At this point in the news cycle, say­ing Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s op-ed in the New York Times yes­ter­day was a hot mess is a cold take. Lib­er­als and left­ists both seem to agree that Democ­rats shouldn’t take the advice of the man who over­saw Hillary Clinton’s doomed and xeno­pho­bic 2008 pri­ma­ry bid and a tax-evad­er-turned-Trump sup­port­er, respec­tive­ly. Among their sug­ges­tions are to ​“reject social­ist ideas” and tack right, embrac­ing reforms like 1996’s dis­as­trous wel­fare reform package.

Curbing climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of our economic system and the role of the state in orchestrating it.

But Penn and Stein weren’t alone this week in offer­ing maligned guid­ance about the Democ­rats’ path for­ward. A stick­er-choos­ing poll from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gres­sion­al Cam­paign Com­mit­tee (DCCC) — which appar­ent­ly has noth­ing bet­ter to do — float­ed swag fea­tur­ing the slo­gan, ​“Have you seen the oth­er guys?” (To be fair, the line pret­ty accu­rate­ly sums up the strat­e­gy behind Clinton’s 2016 pres­i­den­tial campaign.)

Then there’s ​“Win The Future” (“WTF” col­lo­qui­al­ly, obnox­ious­ly), the brain­child of Sil­i­con Val­ley mega-donors who want to dis­rupt the Democ­rats into becom­ing more ​“pro-busi­ness,” which has clear­ly been the miss­ing ingre­di­ent in the party’s strat­e­gy these last sev­er­al years. Their plan? Crowd-source ideas via Twit­ter and put them on bill­boards around Wash­ing­ton D.C — ​‘where politi­cians can see them!’

Indi­vid­u­al­ly, all these ideas seem to lack much in the way of strate­gic mer­it. Tak­en togeth­er, they spell out a good case for why we shouldn’t take any­one seri­ous­ly who wants to defend the cen­ter from a left­ward drift.

So, what made any­one think this kind of think­ing was smart in the first place? Because they man­aged to win elec­tions for a time, cen­trists paint­ed them­selves as the Machi­avel­lians who rebrand­ed Britain’s Labour Par­ty to beat the Tories and turned Democ­rats into the par­ty of wel­fare reform, win­ning over mod­er­ate Repub­li­can vot­ers in the process.

Pol­i­tics, of course, has changed a lot since the days of Bill Clin­ton and Tony Blair. The Democ­rats have lost 1,000 seats since 2008, and not — as Penn and Stein argue — because Bernie Sanders ran in the 2016 Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry. Labour was humil­i­at­ed at the polls by Tories and rapid­ly lost mem­bers until recent­ly, when Jere­my Corbyn’s open­ly left wing of the par­ty start­ed to pull it back to its work­ing-class, social­ist ori­gins and win back seats and grass­roots appeal because of it. Bernie Sanders is also America’s most pop­u­lar politi­cian.

Faced with a choice between social­ism and bar­barism, defend­ers of the cen­ter are devolv­ing into sad fan fic­tions about Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel form­ing a Jus­tice League ani­mat­ed by col­or­ful socks and a zeal for free-trade poli­cies. After years of infan­tiliz­ing the left as unre­al­is­tic dream­ers, a sub­stra­tum of poll­sters, washed-up politi­cians and media per­son­al­i­ties are cling­ing on to the idea that a few telegenic heads of state and an elu­sive sil­ver bul­let from the FBI’s Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion will bring Trump and the ris­ing far-right tide he rep­re­sents crum­bling down.

There’s anoth­er prob­lem with this kind of mag­i­cal think­ing, beyond it being man­i­fest­ly out of touch with polit­i­cal real­i­ty: It might get us all killed.

Curb­ing cli­mate change requires a fun­da­men­tal rethink­ing of our eco­nom­ic sys­tem and the role of the state in orches­trat­ing it. Just last week, the Unit­ed Nations warned that we have just three years to keep the world from warm­ing beyond two degrees Cel­sius, a thresh­old that — if passed — could leave major coastal cities under­wa­ter and fuel geopo­lit­i­cal con­flict world­wide. Pre­vent­ing that in the Unit­ed States alone will mean a rapid scale down (like­ly via nation­al­iza­tion) of coal, oil and nat­ur­al gas com­pa­nies, the state com­man­deer­ing com­pa­nies to phase out com­bus­tion-pow­ered cars almost imme­di­ate­ly and invest­ing tril­lions of dol­lars in pub­lic fund­ing to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the country’s out­mod­ed grid sys­tem. And that’s just for starters.

All of this flies in the face of a cen­trists’ advice about reign­ing in spend­ing and keep­ing the government’s role in indus­try to a min­i­mum. The pre­scrip­tion physics lays out, on the oth­er hand, couldn’t be clear­er: social­ism, or some­thing damn near close to it — includ­ing a lot of the things Penn and Stein sug­gest rejecting.

The sheer phys­i­cal real­i­ty of cli­mate change might be the best argu­ment against believ­ing a damn word these guys say.