This conception of politics rarely seems to factor into Atlantic reporter Franklin Foer’s latest, “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.” Instead, the book focuses on the more polite form of politics that the president practiced during his first two years in office. Beginning with Biden’s inauguration in 2021 and concluding with the midterm elections in 2022, when the “red wave” that pundits predicted failed to materialize, “The Last Politician” focuses on Biden’s attempts to make deals with recalcitrant legislators and nefarious anti-democratic leaders. Although the book is brimming with novelistic details that Foer collected as he interviewed insiders behind the scenes, there are no especially urgent revelations.

Happily, it is not a work of hagiography. Foer complains that Biden’s oratory is often dogged by “indiscipline and imprecision,” and he is sharply critical of the administration’s catastrophically bungled military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Overall, however, his tone is admiring. Biden may strike “friends and critics alike” as “boring,” Foer writes, but he impresses the author as canny and competent. (Foer was the editor of The New Republic from 2006 to 2010, and again from 2012 to 2014. I was an assistant editor at the magazine for a few months in 2014 but didn’t work closely with Foer.)

Perhaps more to the point, Biden has emerged as one of the most progressive presidents in recent memory, despite his uninspiring affect. “Bidenomics” — policies designed to promote competition and strengthen the power of workers — represents an audacious corrective to the Democratic Party’s disastrous embrace of a trickle-down approach, which promised to raise all boats but instead yielded a shipwreck of obscene inequalities. While the Obama administration injected $787 billion into the economy after the 2008 recession, not nearly enough to revitalize the country or bail out its poorest inhabitants, Biden marshaled a bold $1.9 trillion to combat the covid-induced slump. His 2021 American Rescue Plan, hailed by Slate as the “first step toward an FDR-Style presidency,” was one of the most ambitious pieces of progressive legislation to pass in generations: It solidified emergency unemployment benefits, raised child tax credits and distributed $1,400 checks. “Go Left, Young Man” is the title of the chapter in which Foer details Biden’s surprising shift away from his centrist roots.

Biden has also proved to be a staunch advocate for organized labor, arguably the most neglected and underserved constituency in American politics. He has repeatedly run afoul of the more mercenary members of his party, among them Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent, and Mark Kelly, both of Arizona, by endorsing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a bill that would put unions on a more equal footing in negotiations with their behemoth bosses. In 2021, he went so far as to sign an executive order urging the Federal Trade Commission to limit noncompete agreements. And even though the White House Counsel’s Office “questioned the legality of the president using his power to influence a union election,” as Foer reports, Biden filmed a video obliquely but unmistakably expressing his support for workers trying to unionize at Amazon in 2021. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and the newspaper’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.)

During the fraught months leading up to the 2020 election, Biden seemed to promise “a return to normal,” Foer writes — not just in the months after the start of the pandemic that upended American life, but in the months after a presidential administration that had little regard for (or apparently, knowledge of) the norms and laws of the realm. But the circumstances that Biden inherited were abnormal, and his covid response was as quietly abnormal as the rest of his policies. The president’s extraordinary vaccination effort, perhaps his greatest coup, was facilitated by what Foer calls “the guiding hand of an activist state.” The massive and sustained interventions in the market required to produce and distribute millions of vaccines on short notice sounded the final death knell of the laissez-faire methods favored by Obama and Clinton.

It is both a strength and a weakness of “The Last Politician” that it devotes so many pages to the organizational challenges involved in projects such as Biden’s vaccine initiative. On the one hand, Foer’s lengthy detours into matters of logistics provide a welcome reminder that “technocrats,” who come in for a great deal of thoughtless bashing these days, are in fact the force behind any successful social welfare program. “Producing billions of doses of vaccines taxed the entire supply chain,” Foer writes. “Vials are made of glass, made from sand. Needles are hewn from steel, covered by safety caps molded from resin.” The workaday mechanics of effective governance may be unglamorous, but navigating them is no mean feat.

Sometimes, however, Foer’s digressions into minutiae can feel like distractions. His play-by-play account of the United States’ last days in Afghanistan is so protracted that it has the makings of a whole separate book, and there are nearly as many forays into the tantrums and about-faces of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) as there are passages on Biden himself. “The Last Politician” is a bloated text with as many supporting characters — leaders of the White House’s covid-19 response team, wayward legislators, smooth-talking diplomats — as a Russian novel. Sometimes, Biden threatens to drop out of the picture completely.

In what sense is this inconspicuous figure, so often lost in a crowd of advisers and experts and allies and enemies, “the last politician”? In a prologue, Foer suggests that Biden counts as a politician because he specializes in the obsolete art of “nose counting, horse trading, and spreading a thick layer of flattery over his audiences.” The implication is that a politician is the sort of person who prefers haggling with legislators to wielding executive authority. “In Joe Biden’s telling of his life,” Foer writes, “the Senate represented his salvation. After his wife and daughter perished in a car crash in 1972, his colleagues lifted him up.” When he became vice president, he declared “I will always be a Senate man.”

But he is a Senate man no longer. If a politician is simply a fetishist of congressional contortions, then Biden is not much of a politician. Time and again, upon finding that Republicans were unwilling to cooperate, he resorted to issuing executive orders or passing bills by way of “reconciliation” (an arcane “parliamentary procedure” that allows “the Senate to pass spending bills and tax cuts without having to garner sixty votes”).

Perhaps Biden qualifies as a politician simply because he is conciliatory. Buzzwords such as “persuasion” and “bipartisanship” surface frequently in Foer’s book, and such terms are usually deployed with sentimental reverence. Biden, we learn, believes “in the gospel of unity with his whole heart.” In this account, a politician is a milquetoast moderate by definition.

But Biden is not a politician by this measure, either, for he has not governed very moderately. Foer’s explanation for Biden’s remarkable leftward pivot is that the president was not ever “spiritually … aligned” with a “centrist consensus.” But this hypothesis is not very convincing: If Biden has become an unlikely and perhaps reluctant radical, it is because he is responsive to the mass movements of his day, as Foer periodically acknowledges. “To win young voters and fulfill a campaign promise to Elizabeth Warren,” he writes at one point, the president “agreed to student-debt relief, even if it wasn’t a policy he especially liked.”

Biden’s is a familiar story: As Osita Nwanevu recently recalled in the New York Review of Books, Woodrow Wilson was another president who signed onto a progressive agenda “less out of any deep ideological commitment” than “out of a desire to gain and retain the support” of followers drawn to William Jennings Bryan, his intraparty populist opponent. Biden is no more fickle or capricious than Wilson was: Like that predecessor, the president is merely engaging in effective politics. For as Crick reminds us, surely one thing that a politician does is negotiate, not just with politicians across the aisle, not just with administrators and experts ensconced in the halls of power, but also with the public, which is itself engaged in a constant series of negotiations. And if politics is a matter of mass mobilization, we will never see the last of it. The difficult work of figuring out how to live together will never come to an end.

Foer nods to this conception of politics briefly in his prologue, where he notes that “politics is the means by which a society mediates its difference of opinion, allowing for peaceful coexistence.” But in the ensuing hundreds of pages, he rarely discusses the jostling that roils the public sphere. Although he dedicates pages to the niceties of dinners on Capitol Hill, he mentions Black Lives Matter only twice. His periodic allusions to “the Left” — which presumably includes the scores of younger voters who supported Warren and Bernie Sanders — are reliably sneering and dismissive.

The premise of a book such as “The Last Politician” is that the personalities of lawmakers and bureaucrats can explain policy. But is this premise true? If even a temperamental moderate can transform into a radical in the face of popular pressures, psychology may matter less than, well, politics.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future

Penguin Press. 414 pp. $30