A lot of things are unspeakable until suddenly they’re not. The lab-leak theory for the origins of the 2020 pandemic was racist disinformation; now, commentators and experts acknowledge it’s a genuine possibility. The idea that greedy firms pushing up prices to make more profits was a major part of inflation was at first a “conspiracy theory”; now it’s widely accepted by central bankers, economists, and politicians. Until two weeks ago, President Joe Biden’s mental decline was a creation of partisan fakery and lies; now not a day goes by that new reporting doesn’t come from his own inner circle about his limitations.

It’s the same, it seems, when it comes to the outcome of the 2020 primary that made Biden the Democratic candidate in the first place. At the time and since, many on the Left argued that the Democratic Party was less interested in stopping a second Donald Trump term and more focused on crushing the ascent of socialist Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him — claims that, if you spoke them in certain circles, were liable to get you labeled a conspiracy theorist, a purveyor of misinformation, or unserious.

Yet now, as the president fights for his political life, centrist Democrats are just coming out and saying it.

“I’ve said this over and over again,” Rep. Adam Smith, who had days earlier publicly called for Biden to step aside, told MSNBC last week:

Joe Biden was not picked in 2020 because he was the only person that could beat Trump. He was picked because he was the only person that could beat Bernie Sanders, rightly or wrongly. … That conclusion was made, okay? “Oh my gosh, coming out of Nevada, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee!” And people, just like they are now, said, “Ahhh, I don’t think that’s going to work,” so they were looking for an alternative.

Smith was responding to a phone interview Biden had done this past Monday on what is reportedly his favorite show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe. In the interview — for which the president was off camera and could be heard shuffling papers as he referred to notes he apparently had in front of him — Biden bitterly complained about “the elites in the party” trying to shunt him off the ticket before immediately jumping on a call with wealthy donors.

Smith had made a similar point to CNN two days earlier. “The president did not run a great primary campaign,” he told the network. “Bernie Sanders looked like the presumptive nominee, and this exact same group of people the president is now deriding as elites . . . decided they didn’t want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee.”

Former congressman Harold Ford, former chair of the Democratic Leadership Council and banking executive, made a similar point on Fox. “I was an elite that supported you in 2020,” Ford said. “And said that we should do everything we possibly could do to advantage you against Bernie Sanders, because I thought Bernie Sanders’ politics were detrimental to the party and to the country.”

These are stunning admissions. Three years ago, reviewing Aimie Parnes and Jonathan Allen’s memoir of the chaotic Biden 2020 campaign, Lucky, I wrote that, for a host of reasons, the Democratic Party that year “saw its biggest priority not as beating [Trump] but as stopping Bernie Sanders.” And though the party’s leading lights reportedly privately doubted Biden’s ability to actually win and publicly observed that he had significantly declined, they were forced to rally around him as the only stop-Sanders candidate because none of the others had much of any support from nonwhite voters. (Incidentally, Democrats are now explicitly saying they’re ready to accept a second Trump term, and that they don’t actually think his reelection is as existential as they’ve been saying). These were not novel observations, but for many years, they were unspeakable in mainstream circles.

What a difference a disastrous debate makes. It turns out all of it was true: the Democratic Party’s top echelons did work to make Biden the nominee, they didn’t choose him because they thought he was the strongest candidate against Trump, and they were motivated above all by the desperate, urgent need to block Sanders from the party nomination. But don’t take it from us — Democrats themselves are suddenly more than happy to tell you.