As some would have it, the central question facing American liberalism is one of means rather than ends.

While there is broad agreement (or so the story goes) around the legislative program Democrats should aspire to, there is a mostly friendly debate taking place about how best it might ultimately be achieved given inevitable Republican obstruction and the wider constraints imposed by the American political system. On one side of this fraternal parley sit realists who emphasize the value of incrementalism and the necessity of bipartisan compromise. On the other, more progressively minded liberals insist on pushing a more ambitious and ideologically grounded agenda.

This tidy, self-serving narrative of American politics comes with an obvious benefit: namely, that it allows centrist commentators and right-leaning liberal politicians alike to have their proverbial cake and eat it too, expressing nominal sympathy with goals and policy ideas they all but oppose in practice. Probe it a bit more closely and you find that even this lip service to both sides implicitly tilts towards the more conservative side of the equation: when politics is framed as a contest between reality (i.e., centrism) and progressive idealism (read: good intentions that must ultimately be considered naive) most people are bound to side with the former.