Joe Biden won the first Democratic Party primary debate, y ni siquiera tuvo que aparecer.

Now, at his present political trajectory, Biden may end up promising to perform late-term abortions on transgendered Guatemalan migrants with his bare hands by the time the debate rolls around on Thursday. But really, all the former vice president needs to do to maintain his lead position is not turn completely insane.

Because while Sen. Cory Booker might believe that most Americans agree with the policy objectives of the Democratic Party, this is not a Democratic Party that anyone would recognize ten, or even four, years ago.

It’s unlikely, for example, that most Americans believe the United States should be an effectively borderless nation. Yet a whole bunch of Democrats on the debate stage this Wednesday came awfully close to proposing that absolutely no person be stopped from entering the United States—outside drug and sex “traffickers” (although one wonders how they propose we weed them out).

That’s around 144,000 migrants they would have let in just last month. A large number of these newcomers won’t show up in court to have their cases adjudicated, compounding an already growing problem.

There will be many more on the way because Democrats keep offering added enticement for thousands of Central American migrants to risk their lives, and the lives of their children, crossing deserts and dangerous rivers to enter an already overtaxed immigration system. While Democrats on the stage (and the ones posing as moderators) were busy blaming the horrific deaths of Oscar and Valeria Martinez on Donald Trump, they were ignoring the fact that hundreds of similar tragedies have occurred over the past decade, and, not that long ago, even progressive Democrats like Barack Obama were warning that this kind of anarchy was a killer.

So however poorly Republicans have handled the immigration issue, or however coldhearted you believe aggressive enforcement is, the idea that most Americans prefer lawlessness to some semblance of order is an untested theory, at best.

Do Americans really believe that abortion should be a right until the moment of birth, without any single restriction—all of it funded by taxpayers on demand? Polls don’t bear this out. When asked if she believed in any constraints on abortion, Sen. Elizabeth Warren refused to answer, dropping an array of platitudinous statements about reproductive rights instead. The other candidates, though, tripped over each other to claim support not only for unlimited “reproductive health,” but for “reproductive justice,” as well. Don’t forget state-funded abortions for “female trans” people, Julian Castro reminded the crowd.

That’s a lot of wokeness to shoehorn into one issue.

Warren had already dropped “Latinx” on the crowd—the gender-neutral alternative to Latino—promising to “fight” to take away the private health insurance for all sexes. The senator was, however, unable to explain how she was going to come up with approximately 6.5 gazillion dollars needed to fund universal child care, free college, student debt cancellation, free health care, and the rebuilding of the entire economy based on windmills and solar panels.

To be fair, Warren was quickly made to look like a lightweight. Although nearly every candidate proposed abandoning our fossil-fuel based economy, Jay Inslee announced that the United States needed to adopt a new set of “organizing principles”—don’t worry, no one mentioned the Constitution—that would be propelled by electric-powered cars and such.

How much would it all cost? The mayor of America’s largest city, Bill de Blasio, explained that whenever anyone asks him how he’s going to pay for his quixotic plans, he just tells them there is “plenty of money,” the real problem is that it’s in “the wrong hands”—which doesn’t sound authoritarian, at all.

The Gen-Xy Beto O’Rourke, who had kicked off an entertaining arms race in Spanish proficiency, promised to fund “resiliency”—the cost unknown. The one-time darling of the media also promised that as president he would instruct his Justice Department to prosecute his predecessor for “potential crimes,” which didn’t even provoke a murmur from the commentariat, although it’s the same kind of rhetoric that elicits high indignation when used by Trump.

Even beyond all the socialistic policy prescriptions and progressive moralizing, listening to these Democrats, one might have been under the impression that the nation was in the midst of a dystopian nightmare, ravaged by hunger, poverty, and slave-driving corporate masters. Do most Americans view the state of the economy this way? It seems unlikely.

There were some candidates, to be fair, like Amy Klobuchar and John Delaney, who sounded something in the vicinity of a traditional Democrat. Neither has the kind of organization or support to be the leading candidate in 2020. Biden, it seems, is the only real hope for those who believe in relative temperance on the left.

And even he’s a long shot.