In the new year, Democratic leaders have chosen to steer their ship away from their promised economic agenda and toward voting rights, ultimately crashing into the filibuster iceberg last night. Their decision to shelve economic legislation in favor of a democracy agenda reflects a deeper misunderstanding of what fortifies democratic ideals — and illustrates the Gordian Knot grinding up the gears of their political engine.

The Democratic Party is defined by a contradiction: it simultaneously promises to enrich its corporate donors and solve problems created by those same donors. That impossibility gives us drug pricing policies that would not significantly reduce medicine prices, tax proposals that never actually address inequality, corporate handouts that don’t much help the working class, and health care policy that enriches the insurance companies already fleecing sick people. It also gives us rotating villains who help the party’s rank-and-file lawmakers pull their bait and switch — they get to promise populist legislation they know is already doomed by Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, or some other designated malefactor of the day.

As more and more Americans are disgusted by this hypocrisy, here comes “voting rights” — a politically safe initiative because it does not threaten capital in an age when elections can be bought and voting rarely changes economic policy. For Democrats trying to avoid the core tension between their donors and everyone else, a “democracy agenda” is a convenient salve — a high-profile crusade that does not offend their paymasters in the way that, say, breaking up monopolies or closing the carried interest tax loophole might.