Joe Biden isn't Jimmy Carter and this isn't the 1970s

Democrats are way more united now than they were 40 years ago

Those who think there is some yawning ideological gap between Democratic moderates like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the one hand and progressives like Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal on the other really should look at the Democratic congressional caucuses of the Carter years. Hell, they could just look at the congressional delegation from Carter’s home state of Georgia. The two Democratic senators representing the state at the time were the ex-segregationist fiscal hawk Herman Talmadge and the self-described conservative Sam Nunn. Democratic House members from Georgia included the president of the John Birch Society, Larry McDonald, and solid right-of-center members Doug Barnard, Jack Brinkley, Billy Lee Evans, Charles Hatcher, and Ed Jenkins, all of whom were part of the coalition that enacted Reagan’s landmark budget in 1981. There were so many conservative Democrats in Congress then that Reagan didn’t need his party to have a majority in the House to enact his agenda.

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The idea that today’s Democrats are anywhere near as disunited as the party was in the ’70s is ridiculous. The main problem they face today is simply razor-thin margins of control in both houses of Congress, which tempt individual members to make demands and take hostages.

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