Thomas Edsall says some frustrating, historically shortsighted things in this interview with Isaac Chotiner.

After calling for the Democrats to be more moderate, to trim on issues that divide the country—the presumption being that moderation in one party breeds moderation in the other or that moderation in one party checks the extremism of the other (we’ll come back to that)—Edsall brings up the infamous Boston busing battle of the 1970s. This exchange ensues:

Q: So what do you draw from the busing controversy then? What advice would you have given racial justice advocates in the 1970s? A: The goal of school integration was a crucial and important one. The mechanism to achieve it—of pitting working-class whites against working-class blacks—was not the way to achieve it. Liberals in the 1970s should have struggled intensely for cross-county busing, and they should have tried to legislate that. Instead, all busing was done within single urban areas. It created extraordinary disruptions.”

Where to begin?

First, liberals did in fact push for cross-county busing. They were stopped dead in their tracks. By conservatives.

Cross-county busing, where you bus kids from the cities to the suburbs and vice versa, produced an infamous Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley (1974), in which a 5-member majority of the Court (all Nixon appointees), ruled that the courts couldn’t order that kids be bused across district lines unless they could show that the suburbs and the city—or the state government—had maintained, through formal laws of segregation (de jure segregation), racially segregated school districts or what is called “dual systems” of education: one for whites, one for blacks. Such laws were fairly uncommon in the North in the postwar era.

There were many other ways that state and local governments in the North kept the suburbs white. As the plaintiffs in Milliken showed, and as Justices Douglass and Marshall pointed out in their dissents, state agencies in Michigan (the case came out of the Detroit metropolitan area) were involved in redlining, restrictive covenants, concentrating black neighborhoods in certain areas, and so forth. One of the mayors of Detroit’s surrounding white suburban ring had said, “Every time we hear of a Negro moving…in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.” But the Court rejected that argument. So that was the end of the vision Edsall is talking about. Not because liberals didn’t try it, but because it was stopped by five Republican justices on the Supreme Court.

And while Edsall says liberals should have also pursued this vision legislatively, the facts of Milliken—where politicians in the North, Republicans and Democrats (the Dearborn mayor quoted above was a Democrat), were so actively involved in maintaining segregated schools—gives you an inkling why that never got off the ground.

Second, the notion that if the Court had approved the plan in Milliken, integration would have gone easier in the North, is questionable. The mere fact that the cross-county desegregation plan was opposed so strongly in the North should tell you something about the politics of these things. Edsall seems to believe that had liberals done cross-county busing, elite northern white liberals would have been participating in the same experience working-class whites were participating in. Instead, he says, they asked working-class whites in the cities—not elite white liberals in the suburbs—to do the work of desegregation.

Now, as a proposition of political morality, Edsall is absolutely right. And he’s also right that this is how busing should have been done. But Edsall is not making a moral claim; he’s making a strategic claim. That somehow the shared experience of busing across social classes would have softened the political blow. Because everyone’s participating, you get more buy-in.

Yet the very language Edsall uses belies the gauzy communitarianism of his vision. Elite white liberals, he says, bore “none of the costs” of busing. That’s true. But the fact that he uses the word “costs” indicates the depths of white hostility to integration, regardless of social class.

The notion that cross-county busing, across the urban/suburban divide, would have made things less rather than more explosive is fanciful. Whether you think whites moved to the suburbs in the postwar era because of race, the schools, crime, or property values, it’s hard to think how any of those factors would have produced a less ferocious battle if black kids were bused from the Bronx to northern Westchester (where I grew up) and white kids were bused from northern Westchester to the Bronx. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been done, but you can’t claim that the reason to have done it was that it would have massaged things politically.

(I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an implicit political sociology behind this vision. Not Edsall’s per se—based on his shrewd reporting before the election, I definitely don’t believe he thinks this way—but among people in the media and elsewhere who might agree with his argument. A fair number of elite white journalists think wealthier whites in the professional classes are more liberal and socially tolerant. Perhaps the idea is had they been involved in this grand experiment of the 1970s more directly and personally, the forces of trickle-down morality would have made their way into working-class white communities.)

But the biggest problem with Edsall’s interview is the essential assumption that I already flagged: that moderation breeds moderation. Edsall has been pushing this argument, particularly when it comes to race, since the 1980s. And one could argue that he played a considerable role in shifting the Democratic Party’s positions to the center, beginning with the rise of the DLC and Bill Clinton. In the interview, Edsall cites Clinton positively—he knew how to “find middle ground”—and Obama—”he tended to be reasonable”—for these reasons.

But what has that moderation, that reasonableness, produced? Did the GOP get less moderate under Clinton, despite his move to the right on race and other matters? I think we know the answer to that.

And what about Obama, whose immigration policies Edsall praises? Obama took the border seriously, Edsall says, pushing hard on immigration enforcement. What did that do to the GOP? We now have a Republican Party adopting the most overtly anti-immigrant positions—and being led by the most anti-immigrant president—since the days of Johnson and Reed.

Edsall tries to blame this on Hillary Clinton not being as draconian as Obama was on immigration, but that merely sidesteps the issue. Obama’s attempt to meet the anti-immigrant sentiment of the Republican Party halfway did nothing to bring the Republican Party closer to the center—and nothing to avert the nomination and election of a candidate who took the positions Trump did.

When it comes to any program of the left—whether it’s racial or gender or class equality—there are no workarounds. Anyone who thinks you can eliminate domination, on whatever axis of social life, without a backlash and volatile resistance, is dreaming. The only way through it is through it.