Disciplined Democrats look likely to pass Joe Biden’s domestic agenda

IF PERCEPTION IS a construct of language, as an American anthropologist called Benjamin Lee Whorf argued, how Joe Biden’s party must rue the phrase “Democrats in disarray”. Ever since its first appearance, in local newspapers during the 1960s, journalists have reached for the alliterative term whenever Democrats have argued among themselves—whether existentially, as during their 1980s wilderness years; or in the normal course of hammering out a consensus among their many parts. Perusal of the New York Times website finds Democrats in deep disarray during the 1992 presidential primary, shortly before they nominated Bill Clinton, and straight after the 2006 mid-terms, at which they became the first party to control the House and Senate in over a decade.