Sixteen years after Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater by an astounding 61 percent to 39 percent (the biggest shellacking since 1820) Reagan led the Goldwater wing of the GOP to double-digit victories in two consecutive elections. In 1984, Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by 18 percent, nearly equaling Johnson's margin over Goldwater while netting a record tally of electoral votes.

That Mondale election not only served to cement Reagan's transformation of the Republican Party, it set a narrative that Democrats have been living with ever since—liberals can't win. For over thirty years, twice as long as it took conservative Republicans to overcome record defeat and grab both the party and the presidency, the left wing of the Democratic Party has been, if not quite wandering in the wilderness, at least wearing a large "danger" sign.

Mondale, says a mythology so ingrained it might as well come carved on stone tablets, ran as a big-L Liberal. A libby, libby leftie. And Americans rejected his liberalness sooooo much that We Dare Not ever run a candidate again who can be found putting one foot left of center. Run a Democratic candidate on the left, and you risk giving away the presidency.

According to the self-designated political intelligentsia, for a Democratic candidate to take the White House, that candidate has to first move into the space vacated by the Republicans in their flight to the right; a place now labeled moderate, but which was not so long ago was well across the line in conservative-ville. That move must be celebrated in a lot of talk about being tough on crime, of favoring militarism abroad, a declaration that the government needs to be scaled back, and an assumption that "entitlements" is a dirty word. Mention keeping people safe a lot. That's the ticket. Winning Democrats should accept setting litmus tests for food stamps as a reasonable idea, treat "running government like a business" as a serious idea, and consider killing Osama Bin Laden (not securing health care for millions) the high point of the Obama presidency.

A serious Democratic candidate is expected to not just shuffle into the shell of the old Republican Party like a political hermit crab, but to buy into many of the more ridiculous notions launched in the last thirty years while conservatives have steered the national conversation to the right. Chief among the nutso notions? Reaganomics. What once was a position so clearly nonsensical that even the Republican Vice-President-To-Be called it "voodoo," has turned into the central organizing principal of our nation, and the economic policy of both political parties. We accept the terminology of job-creators and not only believe in too big to fail, but in too big to touch.

Thirty plus years after Mondale's defeat, the liberals can't win mythology is still pervasive enough that any attempt to return the Democratic Party to the territory where it successfully governed for fully half the Twentieth Century is regarded as a revolution. Like that TV commercial about people who put up with poor television service, Democrats are expected to be "settlers," who assume at the outset that compromise and holding actions are the best they can do.

Only… there are two things wrong with that idea. First, Republicans certainly aren't doing it. Not only are they willing to dream off the charts, they are not interested in compromise. They've moved the national conversation so far to the right, that somewhere back there in a distance is a pile of smashed Overton windows.

Second, the evidence that liberalism is what kept Democrats from office is… is… hang on, I must have left it over here in my coat. No? Hmm, that's right. It's non-existent.

Yes, liberal Democrats have lost. But then, so have moderate and conservative Democrats. So have moderate and conservative Republicans. They've lost not because they failed to be conservative enough, but because they failed to voice a theme that captured the national imagination. They failed, because they were simply, deeply, boring.

Look back over the last thirty years and what you see isn't a track record of liberal defeat. It's a Darwinian struggle against dullness. Mondale lost because… have you ever met Walter Mondale? Dukakis’ defeat owes more to how he looked in a helmet than anything on his platform. Bill Clinton became president not because of some brilliant "third way" triangulation requiring a sextant and a slide rule, but in spite of it. American's didn't say to themselves "man, I love how moderate he is." They voted for the guy who played sax on Arsenio, answered questions about his underwear, and fought off accusations of cheating way before blue dress days. Trump may think he invented the genre, but Bill Clinton was the first reality show president.

While pundits find it convenient to act as if there was some struggle for the heart of the Democratic Party that left New Democrats in charge, that fight never took place. There was no battleground of ideas, no contest for the One True Donkey. Bill Clinton was 400x more interesting than George H. W. Bush, and even Bob Dole would tell you Bob Dole is no live wire (and he'd say it just like that). Clinton won. Clinton's philosophy came along for the ride. It was only after the jazz and the sex that we were told what we'd actually purchased was welfare reform and free trade.

The truth is, liberalism never went out of style. Not with Democrats, and not with the public. It only lacks a champion.

The public doesn't want to be sold on an agenda. The public wants to be sold on a candidate. If that candidate can capture the public imagination—in the way that President Obama did in 2008—that candidate can not only win, but also have a chance to change those definitions. President Obama has actually done a pretty good job of voicing the liberal case in many areas. Democrats often overlook this. Republicans don't.

Hilary Clinton captures the imagination… in abstract. On paper. I like her. I'll vote for her if she's the candidate. Just let me say that selling yourself as the pragmatic person who knows when to fold ‘em in advance is a damn stupid way to run for president. Ask Mike Dukakis. Ask George H. W. Bush. Absolutely, people like to complain about politicians who are all bluster and who don't follow through on their promises, and yes you may well run into situations where compromise is the only option, but please wait until you hit those walls before you tell people their dreams aren't even worth fighting for.

If Bernie Sanders actually wins the White House, perhaps we'll finally wash away the Mondale myth I give it three point seven seconds before someone declares that New Democrats are losers and that only liberals stand a chance. Maybe four point two. Those third wayers are stubborn. But Sanders National Airport… yeah, that has a ring.

And maybe I'm wrong about Hillary. Maybe she plans to campaign in the center, then run to the left. If so, I'll cheer her on. Surely there's a mountain out there that would still welcome her name. Though, sad to say, should Hillary take the White House, the media narrative is almost certainly going to be one of centrism victorious, even if she runs a campaign left of FDR.

This is an extraordinary year, one in which, in a very literal way, the center can not hold. The death of Antonin Scalia has done something that decades of finger-wagging declarations that “elections matter” could never manage; it’s elevated the election. It’s turned this into a battle that will be fought on big ideas and grand themes. This is going to be a go all out year. A swing for the fences year.

This country is going to take a step to the right or to the left, and some big ideas that currently seem fixed in stone are going to turn out to be written on water. If something is going to fade apart, how about starting with the idea that liberals can't win.