LOSING THE PRESIDENCY in 2016 to someone most Democratic activists consider unfit for the office even on a good day was terrifying, because it suggested they did not understand the country they aspired to govern. It was also a little exciting. Ever since the Reagan revolution, Democrats have had a sickening feeling that their core idea about government is unsellable. “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” still sounds comforting to many of them, but they suspect they are not allowed to say it. The lessons of Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 and the backlash against Barack Obama’s attempts to fix health care seemed to be that the country is as hostile to big government as ever. Then Donald Trump ran, without making any of the usual conservative promises to starve the beast, and won. Before 2016 liberals thought they were fighting an idea. Now, it seemed, they were fighting a man. Perhaps the old rules no longer applied.

The sense of possibility that came with this has been a tequila shot for those trying to push the Democratic Party leftwards. One prominent effort to do so is being masterminded from the top floor of an art-deco building in downtown San Francisco. This is where Tom Steyer oversees NextGen America, which he calls the largest grassroots political organisation in the country. Mr Steyer, a former fund manager, and his wife have given $30m to Democratic and liberal causes in this election cycle according to the Centre for Responsive Politics, making them the most generous political donors in the country. But Mr Steyer has a fractious relationship with the Democratic Party’s leadership, which he views as weak-kneed. He funded an advertising campaign that called for impeachment of the president. Party grandees hated it. Mr Steyer thought this hypocritical. “Every Democratic politician thinks Donald Trump has met the standard for impeachment, they just can’t say it,” he says. “Telling the truth and standing up for our values is important in and of itself.”

Doing so, Mr Steyer believes, is also good politics. The Democratic leadership tends to divide candidates into centrists, who can win in marginal districts, and lefties, who are fine in safe seats but will lose otherwise winnable ones. This makes intuitive sense, but it is an idea that political scientists have found hard to stand up. The “median-voter theorem” once held that the party that hews closest to the views of the median voter usually wins. It was taught to this generation of academics as akin to the law of gravity, but has since become the political-science equivalent of believing Earth to be flat. When politics is so polarised, people no longer cluster in the ideological middle. And besides, the belief that voters are calculating machines who carefully weigh policies before opting for whoever offers them the best deal, is hard to sustain. That strengthens the arguments of those pushing for boldness. “The idea that there is a trade-off between pleasing the base and winning is completely false,” says Mr Steyer. “Turnout in elections is pathetic; the strategy of trying to talk to both sides simply doesn’t work.”

Almost all Democratic candidates now favour raising the minimum wage and also endorse universal health care and criminal-justice reform. The disagreement is over how to get there. Lee Drutman looked at the division between Clinton and Sanders supporters in the Democratic primary of 2016 for the Democracy Fund, a bipartisan foundation, and found few disagreements on policy, except for a slight difference over the benefits of foreign trade. Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University concurs. The notion that Clinton and Sanders supporters were divided by ideology, he writes, is starkly contradicted by statistical analysis.

Within activist circles, though, this division is real. What might look to outsiders like small policy differences reveal a larger philosophical difference. Candidates who favour incremental changes are signalling that they are basically happy with the country as it is, says Karthik Ganapathy of MoveOn, one of the largest pressure groups on the left. More uncompromising candidates are signalling that they know that something is fundamentally wrong with American society, he says. Thus differences over whether the federal government should offer a public health-insurance option or introduce a single-payer system can become litmus tests for the party’s progressive wing. Democratic senators have recently proposed plans for universal single-payer health care, free college tuition, a national $15 minimum wage and a federal jobs guarantee for those unable to find employment. This last measure alone could increase the federal government’s payroll tenfold. The senators usually spoken of as contenders for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020—Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders—have all endorsed some or part of this. Twenty years ago a Democratic president declared that the era of big government was over. Now it seems to be back.

Donkey in elephant’s clothing

Contrary to popular belief, there is some evidence for the idea that Americans might quite like some more government. Another consistent finding in political science is that voters are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. Small government is more popular than big government in theory, but voters do not like spending cuts. “The public mostly agrees with the Republicans in philosophical terms and with the Democrats in policy terms,” write David Hopkins and Matt Grossmann in “Asymmetric Politics”, the best recent book about how the two parties became what they are. This is not just an unwillingness to choose between two good things. Even when voters are told that spending will require higher taxes or budget deficits they still want it, according to Messrs Grossmann and Hopkins. A survey taken a year after Mr Trump won found that 55% of Republicans thought government should make sure everyone has access to good health care and 60% of Republicans thought the government should provide a decent standard of living for those unable to work. Perhaps, these numbers suggest, Democrats are not so out-of-tune with the country after all.

