The Matt Yglesias’ of the world (who Joe Biden’s administrationread en masse) argue in favor of pivoting to popularism,a braindead strategy endorsed by people who don’t understand polling as they just point to the biggest numbers and say “do that.” Mind you that a dynamic exists in polling where Trump’s positions are more popular when generically described, but when their effects are added to the question,support for Trump’s policies drops, so the entire theoretical basis of this idea is nowhere near as straightforward as it assumes. Besides, the suggestion that this is a thing the Democrats should pivot to instead of something which defines them is disproven by the wide ideological spectrum spanned by their presidential campaigns over the last twenty years.

Thinking that pivoting 180 degrees from Democrats’ position just four years ago is their route to political salvation is beyond deluded, not to mention that the hysteria around transgender people is, as pollster Lakshya Jainnotes, “an issue that motivates elites for whatever reason, but most voters don’t care much.” It’s the kind of thing that people who haven’t spoken to a working-class person they weren’t paying in decades would believe. It’s clear that this push by elites is driven by a dark belief that the transgender community is a small enough minority that is worth sacrificing (as if that has ever satiated any authoritarian movement ever), but like most things the Gavin Newsoms andJames Carvilles of the worldbelieve, this is wrong. As Parker Molloy oftenpoints out, the U.S. transgender population is roughly equivalent to that of America’s ninth largest city. Imagine Newsom acquiescing to a request by Charlie Kirk to wipe out Philadelphia. Elite Democrats’ flippant attitude towards fighting back against the assault on transgender people demonstrates no sense of scale of the real world,because they live in a cloistered one largely siloed off from the rest of us.

Republicans take a lot of deserved flack for insulting the intelligence of the average American voter in their bid to flatten the populace into a bunch of pliant bigots fighting each other and not the capitalists who fund the GOP, but the Democrats aren’t far off in their shockingly cynical treatment of Americans’ intelligence. In fact, it goes beyond that, and they misunderstand something fundamental about basic human nature. We’re good at sniffing out bullshit, like the Democratic Party.

If the only place you truly stand is next todril’s racism dial trying to figure out how much to turn it up or down every four years, people will see that you don’t actually believe in anything. “Tacking to the center” is equally as meaningless as declaring yourself to be a gay space communist in the eyes of the right-wing voters Gavin Newsom and his kind will never attract. If you don’t plant your feet firmly in the ground somewhere, people will never believe you stand for anything.

I use the word coward often to describe the Democrats to communicate that their issues are more primal than political. Any new policy path cannot be charted until the Democrats make it 1,000 percent clear what principles they fundamentally believe in, and it better be ones that their liberal base is on board with, or else the centrist dream will die on the vine. There are Democratic centrists running to the right-wing gossip merchants at Politico and Axios right nowsaying this is Rahm Emanuel’s time while pointing to new polling that suggests a majority of Democrats want the Democratic Party to moderate.

But that samepolling cited by the Emanuel caucus also suggests that two-thirds of Democratic voters want Congress to “stick to their positions even if this means not getting things done in Washington.” That is the very clearly not tacking to the center. There is no silver bullet in recent polling proving anyone’s ideological priors are the one true path forward for the Democratic Party. All it suggests isa party in crisis that is riddled with contradictions, like the centrist wing looking at the election Democrats won with the aid of the dreaded groups and saying, “that is how to lose,” and instead asserting that the party should moderate more like the two times they lost to Donald Trump.

Moderation is one thing, and pointing to more moderate candidateswinning in deep-red districts is not exactly a convincing case that should be the model everywhere, but if you’rekneeling in kente stoles in a performance your own base sees as grossly insincere, then four years later you’re saying that Trump’s bid to eradicate transgender people is just Common Sense Consensus Politics, no one is going to see you as a moderate.

They won’t even place you on the ideological spectrum. You’re a phony. A fool. A coward. A walking insult to the average person’s intelligence who can sniff out bullshit from a mile away. Democrats like Gavin Newsom who let themselves go whichever way they think the wind is blowing do nothing other than prove to the entire world that they are never to be trusted or taken seriously ever again.