In 1964 Arizona senator Barry Goldwater stood before the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for the presidency. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” he declared. “And let me also remind you that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Many interpreted the statement as a bald appeal to Southern racists, especially coming from a candidate who only weeks before had voted against the Civil Rights Act. Four months later Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide, losing only the Deep South and Goldwater’s home state. In the wake of this loss, Republicans came to see his speech as a cautionary tale of extremism, especially as outright racism became ever less politically permissible.

By the time the next presidential election rolled around, the pivot was clear. In 1968 Richard Nixon presented himself as the moderate alternative to both the reactionary racist George Wallace and the Great Society liberal Hubert Humphrey. As historian Matthew Lassiter has documented, Nixon’s “suburban strategy” fused colorblindness—opposing both racism and mandatory integration—with promises to restore law and order after a year of protests and urban unrest. The message targeted white, middle-class voters in booming Sunbelt suburbs and their counterparts around the nation—the so-called “silent majority.” His victory seemed to confirm that the key to winning modern elections lay with middle-class, white suburbanites.

I was reminded of this legacy while reading Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s trenchant argument. They incisively lay out the many reasons that current pleas for Democrats to moderate are misguided. The specific history of these calls, shrouded in racial politics from the beginning, only reinforces their case.

The embrace of moderation became increasingly adopted by both political parties after the 1960s. But where Nixon adopted a moderate stance to avoid accusations of racist extremism, Democrats sought to distance themselves from the alleged excesses of racial progressivism in the post-civil rights era. These efforts were first led by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985 by Al From. According to these “New Democrats,” the party’s viability depended on shifting to the center and catering to white, middle-class voters who had been migrating to the GOP.

Like Nixon, the DLC presented itself as a “third way” alternative, “different from the Old Guard Democrats and from the Republicans.” Its agenda combined talk of economic growth through free trade and high-tech entrepreneurship with social policies promoting personal responsibility and meritocracy, squarely rejecting economic redistribution and all but the most symbolic forms of affirmative action. And its electoral strategy rested on the theory that it was better to target potential swing voters than to get disaffected and marginalized Americans to the polls. Mobilizing nonvoters, DLC advisors William Galston and Elaine Kamarck argued in an influential white paper, simply wouldn’t help Democrats—the idea that it would was “wishful thinking,” indeed “myth.” Their approach was first deployed in 1992 and reached its apex during Bill Clinton’s reelection bid in 1996, when the campaign bent over backward to distance the president from positions that white suburban voters might perceive as even remotely progressive, especially on race.

Proponents of moderation, of course, cite this strategy as a success story, and in a narrow sense it might have been—though economic factors arguably played a much larger role. Clinton won in ’92, but on the tide of economic disaffection; he also kept the White House in ’96 with 53 percent of suburban women, but before the worst impacts of NAFTA had begun to be felt. Nevertheless, party strategists doubled down on moderation for the next two decades with an ever-growing focus on public opinion polling and focus groups. In 2000 Al Gore’s advisors divided white women into sixteen different categories to facilitate outreach and emphasized  suburban quality-of-life issues like sprawl and traffic in campaign messaging. Barack Obama promulgated his own third way vision—transcending partisan and racial divisions—in a bid to win over suburban professional swing voters in states like Virginia and Colorado, relentlessly portraying himself as reasonable and pragmatic to assuage fears he might be a Black radical. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both operated on the “Panera Bread” theory of elections and explicitly sought to walk a careful tightrope on race and other issues construed as aligned with the left. And Kamala Harris pushed this approach to its outer limits with her appearances with Liz Cheney and on The View.

If moderation perhaps helped Bill Clinton and Obama and Biden win, and almost worked for Gore, what’s so bad about it? As Bonica and Grumbach suggest, it was always a deeply flawed strategy, whatever its short-term returns. It reoriented the party away from grassroots organizing and bottom-up movement building. It led Democrats to abandon potential new constituencies, forsake credible moral and policy leadership on issues of inequality, and craft platforms and policy agendas that have alienated large swaths of the electorate. And it has contributed to empowering an increasingly radical GOP by depriving American politics of a meaningful opposition party.

As Harris’s loss demonstrates, this approach also lost whatever marginal effectiveness it once had. Most of the “wine moms” were already supporting Democrats in 2024. There are simply no longer enough moderate voters left in swing states or really anywhere to radically transform electoral outcomes. Hyperpolarization and nationalization have fundamentally altered the political landscape, as Bonica and Grumbach note; so too has exploding wealth inequality, compressing the number of solidly middle-class or even upper middle-class voters. And it should be noted that the positive response to Trump’s extremism among many voters was a direct response to their dissatisfaction with Obama’s moderation. In the last decade, Republicans have clearly given up the old strategy of moderation represented by the Bushes and Mitt Romney in favor of Goldwaterian ambition—and they have only been rewarded for it at the polls. Outrage at Trump helped Biden to victory in 2020, but once again economic disillusionment prevailed under Biden’s administration, and the center did not hold.

Yet in spite of all this, influential Democratic politicians, strategists, and party-aligned pundits remain stuck in the past. Today’s “popularist” defenses of moderation are only the latest iteration of the DLC push to quash progressive ideas, this time in the name not only of white moderates but of voters of color who supported Trump. Commentators like John Judis and Ruy Teixeira were among the first to claim that “wokeness” and “social justice commitments” cost Democrats the 2024 election; the message is that Democrats must disavow the Black Lives Matter movement and abandon transgender children while doubling down on a Clintonian economic agenda of tech-driven growth. The idea is not just strategically shortsighted but fundamentally immoral as the Trump administration is eviscerating fundamental civil rights protections. Sacrificing economic populism and social justice alike is a sure recipe for continued disaster.

The stakes of this debate, as Bonica and Grumbach argue, are much higher than how to win a single election. To break the cycle of razor-thin margins and ever-growing disillusionment, Democrats would do well to heed Goldwater’s dictum. In fact, they could look to an even more reputable source. The year before Goldwater’s speech, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from jail in Birmingham, “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?” Moderation is not just unvirtuous: it is a doomed way to build a stable political coalition, to earn and keep voters’ trust, and to create a policy agenda to meet the moment. The contemporary right has certainly learned that lesson, dispensing with any effort at moderation in 2016 and winning a trifecta in 2024. It is long past time for Democrats to learn this lesson as well.