This is wishful thinking, confusing what activists are hankering for with what marginal Democratic voters might want. Most of the new proposals from Democratic senators, which in fact are resuscitated versions of old ideas, come from politicians who hail from safely Democratic states. Voters in Massachusetts, New York and California probably do want single-payer health care. Colorado, where voters rejected a ballot-initiative to introduce it by a margin of 80-20 two years ago, does not. Democrats need more votes in places like Colorado, not ever-greater winning margins in California and Massachusetts. Barry Goldwater on the right in 1964 and George McGovern on the left in 1972 both ran presidential campaigns testing activists’ theory that the country wanted more ideological purity. Both were trounced.

For those who played a part in the transformation of the Democratic Party from the low of Walter Mondale losing all but Minnesota and Washington, DC in 1984 and Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, the argument activists are having now is horribly familiar. By the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Democrats viewed the Gipper as a celebrity lightweight who had hypnotised the rubes. Once he was gone, in 1988, they expected to take back the White House, a hunch that hardened into a certainty when polls showed their nominee, Michael Dukakis, 17 points up five months before the election. Left-leaning pundits argued then that the increasing diversity of the electorate was good for Democrats, and that the country was ready for a counter-revolution.

“Nothing shocks a political party more than losing a national election it expects to win,” says Bill Galston, now at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, and then an influential thinker about how Democrats could revitalise. After that defeat, Mr Galston wrote an essay called “The Politics of Evasion”, in which he argued that Democrats were ignoring what voters were telling them. The party was not trusted on the economy and was associated with stances on welfare, gay rights and the death penalty that too many voters found strange or threatening.

This insight lay behind many of the Clintonian instincts that Democrats, looking back, now find unforgivable: interrupting the campaign to fly back to Arkansas and oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector; tough-on crime sentencing; deregulating Wall Street and cutting welfare spending. “Clinton was tolerated and respected by the base,” recalls Mr Galston, “but the terms of his success always stuck in the craw of the party.” Asked what the equivalent of those welfare cuts—an idea that is hated by the party but makes sense to much of the country—might be in 2018 or 2020, Mr Galston identifies immigration. “If Democrats are determined to go down fighting defending the principle of sanctuary cities [in which local jurisdictions decline to co-operate with federal officers in enforcing immigration laws], Republicans will be only too happy to let them.”

When trying to explain what happened to American politics, many Democrats tell themselves a story about how the Republicans became ever more extremist while their own party stayed more or less where it had always been. There is truth in this: Republicans are more ideological than Democrats. Yet Democrats have not stood in the same place for the past 20 years.

As recently as 2007, trade unions and a large chunk of the party’s congressional wing were hostile to immigration reform. Senator Sanders voted against a bill in 2007 that would have given a path to citizenship for 12m undocumented people, on the basis that the proposal also allowed companies to bring in guest workers, undermining unions. On gay marriage, too, as recently as 2008 neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama were prepared to endorse a position that is now so thoroughly mainstream for Democratic candidates that they seldom mention it.

Perhaps because these attitudes changed so quickly, many in the activist wing of the party seem to imagine there is no elastic limit to where they can take the party and still win national elections. They subscribe to a folklore that views history since the 1960s as a series of victorious social movements—civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights—and the role of activists and politicians as being to lead these movements, dragging America with them, even against its will.

Sometimes this really is how it happened. In 1963, 60% of respondents told Gallup that they viewed the March on Washington unfavourably, saying it would cause violence and not achieve anything. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, delivered on the National Mall, now sits alongside the Declaration of Independence as one of America’s sacred texts. Shortly before Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, 78% of white people told Gallup they would move out of their neighbourhoods if black people moved in. He did it anyway.

More often, though, successful politicians exploit changes in social attitudes that are already happening, rather than causing them by decree. “In the very long run,” says Mr Galston, “politics can award medals for bravery.” In the short run, which usually means the time between now and the next important election, “politics is about a quest for the power to pursue the national interest in the way you choose to define it.” This kind of argument always raises the question of whether you are advocating a craven capitulation to public opinion, he adds. “But if you define the national interest in a way that precludes winning power, then what are you really doing?”