It was every bit as predictable as death, taxes, and alarming tweets from @realDonaldTrump. In August, the small-but-powerful remnant of big-money moderation in the Democratic Party, shaken but not stirred by Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, officially declared war on the party’s left-leaning rank-and-file. Rising from the ashes of the defunct Democratic Leadership Council, the “centrist” movement that took over the Democratic Party after its three straight presidential defeats in the 1980s—and erased the last vestiges of New Deal liberalism from American political discourse in the name of winning elections—came a “new” effort called New Democracy, touted as a vehicle for “rethinking” the party’s message after its history-making loss to Donald Trump. But this grand reassessment, led by DLC co-founder Will Marshall and his K Street band of brothers, was merely a reassertion of the wealth-first economics, go-slow social progressivism, and hawkish foreign policy peddled by white Democratic power-brokers and Clintonian neoliberals for three decades now.

In a political age defined by two strains of populism—Trump’s on the right, and Senator Bernie Sanders’s on the left—New Democracy should be viewed by any sentient political observer as little more than a risible relic with a fancy budget. The most prominent Democratic politicians who’ve jumped on board are anything but prominent: John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s business-first governor, Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor and Clinton cheerleader, and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. But the old organs of the Washington establishment still take these people seriously, and otherwise intelligent Democrats still have a strange Pavlovian response to the dire warnings they issue, like clockwork, every four years: Embracing liberalism will always and forever end in defeat (even if Barack Obama disproved that theory not once but twice).

And so, last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed that disarranged the nerve endings of timorous liberals across the land: “Trump Is on Track to Win Reelection,” by professional Clintonite Doug Sosnik. (The last time Sosnik ventured such a bold prediction was in June 2016, when, even before the party conventions, he declared the election “already decided”—in Clinton’s favor.) Matt Yglesias at Vox, among others, hopped aboard this memetic bandwagon in subsequent days, offering up their own reasons why Trump’s “on track to win in 2020.”

Sosnik made one valid point: Trump’s “dismal” poll numbers nationally don’t reflect his standing in the battleground states that lifted him to victory in 2016. And indeed, the president’s numbers in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are a bit less dismal than elsewhere. But Sosnik’s argument has little to do with facts. Toward the end of an article built on tortured logic and tendentious claims (“Trump enters the contest with a job approval rating that is certainly at least marginally better than what the national polls would suggest”), he finally comes around to his money shot: “So for Democrats and others who want to beat Trump, unifying behind one candidate will be essential.” Translation: Let the old, white, Democratic establishment pick its favorite for 2020, and everybody else get in line. Or else.

Or else what? Alan Greenblatt, a staff writer for Governing magazine and former NPR correspondent, provided an answer in Politico Magazine on Sunday with one of the most ludicrous pieces of political analysis you’ll find this side of Breitbart: “Are Democrats Headed for a McGovern Redux?” If that question sounds awfully familiar, that’s because it is. The “no more McGoverns” argument has been recycled and appropriated by anti-liberal Democrats—with nips and tucks to suit the needs of the moment—in practically every presidential election since 1972. They wielded it like a tiki torch against Jesse Jackson’s populist insurgency in 1988, and invoked it to torpedo Howard Dean in 2004. And after its ironclad logic failed to derail Barack Obama in 2008, the “McGovern threat” was revived with a vengeance against Sanders in 2016.