About a month ago, I wrote a piece about Democrats, mostly Hillary Clinton diehards, who blame Bernie Sanders for her 2016 loss to our current trash heap of a President, and why that position lacks a sturdy foundation. Today, I’d like to do something a little different. Specifically, I’m going to pull a 180 and criticize staunch Bernie Sanders supporters (or at least a subset of them).

This may come off as a flip-flop, but I don’t think that it is. I believe one of many reasons why our political discourse is broken is the unwillingness to take a critical, reflective look at one’s own tribe (the fact that they can reasonably be called tribes is telling in and of itself).

First, I should note that the vast majority, roughly 75–80% or so of Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. That was the right thing to do, and also begins to outline one of my main points for this piece. That is, we should treat primaries different than we do general elections.

Primaries should be our time to debate, and make demands, and have our voices heard. Progressives should absolutely push their preferred candidate. We shouldn’t hold back because the establishment has handpicked its heir, as many Clinton supporters seem to argue now as they blame Bernie for her loss. The primaries are where we decide what we are as a party, and we want the party to be more economically progressive.

But once we move into the general election, our mindset has to change. If our preferred candidate loses the primary fair and square, we can’t just whine and complain about centrist Dems and neoliberals. All that does is hand Republicans an advantage. And the more power Republicans gain, the harder it becomes to make progressive change.

Now, the left will likely respond to this by saying traditional Democrats have lost countless seats over the past few years, and thus the Republican power-hoard is largely on them. And that is fair, to an extent. Clearly the Democrats have had their struggles of late.

But there is also a bit of a contradiction in this mindset. These progressives will simultaneously argue that the party is dominated by centrists that need to be ousted (Manchin, Heitkamp, Jones, etc.), while also maintaining that centrists can’t win, and moving left is the only way Democrats stand a chance going forward. I don’t see how both can be true at the same time. Why do the Joneses, Lambs and Northams seem to be winning if being a moderate is akin to self-sabotage, as they argue?

Now again, my argument is not that leaning towards the center is the answer either, nor do I think those centrists should get a free pass. But we have to operate in reality. The reality is, centrists can win. Progressives can also win. There isn’t a magic bullet that guarantees success. Hence my feeling that primaries should be the battle grounds, after which we come together and support the victor, regardless of if they were our first choice. If the progressives’ are right that leftward, progressive policies will win-out, then they should have no problems taking over the party from within, rather than choosing to bifurcate it (to the delight of the Republicans, who would be facing off against a chaotic and divided opponent).

My other point, which operates along a similar line, is that we need to be willing to take small victories when we can rather than demanding absolute perfection. In the 2016 campaign, universal healthcare, free college, $15 minimum wage, and getting money out of politics seemed to be the most resonant and recurring issues for the Sanders campaign and his supporters. Ever since, this group (which includes myself) has demanded that these become mainstream within the Democratic Party. Any candidate that wants our support should embrace these things.

And they have. Senator Kamala Harris, like 2020 candidate and regular target of the left’s frustration, tweeted out the following about two months ago:

See checkmarks 1, 2, and 4? Those sound an awful lot like those core ideas I just mentioned, and which Bernie ran on.

Two more likely 2020 candidates, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, have sworn off Corporate PAC donations, something the left (rightfully) lauded Bernie for doing (these two also co-sponsored the Medicare-for-all bill, while Gillibrand is also on the record in favor of tuition-free public college, and Booker has supported debt-free college).

These candidates are moving left. Despite this, they are still going to be shouted down as neoliberals and corporate Democrats, simply because they aren’t Bernie Sanders. Even Elizabeth Warren seems to have lost favor with progressives because she declined to endorse Bernie in 2016 (this despite the fact that she supports all the economic goals we would want her to support).

This kind of inconsistency — demanding change, and then, when that change comes, shifting the goalposts even further — does serious damage to the movement. If other Democrats see that those who move left are still being shunned, why would they bother following suit? They will continue to see us as a lost cause, a sunk cost. They will continue to court the moderates rather than embracing the left. And they will be justified in doing so.

I understand the frustration with the Democratic Party. They have a long way to go. But we aren’t perfect either, and pretending we are doesn’t help anyone. We need to be firm and consistent without demanding the moon.