The predigested narrative of the Democratic presidential primary frames the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as one pitting the pragmatist versus the dreamer, the grinder with the knowledge to work the levers of the system versus the head-in-the-clouds visionary.

Lately, several mainstream liberal commentators have taken to siding with the pragmatist, painstakingly explaining to their readers the importance of preserving existing gains in a time of partisan warfare, and dismissing Sanders’s ambitious platform as misplaced and foolish. Incrementalism is a reasonable ideological preference. But the hot rhetoric and the need for Manichean imperatives that characterizes campaign season has intensified the attacks on Sanders, painting him as a political dilettante who doesn’t understand how Washington works—and, by extension, suggesting that anyone in government with big ideas is doomed to failure and would be better off going along to get along.

That’s where this otherwise typical campaign back-and-forth strays into dangerous territory. When you saw off every policy to what falls into the immediate range of possibility at the present moment, you give supporters little reason to organize behind your ideas. More important, you neglect the creative ways in which those seemingly unrealizable goals can be realized, no matter the situation in Congress.

Maybe you’ve heard the one about the community health centers.

Originated in 1965 as a Great Society reform from the Office of Economic Opportunity, these neighborhood medical clinics provide integrated medical treatment and dental care to low-income and rural patients nationwide, regardless of the ability to pay. No two community health centers look exactly alike. But in general terms, they look more like the socialized medicine of Great Britain’s National Health Service than a single-payer program like those of Canada or France. Federal, state, and local grants fund the doctors and clinic personnel; the clinics refuse nobody for insufficient funds or lack of insurance; some even pick up and drop off patients at their residences.