There is a comforting story that the Left is telling itself right now: thanks to Bernie Sanders’s primary run, the summer of racial justice protests, and a general upsurge in left activism (unfortunately often confined to the digital sphere), Joe Biden has been “pushed” to the left, as evidenced by his executive orders and the recent stimulus bill. There is no doubt that the Biden stimulus is different from previous stimuli, i.e. it’s not a corporate bailout posing as an economic recovery plan. A “transitional demand” of the post-work Left has been realized (more checks for all!), and we’re also getting increased child credits, the extension of the CARES unemployment expansion, and money to reopen schools.

But where precisely is the evidence that the Left is responsible for any of this? The story seems to be: we did stuff, and now things are different, and so the stuff we did has made things different. A classic set up for a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: that B came after A does not necessarily mean that A caused B.

The most obvious reason that the Biden stimulus is big and bold in comparison to its predecessors is that we’re in a pandemic, and the economic fallout has been severe: “one-in-four adults have had trouble paying their bills since the coronavirus outbreak started, a third have dipped into savings or retirement accounts to make ends meet, and about one-in-six have borrowed money from friends or family or gotten food from a food bank.” If Biden had passed this kind of bill without the exogenous economic shock that was the pandemic, maybe we could then scratch our heads and wonder about the cause for such a substantive shift in the administration. But this bill comes after a remarkable crisis that required a massive response, and it’s important to keep in mind that everything about this is temporary: “The principal components of its vast outlay—direct cheques, plus increases in tax credits and unemployment benefit—are all meant to expire.”

The stimulus itself also bears none of the structural effects that one would expect from legislation that the Left has in any small way “pushed.” As Jeet Heer noted on Twitter, it’s clear that at the current juncture, “it’s much easier to get people money by cutting checks than moves to bolster working class power in relation to employers (i.e. minimum wage).” This is not a coincidence. Elites are just fine with taking advantage of quantitative easing and the recent lending spree to shower the United States with cash. As Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora argue in a recent article for The New Statesman, “With millions of people under- and unemployed in an increasingly informal economy, a ‘quantitative easing for the people’ appears as a cheap, easy way of providing welfare.”

This is, quite literally, throwing money at a problem. The power relations in the economy are barely affected, and market mechanisms are left wholly intact. Instead of a deluge of “free cash,” we need “whole areas of our social life [removed] from the tyranny of the market…. public health care, social housing projects, public works programmes and free education”. Direct cash transfers, Jäger and Zamora continue, all too neatly fit our precarious, atomized social situation. They are a salve for the market, when what we need is to demarketize through the reinvigoration of the welfare state. Theoretically, this is what the Left wants: not just the temporary alleviation of poverty through cash infusions but a change in the dynamic that produces poverty to begin with.

One might counter: “Of course we’re not going to see exactly what the Left wants embodied in any Biden stimulus, but that stimulus is the result of our pressure filtered through the pea brains of Democratic policy makers.” But this points to the fundamental belief at work here: that the Democratic Party, thanks to the last five years of tireless activism, has finally become responsive, even if it’s not exactly in the way we want. It’s early in the Biden presidency, we needn’t write anything off, of course; but the evidence so far indicates that he is responsive not to polling or political pressure but rather to wonks who can only agree that we need to get money out there, as well as to the professional-class, Democratic Party base, who want to end the pandemic and re-open schools.

Sadly, it’s the shift in that base toward what Zack Beauchamp has called “post-material materialism” that might be the best evidence of the Left’s influence. In this view, the Left has done little to empower the working class, but it has helped to expand the ambit of cultural liberalism to include at least a stated commitment to economic redistribution. Sean McElwee emerges vindicated. If this is the case—that the Left has played a role in furthering the class dealignment that has, as Matt Karp recently argued, ironically made budgetary largesse more possible—then it’s unclear that we should be particularly proud of the current moment.

There’s a certain strain of NGOist logic that dictates we ought to claim credit regardless, merely to bask in the inevitably approving glow of this stimulus. Of course voters will “like cash that is time-limited, crisis-enforced and financed by the awesome borrowing power of the US government.” But it’s not certain that they will see this stimulus, in the words of Eric Levitz, as “the greatest increase in purchasing power in history”; it’s more likely that they will simply see it as a needed counter-shock to correct for the pandemic. If liberals like Levitz were so wrong in their predictions that voters would punish Trump for the pandemic, why should we think they are right that voters will reward Democrats for this stimulus check?

In any event, we don’t want (possibly) strategic lies to turn into phantasms that cloud our perception of political reality. In his post-election analysis, Vivek Chibber laid out how this last cycle was not about the defeat of far-right nationalism but about the defeat of the Left. How did we get from having our asses handed to us to exerting enough power to force Biden to do anything not 100 days into his term? The lesson of 2020 is that the Democratic establishment is willing to risk defeat in the general so long as it has thorough control over the primary, which allows it to chasten the Left for rocking the boat. The only way to change this dynamic is to build power to the point where we can just outright defeat them. Simply aligning ourselves with liberal self-congratulation is a way of preempting the slow work of building organizations that can one day hope to serve as the anchor of this working-class power.

I understand, of course, the need to believe that our labor over the past five years was not in vain. And it’s undeniable that Bernie has demonstrated quite clearly to left-leaning Democrats that they can be much bolder on economic issues and not be punished for it by voters. But that’s a welcome change that’s had to do with Bernie and progressive legislators, not the Left and the Biden administration. If legislation that indicates some meaningful structural shift gets passed, even the modest labor protections of the PRO Act, let’s reassess, but until then we should dispense with the comforting illusion of having much sway over a fluid and depressing situation.

Dom King is a writer from Cleveland (but temporarily a content creator living in Brooklyn).