THE little smile, hastily suppressed, said it all. Bernie Sanders is a grim, almost mirthless, figure. Yet a cry of “Bernie for president!”—echoing around Los Angeles’s docklands like a portent—caught the 76-year-old senator from Vermont off-guard. One moment his craggy face was glowering over the mistreatment of the local truckers, fleeced of job security and benefits; the next it had melted, like frost in spring, into a joyful smirk. Mr Sanders, the runner-up to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries, still burns with ambition. But are Democrats still feeling it?

A recent day on Mr Sanders’s tail in southern California, where he fired up a trio of left-wing crowds, suggested many are. At a gathering of unionised workers at Disneyland, the “Happiest Place on Earth”, he raised cheers by angrily endorsing their demand for a $15-minimum hourly wage. (But he had bad news for their children: “Ducks don’t talk, mice really don’t talk,” said Mr Sanders, taking no prisoners. “That’s fantasy, this is reality.”) In a stirring rally in downtown Los Angeles, he was later feted by the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement who once derided him. In 2016 Mr Sanders appeared to have given little thought to their cause. Now, burnished by a new campaign for criminal justice, he was welcomed by some of America’s foremost civil-rights activists as a visiting prophet. “I believed that he could beat Donald Trump and I still believe he could!” hallooed Shaun King, a campaigner with a million followers on Twitter.

This is a kind of fervour the centre-left, retreating in America and across the West before the populist right, rarely conjures. It recalls Mr Sanders’s thrumming, thrown-together campaign rallies, so unlike Mrs Clinton’s dull appearances. No wonder many hope he will reignite in 2020. Polls suggest Mr Sanders is the most popular politician in America. Betting markets make him the favourite for the next Democratic nomination. If the contest were held next month, his superior name-recognition and lists of small-time donors might see him home with ease. Yet the vote is two years off, and the punters are probably mistaken. Mr Sanders’s following, influence and prospects have all been exaggerated.

Set aside, for now, his crotchety-great-uncle charisma, and the idea that Mr Sanders is a major force rests on two myths. The first is that he almost won the Democratic nomination: had he not been stiffed by the party establishment, which assisted Mrs Clinton, Sandernistas say, he would have done. President Donald Trump says the same. It is nonsense. Mr Sanders won 4m fewer votes than Mrs Clinton and none of the most populous states. He won quirky, liberal hotbeds like New Hampshire, or through the caucus system that mimics them. He was considered competitive chiefly as a result of bored journalists’ efforts to inject drama into the yawnathon of Mrs Clinton’s slow-walk to the nomination.

The most fervent Sandernistas tended not to be Democrats at all. They were college kids and independents, many of whom subsequently drifted off to a third-party nominee. A middle-aged Sandernista in the crowd in Los Angeles, Jacinta, said she voted for the Green candidate in 2016, considered Democrats and Republicans as birds of a feather, and was frustrated that neither backs free movement across the southern border. Most Sanders voters, by contrast, were loyal Democrats who simply didn’t much like Mrs Clinton. Having little attachment to Mr Sanders’s statist ideas, they nonetheless swung grumblingly behind her. This helps explode the second myth: that the Democrats have veered to the left, where the rumpled Mr Sanders awaits them.

There are, to be sure, signs of a long-running leftward drift in the party, as it loses its last conservative whites to the populist right. But there are also counter-signals. Mr Sanders’s demand for “universal health care” has been taken up by almost every Democratic candidate in the mid-terms—but there is such ambiguity about what it entails as to make this no more meaningful than civil rights among other distant aspirations. None of Mr Sanders’s other big ideas—including free college and massive public works—is getting much play. Nor have Sanders-endorsed candidates fared well in the primaries. Our Revolution, a group Mr Sanders formed to promote his acolytes, has been a failure. “It doesn’t do anything,” gripes a strategist for one of its candidates.

Rumpled, crumpled, Trumpled

The energy on the left is focused on opposing Mr Trump’s attack on liberal democracy, not on carrying forward Mr Sanders’s revolution. The success of moderate candidates in the Democratic primaries suggests this is making the party more pragmatic and mindful of party unity than Mr Sanders, an ideologue who is not a Democratic Party member, might like.

This illustrates how asymmetrical the extremist drift in American politics is. While the right gallops towards the ethno-charged edge of reason, the more diverse, heterodox left yo-yos between defining itself against its governing wing, as Sandernistas did in 2016, and swinging back to moderation to stave off the latest Republican attack. Put another way, the Democrats, unlike their counterparts in Europe’s multiparty systems, are often spared the burden of having to work out what they stand for beyond opposing the right. Despite a lot of blather about liberals and progressives, to be a Democrat under Mr Trump is mainly to be pro-liberal democracy and protective of immigrants, minorities and other targets of the president. That leaves little free time to feel the Bern.

Mr Sanders still has a chance in 2020. His odd charisma, name recognition and ability to work up a devoted crowd are real advantages. His genuine concern for the underdog is all the more attractive set against Mr Trump’s counterfeit concern. But if Democrats picked Mr Sanders, it would not be for his ideas, which have little support within their party, let alone America. It would also be delightful to Mr Trump, who fancies his chances of destroying “crazy Bernie”. If only for that reason, it is good that Mr Sanders’s moment in American politics has probably passed.