No doubt, you have been told to keep quiet. Just put on your big boy pants, they say, and find the impulse control to at least muzzle yourself for the next seventy-one days until the election happens. After that, fine — then and only then will you maybe be permitted to speak your mind and politely ask the Democratic Party to match its rhetoric with its policy agenda.

But until then, you are told to “shut the hell up and grow up,” as former Barack Obama and Mike Bloomberg pollster Cornell Belcher put it during an emblematic MSNBC segment berating progressives.

This kind of hectoring has become a defining part of the Democratic Party’s culture. As the late great journalist Bill Greider lamented in this must-watch clip: “The way the Democratic Party is run now for quite a number of presidential cycles is they pick a nominee in a kind of half-assed process that doesn’t really represent much of anybody, and then they tell everybody to just shut up — don’t bring up anything that will complicate life for your nominee . . . shut up, turn off your brains.”