The centrist democrat theory is effectively, "look, all we care about is beating Trump. The case we need to win the election is to tell the public at large, 'don't worry, nothing bad will happen to you, everything will continue to go well, we'll just get this crazy person out of the white house and replace him with someone who isn't completely awful'. That radical socialist nominee, in contrast, tells the public at large that we're going to completely rearrange their way of life, because who knows what he'll do if he's elected, and change is very scary to most people, who would really rather not think about politics very much."
The flaw in that thinking is that that's exactly the case those centrist democrats made in 2016, and the other side nominated the "crazy guy who might completely rearrange the country because who knows what he'll do if he's elected." And he won.
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"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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