“The deeper problems that plagued [Hillary] Clinton’s run are not necessarily ones unique to Clinton,” I wrote back in 2017, surveying the wreckage of Clinton’s presidential campaign as expertly dissected by Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen in that year’s Shattered. “Her lack of vision, her refusal to shift her centrist policies to the left, her campaign-for-a-campaign’s-sake, the centering of her campaign around an individual rather than a set of principles — these are all factors that could easily be repeated by the next establishment candidate.”

“Voters don’t have to settle for uninspiring neoliberal centrists like Hillary Clinton. Let’s not do it again,” I concluded.

But “do it again” we did. As a frightened Democratic electorate does every time a hard-right extremist is up for reelection on the Republican ticket, voters put on their pundit hats, conjured an apparition of the kind of voter they imagine decides elections, read their minds, and proceeded to hitch their wagon to the least inspiring, most conventional Washington politician on stage, presuming he’d be best placed to win over the phantom they’d created.