Ed Kilgore concludes that “their effort to revive progressivism by marrying it to market mechanisms — in part to secure business and moderate Republican support — never caught the public’s imagination or secured bipartisan support. . . . And then there was 2016 itself, when the political premise of Democratic centrism evaporated in Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump.”


I am sure that a lot of people who used to think of themselves as conservative or centrist Democrats feel this way now. But here’s another way of looking at things. What was politically valuable to Democrats about the new Democratic turn was not so much centrism on fiscal and economic matters but on questions of values. The Democrats recovered from their 1980s nadir in large part by changing their image on questions of work and welfare, faith and patriotism, and—although this is an even more complicated story than the others—sex and family.

And on those questions, centrism didn’t fail in 2016; it wasn’t tried. Hillary Clinton invited Republicans to vote for her, sure, but only on the basis of the putative unacceptability of Donald Trump. There was no substantive moderation on guns, abortion, religious freedom, immigration, or other cultural issues: quite the reverse. And it seems to me that Democrats paid a significant price for going too far left on such questions, and may do so again.