Before the Bernie Sanders crusade, whose dream of victory was extinguished in New York’s primary on Tuesday, the future of the Democratic Party seemed likely to resemble the final six years of the Obama era, only more so: a party increasingly ideological and left-wing on social issues and more incrementalist and technocratic in the economic realm.

This combination fits perfectly with the politics of the party’s donor class, cosmopolitan social liberals who benefit from low-skilled immigration and free trade and don’t want their taxes raised too high. It fits reasonably well with the trajectory of public opinion, which has shifted leftward on culture-war issues but didn’t exactly greet the 2009-10 wave of liberal legislation with open arms. And it fits with the seeming fiscal constraints imposed on liberalism after Obamacare — the cost of New Deal and Great Society programs, the aging of American society and the prospect of structural deficits for as long as baby boomers are taking Medicare.

But what it doesn’t fit with, it turns out, are the desires of the many, many Democratic voters who made Sanders a contender, a prolific fund-raiser and an extraordinary phenomenon even in defeat.

The Sanders insurgency is hardly the first of its kind: As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie points out, it follows in a long tradition of progressive candidacies that inspired but ultimately lost, with Howard Dean and Bill Bradley being the most recent examples.