically against military adventurism, and progressive activism is far stronger these days.