Democrats like Bill Clinton helped Republicans in their dismantling and avoided being described as liberal at all costs. From this aporia the word progressive reemerged as an antithesis to conservative, but was otherwise a floating signifier

In 2016 we knocked on doors for Sanders and, like many thousands of others, were liberated and transformed by his campaign. Sanders’s long-standing rhetorical ploy has been to reframe what was taken for granted (a private insurance market for health care) as itself a form of madness and to reframe what is considered mad, bad, and dangerous (a public insurer) as the bare minimum of what could be expected in a country as rich as the United States. To say this at the doors of hundreds of people, and to find that they agreed with you, was to feel sane yourself.