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“So, I would say we feel pretty good about that,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a daily briefing. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist Biden beat to win the Democratic presidential nomination, sang from the same songbook on CNN. Asked about the spending cut from the package to win the votes of a dwindling band of Democratic centrists, Sanders replied, “In my view, this is the most significant legislation for working people that has been passed in decades.” The network’s website later published a piece titled “The US is about to start a massive experiment in progressive government.”

The messaging illustrates the contradiction at the core of Biden’s successful campaign for the White House: He simultaneously pledged to fulfill Sanders’s wishes for the “most progressive president since FDR” and be a nonthreatening, bipartisan deal-maker who would deserve the votes of college-educated, white suburbanites who typically cast their ballots for Republicans.

Left-wing Democrats turned out for Biden in a way they did not for Hillary Clinton four years prior, without major defections to either the Green Party or the populist Republican nominee. But that may well have been offset by conservative Hispanic and black voters inching toward the GOP in opposition to socialism and defunding the police. The critical shift came once again, as it had in the 2018 midterm elections, in the suburbs. If former President Donald Trump had retained his 2016 share of the suburban vote in the key battleground states, the “former” modifier would not apply.

The White House argues that the stimulus plan actually shows Biden is living up to both campaign promises. The $15-an-hour federal minimum wage was discarded from the legislation, and the administration rejected liberal pleas to have Vice President Kamala Harris overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the question of whether the minimum wage hike could be passed by a simple majority through reconciliation — a maneuver that did not have the votes to succeed in any event.

Billions of dollars in spending were pared from the final bill in order to target aid more carefully, tightening who qualifies for the stimulus checks. The Senate also cut the weekly federal unemployment supplement from $400 to $300. Psaki pointed out that support for the legislation stretched from Sanders to Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, as it had to in order to pass. The final price tag was slightly lower than a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package Trump signed into law last year.

Republicans take a different view. “It is a Trojan horse for socialism, it is everything Democrats have wanted wrapped and branded in coronavirus so that people are scared into voting for it,” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida told Fox Business. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee argued that 91% of the spending is “money for the arts, humanities, transportation, abortion, loan forgiveness for students, loan forgiveness for ‘socially disadvantaged farmers.’” When a group of GOP senators went to the White House with a proposal more in the $600 billion range, Biden listened but told them he would not go smaller.

This is the way Democrats are legislating now, despite their razor-thin majorities. Their election reform bill, H.R. 1, or the “For the People Act,” is a collection of liberal policy priorities on the issue. The Equality Act is a sweeping reform of how sex is defined under federal civil rights law. The immigration plan is another “comprehensive” bill, yet with fewer concessions to border security and enforcement than the previous proposals that garnered some Republican support in the Senate.

The Democrats’ majorities are small, but they are arguably the most ideologically homogeneous they have ever held. Only a handful of genuine centrists remain. Some, such as former Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, fell to liberal primary challengers. Others, such as former Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, were unseated by Republicans. The big GOP years of 1994, 2002, 2010, and 2014 wiped out the mostly Southern white conservatives who were once part of the Democratic caucus and therefore limited liberal ambitions.

Whereas Bill Clinton had to deal with Sen. Sam Nunn, an influential Southern conservative who, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, balked at gays in the military, today, the two Democratic senators from Georgia are staunch liberals. Whereas Barack Obama had to shelve the public option as part of his healthcare plan to appease centrists and insurance-state Democrats, government “competition” for private health insurance may be a starting point for the party under Biden. Partisanship has made negotiations with Republicans a nonstarter; a new liberal hegemony has sharply curtailed intraparty deliberations, too.

When Clinton took office, Democrats controlled the House 258 to 176. (This actually understates their majority; the one independent was Sanders.) They held the Senate 57 to 43. Clinton’s tax increase still only passed the House by one vote and cleared the Senate thanks to Vice President Al Gore breaking a tie. Clinton’s much smaller stimulus plan and healthcare bill were both stopped before Republicans won Congress in 1994.

Similarly, when Obama came to the White House, the Democrats held 59 Senate seats. That increased to 60, a filibuster-proof majority, when Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched parties. The Democrats also enjoyed a 257 to 178 majority in the House. Obama’s stimulus program barely passed. Obamacare briefly hinged on negotiations with a small number of anti-abortion Democrats, mainly Catholics from the Midwest. A cap-and-trade energy plan passed the House by a small margin and wasn’t even attempted by the Senate.

Liberals complain about Manchin or Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who certainly matter in a 50-50 Senate. “There is a well-worn tradition of the House blaming the Senate for not being able to pass your agenda because of the procedures that are in place,” said a top Democratic campaign consultant. “These procedures have prevented a lot of conservative overreach over the years when Republicans have been in the majority, by the way.” But Clinton had at least half a dozen Democratic senators who were at least as conservative and often more so.

