On the face of it, Joseph Biden Jr and James Carter Jr ruled over two Americas, their terms separated by six administrations and more than four decades. Their futures, too, could not seem more divergent: today, as America’s 46th President declares his intention to remain in office, its 39th will remain at home receiving end-of-life care.
And yet, only 18 years separate the two men’s births; they are of the same generation. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that their political careers seem inextricably bound.
Both presidents were explicitly defined as the antithesis to a tumultuous predecessor, with Carter as the anti-Nixon and Biden as the anti-Trump. Both were elected into eras of high inflation. Both had low approval ratings. And both pursued a foreign policy of restraint that, according to their critics, only emboldened aggressors. Carter’s administration saw the Soviets invade Afghanistan, following the fall of Saigon under Nixon-Ford. Biden’s saw Russia invade Ukraine, following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban a year before.
For all these parallels, though, there is a crucial difference: the composition of their party. While Biden’s party has all but severed its ties with the white working class, Carter was the last president elected by the coalition that grew out of Roosevelt’s New Deal America. The states of the former Confederacy all voted for Carter, as did the Southern evangelical regions that would later become a mainstay of the Republican party. Carter also appealed to white voters in the northeast by promising not to use federal force to change what he called the “ethnic purity” of Irish-American, Italian-American and other neighbourhoods resistant to racial integration.
Even before Carter’s election, the future of the Democratic Party had been foreshadowed — in George McGovern’s doomed campaign of 1972 and Nixon’s landslide victory that followed. By the Obama years, the McGovern coalition of college-educated white voters and racial minorities was the Democratic mainstream, growing by absorbing many former liberal Republicans concerned by the rise of conservatism and populism within their party. What had been the obsessions of northeastern liberal Republicans in the 2000s — family planning and environmentalism — became the leading issues of a Democratic Party that caters to rich and professional elites.
This was not inevitable. Until 1975, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, a Catholic as well as a liberal, insisted that human life begins at conception. By 1992, however, a brief period in which Democrats were allowed to disagree about the issue ended: at the Democratic convention that nominated Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Pennsylvania Governor, Bob Casey, was denied the right to speak because of his opposition to abortion rights.
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