#NeverTrump Republicans, having lived through this movie, have been cringing in their seats for quite some time, eyes half-covered as they poke the fellow to their left and whisper, “The end is nigh.” I myself issued my first warning that something like this could happen to Democrats just three short days after the 2016 election.

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Mostly, we have been ignored, and only now, when it looks almost too late, have Democrats fully realized the danger. Meanwhile, #NeverTrumpers have stopped whispering and begun shouting everything we learned from 2016 at our center-left counterparts, in the hopes that somehow those guys can write a new ending on the fly.

That shouted advice is generally good, and I certainly hope Democrats use it. But I fear that no matter what advice we offer, no matter what the #PleaseNotBernie Democrats try, it simply won’t help.

First off, the most important thing Democrats could do is consolidate the non-Sanders lane down to one candidate. Which is all very sensible, but everyone thinks they ought to be that one candidate, so self-interest is likely to dominate common sense, just as Rubio, Kasich and Cruz all stayed in in 2016, blocking each other and handing the nomination to Trump.

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But the easier lessons you could offer have rapidly been drained of relevance. Looking back at myself in 2016, I can imagine all sorts of steps I’d have advised Democrats to take to keep a Trumpian figure from dominating their primaries.

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I’d have warned them not to let nostalgia for past presidents lure them into pouring all their energy and money into a weak candidate like Jeb Bush (or Hillary Clinton). I’d have suggested they allocate convention delegates in proportion to a candidate’s share of the vote, rather than allowing the winner-take-all or winner-take-more primaries that gave Trump a majority of delegates with a plurality of votes. Heck, I might even have recommended ranked-choice voting, which Maine uses for local elections, because it’s supposed to favor moderates.

And in case all those measures failed, I’d certainly have suggested having some fallback mechanism for party leaders to overrule voters who might not understand, or care about, the difficulties of building an electoral coalition broad enough to actually win the presidency, take both houses of the Congress and get something done.

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Sound ideas all, none of which would have worked — or rather, none of which have worked. Because Democratic donors didn’t go all-in for Biden the way GOP donors did for Bush, handing him $100 million to waste garnering 2.8 percent of the vote in Iowa. Meanwhile, the Democratic primaries are in fact proportional, and two out of three of the races so far have been caucuses, which resemble ranked-choice voting. And the Democrats do have an emergency brake in the superdelegate system. Only it’s already clear they won’t be able to use it without splitting the party and losing the general election.

Because maybe the truth runs deeper. Maybe there was no way to write a new ending for this script. Perhaps vast structural changes are sweeping through the American political system, and trying to halt them with rule tweaks and tut-tutting is like trying to fight a whirlwind with a toothbrush.

Then again, it’s also possible that one reason the current Democratic efforts look so futile is that Sanders supporters have before them the shining example of Donald Trump. He demonstrates it’s possible to initiate a coup against the leaders of a party you don’t even really belong to, and find yourself, when the guns stop blazing, in control of not just the party but also the White House. I do wonder if that precedent won’t make it much harder to stop Sanders — whether #NeverTrumpers’ louder and louder warnings have proved useless not just because the center-left left saw things too late but because we did, too.