Now look, there's a very simple political narrative you might have heard because it's repeated ad nauseum.

And it goes something like this. The average American doesn't like extreme politicians of the right or left.

As the right becomes more extreme, Democrats should occupy the center lane, offering moderate solutions with broad appeal.

If they become too extreme, they will alienate the average voter.

They should therefore retreat from excessively progressive positions, proving themselves to be the

reasonable alternative to the right.

When Democrats lose, it's because they've gone too far left,

and they must return to the sensible, careful, reasonable, reasonable center in order to win.

Now, that's roughly the thesis of a recent editorial in the New York Times by the

editorial board called The Partisans Are Wrong, Moving to the Center is the way to win,

which makes a forceful argument that Democrats need to abandon progressivism for the sake of stopping Donald Trump.

Not only, the Times says, is centrism pragmatic, but the need to stop the right is so urgent that Democrats actually have no choice but to embrace centrism. There is simply no alternative.

Now, the case that the Times editorial board makes for the political efficacy of centrism is

unpersuasive, and we're going to get to why it's unpersuasive. But before I get to why

the case that centristism works is unpersuasive, let me just first register an objection to the

terms on which the debate is being had. Okay, so the question that the Times answers in its piece is effectively,

are Democrats more likely to win elections on centrist or progressive platforms? And so the

unstated premise of the piece is that Democrats should do whatever makes them most likely to

win elections. So if the answer to that question is they are more likely to win elections when they run on centrist platforms,

then that means they should run on centrist platforms.

So whenever we consider a political position in this framework, they want us to ask ourselves, not is this political

position correct? Is it true? Is it right? Is it moral? Is it just? They want us to ask ourselves,

...