This is the point Dom Cummings was making in his recent appearance on the Spectator podcast. I don't always agree with Chairman Dom, but he was on the nail.
The Democrats should have responded to Trump's election wins by saying, we need better candidates and more appealing policies. Our next campaign should be more about kitchen table issues and less about Hillary partying with celebrities. But nooooo, they doubled down on their mistakes, they just said, we should have imprisoned Trump, we should have blocked Elon from buying X, we should have pressured big tech into doing more censorship, we should have had more of the woke identity politics that even our own voters hate.
Ten years later we're seeing a handful of ambitious Democrats cautiously suggest that maybe it might be a good idea to talk about kitchen table issues.
It's a similar thing in Britain, and I'm not going to get into whether Brexit was a good or bad idea, but the political class promised us a referendum, and promised to abide by the result, and when they didn't get the result they wanted, spent the next several years behaving like a toddler refusing to put his wellies on.
There were a handful of Labour MPs in Red Wall seats - Stephen Kinnock, Caroline Flint, Gloria De Piero - who said, we voted Remain, we don't like the result, but the people have spoken and we have to accept that. Labour could have listened to them but preferred not to. A similar dynamic was behind Leanne Wood's marginalisation in Plaid.
There is a trend, as Cummings points out, of West European governments dusting off the box of tricks they used to stage colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and using them to prevent populists coming to power at home.
This idea that the electorate is deficient and the political class needs to save us from our own bad decisions - that's not a fringe view, it's very common among regime mouthpieces like Rory Stewart and James O'Brien and Lewis Goodall. It's the same kind of thinking that gives us MPs like Alex Sobel saying he doesn't want terfs voting for him.
I think this is a very dangerous trend. You may not like Nigel Farage but he's a safety valve. The more the centrist political class continue on their authoritarian turn, the more likely we'll end up with something much uglier.