Something unusual happened last Friday, although you wouldn’t know it from the griping on Twitter. While liberal activists looked on in shock, Senate Democrats celebrated a bipartisan budget agreement as a major victory for the party’s agenda. “This budget deal shows that the Better Deal agenda is more than a set of ideas; now, it is going to be real policies,” Chuck Schumer crowed. “It delivers exactly on what we laid out last year: rural broadband, childcare, and assistance with college tuition.” It was, from one perspective, a rare and surprising moment of success for the Democrats, mired as they are in triple minority status. And it was more than empty political posturing from Schumer: in many ways, the Democrats got more out of the budget negotiations than Donald Trump, who failed to advance his declared goal of funding the border wall and altering the system of legal immigration.

The budget resolution was a stunning, though largely unnoticed, win for the Democrats at the expense of the president. You might be forgiven for not knowing that childcare, rural broadband, and college-tuition assistance are at the heart of the Democratic agenda, since much of the public positioning of the party in recent months has been dominated by immigration, tax policy, and endless maneuvering around the Mueller investigation. But Schumer did not invent this agenda out of whole cloth and, in fact, the Democratic budgetary victories tie directly into the Democratic economic platform announced last summer.

To understand why Schumer celebrated a deal that his base hates, you have to go back to the chaotic early months of the Trump presidency, when the Democrats were still in shock. After the Trump victory in 2016, the Democratic National Committee undertook a painful postmortem to understand the reasons for their loss, with an emphasis on grappling with the defection of mostly white, mostly working class voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The result of this evaluation was the infamous Better Deal, a 12-point plan for job growth and income enhancement. The plan was unveiled in July 2017 by Schumer and Nancy Pelosi at an event in Berryville, Virginia, about 50 miles outside of the Washington beltway. The plan’s full name (Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future) was widely panned, somewhat unfairly, for having a consistency and cadence too close to the Papa John’s slogan (Better Ingredients, Better Pizza), and was greeted, somewhat more fairly, with a skepticism that it truly reflected the priorities of the party base.

That last concern was borne out when, after a brief flurry of press and social media, the Better Deal plan effectively disappeared, in the old Soviet style, never to be seen or heard from again. The D.N.C. and Senate Democrats maintained some lonely Web sites dedicated to the Better Deal, but otherwise it was not mentioned in speeches or events, and it is virtually impossible to find even a stray tweet about the Better Deal after that initial Berryville event. #Resistance remained beloved by party leaders and faithful alike, while #BetterDeal fell into virtual disuse. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the Better Deal reflected nothing more than the pollster’s dutiful nod to economic populism, when the real energy and agenda lay with the cultural reformation and the fight against Trump and all his apostasies.

So it was a little stunning to see the Better Deal rise from the dead with the budget deal last week. Despite having almost no governmental power other than the ability to block certain votes in the Senate, the Democrats managed to negotiate for an impressively large chunk of the Better Deal plan, including $5.8 billion of new spending on low-income childcare, $20 billion in new infrastructure spending including rural broadband, and a special joint committee on fulfilling pensions. It is not the entire Better Deal agenda by any stretch of the imagination, but it shows how desperate the Republicans were to complete a budget deal, and how irrelevant President Trump and hard-line conservative backbenchers were to the final deal. It also illustrated, paradoxically, how much Democrats can achieve when they stop giving Republicans so much to fight. It is no secret that Washington dysfunction is driven, in large part, by the principle that all politics are zero sum. While the left wing was raising hell over immigration, the revanchists on the right let the actual Democratic agenda sail on by.