The most disturbing thing about Gina Haspel getting confirmed as America’s next CIA director is the fact that she won that position after overseeing torture at a CIA black site and destroying evidence that it took place. But the most surprising thing is that six Democratic senators cast the decisive votes that sealed Haspel’s victory.

This will come as a shock for liberals who expected a blue firewall against Haspel, given the controversial nature of her career. But the unsettling reality is that Americans are still divided over the ethics of torture, even though the Geneva Convention has prohibited torture since 1949. A 2017 Pew Research poll found that Americans of conservative-to-moderate political persuasion were more likely to support torture than Americans who identify as moderate-to-liberal.

The Democrats who voted for Gina Haspel — Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Bill Nelson, Mark Warner, Jeanne Shaheen and Joe Donnelly — all hail from purple swing states. They’ve broken party lines to vote with Donald Trump and the GOP before, and while none of them are formal members of Washington’s Blue Dog caucus, they’re conservative Democrats whose votes are as likely to change as the breeze.

Naturally, this sort of thing is infuriating to liberal voters, many of whom have adopted politics of resistance ever since Trump and his allies swept into office. But what’s strange here is how rarely the actions of these conservative Democrats ever seem to incur the wrath of party leaders like Chuck Schumer. Prior to the Haspel vote, Schumer told reporters that he was not actively urging his colleagues to vote against Haspel. Furthermore, he kept his own vote closely guarded.

When Schumer’s passive approach to the Haspel confirmation is weighed alongside something he said last year — that the Democratic Party is a “big tent party” that welcomes many kinds of viewpoints — a problematic theme comes into focus.

Today’s Democratic Party leaders, it seems, are more interested in stewarding bipartisanship than taking tough, principled stands on issues that matter to their base.

To be fair to Schumer, the Democratic Party’s obsession with West Wing-style cooperation of parties began before his current tenure. Back when Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill — now considered by many liberals to be one of the most destructive bills signed by a modern Democratic president — the party base was a more moderate collection of voters who rewarded reaching across the aisle. But as Democratic voters eventually began moving to the left (following the Republican Party’s hard turn to the far right) elected Democrats mostly remained fixated on bipartisanship as their default course of political action.