For frame of reference, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama — since 1995, a Republican in good standing with the conservative wing of the party — was one of them. Then-Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican who led the opposition to Clinton in a way comparable to Sen. Ted Cruz under Obama, had been a Democratic congressman with much the same voting record before his party switch. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a key Democratic vote during the Obama years, was to the right of Sen. Lincoln Chafee back when the Rhode Islander was still serving as a Republican.

The ideological sorting of the parties has been a decadeslong process with many consequences. One of them has been empowering the current Democratic majorities to govern by wish list. The coming infrastructure bill is expected to follow in the footsteps of the stimulus by containing a hefty price tag, another $2 trillion and counting, and vast quantities of funding for a host of liberal priorities. All this despite an even split in the Senate, where Democrats only hold the majority thanks to Harris’s tiebreaking vote, and a 220 to 211 House majority that Biden has to keep in mind whenever he considers a lawmaker for an executive branch appointment.

It’s possible that the narrowness of these majorities could catch up to the Democrats at some point. Either Manchin or a small number of left-wing House members could have blown up the stimulus from opposite directions. It does not take many defections to sink legislation. And Democrats do still have significant disagreements: In the end, eight Democratic senators, including two from Delaware who are close to Biden, sank the $15-an-hour minimum wage, not just Manchin and Sinema.

Senate rules limit the use of budget reconciliation both in terms of subject matter and the absolute number of times a year. So, having passed the stimulus along party lines with only the faintest appeals to bipartisanship, most future legislation is going to bump up against the 60-vote threshold required to invoke cloture and break filibusters. Democrats do not have the votes to eliminate the filibuster.

House Democrats were already losing patience with the Senate even under reconciliation. They are chafing under Manchin’s newfound power to decide the fate of the whole Biden agenda — “It’s not a good place to be,” the West Virginian said in a television interview — and left-wing operatives close to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the influential young New York Democrat, have begun sending fundraising emails aimed at purifying the party further with additional primary challenges to the surviving centrists. “If you think you can get a more progressive Democrat elected in West Virginia,” a Democratic strategist said, “good luck.”

While Manchin is open to some reforms that would make filibustering more difficult, the legislative maneuver is the source of his increased influence, and he has said he will use it to force Democrats to live up to Biden’s pledge of bipartisanship. “I haven’t seen an effort by any of our leadership to go sit down and work with them,” he told reporters, referring to Republican senators. Bills such as the Equality Act or H.R. 1 could go to the Senate to die, fostering divisions in the Democratic Party.

Democrats nevertheless remain committed to passing legislation of the scope they have only previously enacted when commanding three-fifths majorities. Despite liberals’ increasing talk about the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College or the Senate, they are trying to govern ambitiously with far less support than they held during the New Deal or Great Society. Obama’s 53% of the popular vote in 2008 remains their high watermark. Clinton never received an absolute majority.

Yet Democrats feel justified in taking this course not only because they are convinced of the righteousness of their views, but also because they are certain Republicans would do the same. George W. Bush did not scale back his tax cuts due to the closeness of the 2000 election, in which he lost the popular vote. Instead, he got them passed, with 12 Democratic votes, in an evenly divided Senate. Trump still pursued his planned tax cut and attempted Obamacare repeal after losing the popular vote. He secured a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court in an election year even though nearly all the polls predicted he would lose.

Republican operatives warn that the Obamacare fight proved Democrats are willing to “burn down” their majorities to achieve liberal policy objectives. Yet Democrats don’t see themselves as burning down the majorities but saving them. The party is disfavored in the midterm elections next year, clinging to control of Congress by single-digit margins. Republicans gained 52 seats in the House in 1994 and 63 in 2010. Directing vast amounts of federal spending at both the pandemic and the economy, they believe, is their only hope.

Other liberal agenda items are also seen as high-risk, high-reward. “In terms of putting numbers on things, I think that if we implemented D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood and passed redistricting reform, that would roughly triple our chances of holding the House in 2022 and roughly the same in the Senate,” influential Democratic strategist David Shor told New York Magazine. But this wish list must be passed without denting Biden’s popularity. “If his approval rating is below 50 by the end of the year,” Shor said, “we’re probably f—ed.”

This was the political calculation the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party made when it decided to whip up the grassroots in support of Biden: that if they also controlled Congress, he would be an automatic signature machine for whatever they were able to pass. But that is not the promise Biden made to another important part of his coalition, which believed his rhetoric about bipartisanship and unity. The Left sees that talk as a relic of a bygone era, like Biden’s soliloquy about leaving the record player on at night during one of the Democratic debates.

Stimulus spending is at least broadly popular, though the devil is always in the details. Culture war flashpoints over immigration and transgenderism are likely to be more polarizing. Without Trump on the ballot to resolve the contradictions, Biden cannot be the most bipartisan and most progressive president in history at the same time.

W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor.