We’ve been discussing a lot of plans and ingenious new strategies for a Democratic comeback which are variously half-baked, hyperbolic, histrionic or merely silly. Here’s one that I believe is not. It’s not even a strategy. It’s simply identifying a real challenge, or a knot Democrats need to untangle.

A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.

In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.

For years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Tom Edsall, the one-time Washington Post reporter and author who now writes a weekly column about politics for the Times. The love/hate has a temporal dimension. When I was first getting interested in politics as a teen and young adult I was very taken with Edsall’s books. They were very smart and opened my thinking to new ways to approach political questions, particularly how to think about political economy. In recent years he almost always drives me to distraction. I can’t tell you whether he’s changed or I have or, more likely, we’re just no longer in sync. In the 21st century, Edsall seems always to approach big questions with the idea that regardless of the situation it must be a disaster for the Democratic Party.

In any case, I was reading his latest column, which ends up raising some interesting questions about the politics of liberalism and freedom, building off a column by Noah Smith. Edsall starts with a premise that I think is clearly true. Over the last fifteen years or so, many of the more active Democrats (“strong Democrats,” they’re called in this piece) have moved significantly to the left not only of the median voter but even of the median Democrat on issues tied to sexuality, immigration, race, etc. It’s worth noting that being to the left of the median voter doesn’t mean you’re wrong. And it goes without saying — though it remains curiously unsaid in these discussions — that the same is true of party activists on the right. Still, that can create electoral challenges that need to be managed. That’s what the whole Jentleson/Favreau conversation about “saying no” is about.

So far, so good.

Let me return to something I wrote about yesterday and said I’d return to: Adam Jentleson’s piece in the Times on whether the Democratic Party can learn to say no to interest groups that often demand assent to various positions and commitments that are either obscure or toxic to a majority of voters. Trans rights aren’t the only issue Jentleson was talking about. But the larger debate clearly revolves around the ad the Trump campaign ran against Kamala Harris saying she supported tax payer-funded sex change operations/gender affirming care for prisoners. This was a question Harris checked “yes” to on an ACLU candidate questionnaire in 2019 as part of her 2020 run for the presidential nomination. There is at least the perception among some that it played a non-trivial role in turning the campaign against her

As a general matter I agree with Jentleson’s point. Not specifically about trans rights issues, but more generally. The goal of parties and campaigns is first to win elections.

But I can’t say that without noting some recent history.

Because these thoughts are provisional and in process, I’ve decided to package them seriatim, as a list of ideas, possibilities, counters and so forth.

• One of the shortfalls of the recriminationfests that come after a big political defeat is that the people getting the most attention are usually those shouting loudest and making the most totalizing claims. But there are important caveats and qualifiers to keep in mind. One is that anything obvious, sure-fire and without real costs would have been tried already. There’s no silver-bullet solution. This is just common sense, perhaps even conventional wisdom. At worst, it can be used to stifle new thinking or taking new chances. That’s another important pitfall. But it’s still true.

I’ve written in general against post-election recriminations since November 5th. This post may seem like one such recrimination on the surface. But I think if you bear with me, you’ll see that it’s really not. I should be clear, too, that being anti-recriminations, whatever that might mean, doesn’t or shouldn’t mean people shouldn’t try to figure out what was done right or wrong, criticize whoever needs to be criticized. Of course they should. What it means to me at least is that in the desolation of a really, really hard defeat, a very consequential one, people shouldn’t rush in to take shots at the folks they’ve always had it in for, using the devastation less as a wound to overcome than an opportunity for the old score-settling.

So here’s the issue I want to discuss.

Until his campaign began to come undone this last summer, it was widely understood and accepted among Democrats that Joe Biden, to the surprise of many, was the most progressive Democratic president, with the most consequential progressive legislative agenda, in at least half a century. This was widely believed because it was unquestionably true. Because of a series of decisions by both Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden ended up governing with a trimmed down version of the legislative agenda of the progressive left. What counts here as “trimmed down” is obviously a pretty critical question. There was no Medicare for All. But on lots of policy and regulatory positions, the left’s agenda was Biden’s. This isn’t just me saying this. Ask Bernie Sanders, or at least ask him until a week ago. The point I’m making here really isn’t open to much debate.