Read: The Democrats’ visceral fear of losing to Donald Trump

Or, to bend a line from that firebrand liberal Barry Goldwater: Extremism in defense of democracy is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

“Hillary Clinton’s loss had an exponential effect,” says Robert Boorstin, who was a Clinton White House speechwriter and a pollster for Al Gore in 2000. “Because it changed the rules of the primary game—because people thought it was rigged against Bernie Sanders, and there is some evidence that it was at least heavily weighted in her favor. But it’s also changed what’s ideologically acceptable.” (In fact, it seems beyond doubt that Hillary Clinton’s dominance of party processes and elders gave her a leg up in 2016.)

Ben Rhodes, the former Obama speechwriter and deputy national security adviser, told me that the extent to which Trump has scrambled the country’s political culture has had a powerful impact on the Democrats. “One is the idea that politicians were mandated to play within an established set of lines, that were set by some perceived conventional wisdom, kind of goes out the window—Trump has tossed out a sense of ideological constraint,” Rhodes said. “And the other is the extent to which Trump has mobilized opposition. So Democrats are appalled by what he is doing to immigrants, and therefore may go beyond calling for the legalization of people who have been here a long time and move all the way to decriminalizing border crossings, because they see people in cages.” The party’s leftward drift, Rhodes said, “is both an emotional and intellectual response to Trump.”

That phenomenon was on full display during the first two debates, in which the most liberal candidates—such as Cory Booker, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders, and to a lesser degree, Kamala Harris—portrayed both Clinton and Obama policies in a shockingly negative light. Obama, in this view, was not the president who finally delivered on the Democrats’ decades-long dream of expanding access to health care, but the man who left tens of millions of Americans without adequate insurance coverage. The next-wave Democrats characterized Obama not as the president who used bold and disputed executive action to protect undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children, but as the cold-eyed calculator who presided over a record number of deportations.

And Bill Clinton? His 1994 crime bill was mocked at the time of its passage as too soft because it included money for programs like “midnight basketball” and community policing, and its unpopular ban on assault weapons helped lead to the Democrats’ catastrophic loss of the House of Representatives that year. (Clinton accepted Republican proposals to stiffen prison sentences as the price for passing the bill, because conservative House Democrats who were vital to the overall bill’s passage declined to support the assault-weapons ban.) Now the crime bill—and its Senate quarterback, Joe Biden—are scorned as the progenitors of mass incarceration.