One of the remarkable things about 2020 in Democratic politics is that both the center and the left have just kind of assumed that this was an all-or-nothing year, and that intraparty disputes would be resolved in one direction once and for all.

That's... not how it works.

The left was despondent about Bernie (and, for a smaller faction of left-liberals) Warren going down in the primary, believing it meant the left-wing electoral project would crumble to dust.

It hasn't.

Many on the center, conversely, thought that Biden's victory in the primary restored sanity and order to the political universe, and that the electoral left -- and activists in general -- would be safely relegated to political irrelevance again.

That also hasn't happened.

I keep pointing to the generation gap in the primary. There's a very clear -- and growing -- generational divide in Democratic politics, and it's not going to be resolved in a single election cycle.

Trump and the very legitimate fears of fascism have held this coalition together -- a popular front of the center-left, if you will -- but the internal divisions are very real.

There are at least two forces that could hold it together. One is thoughtful leadership. If Biden tacks left in a meaningful way, for instance.

The other is the continued spectre of fascism. Even if Trump leaves office in 2021, the Republican Party is still a far-right ethnonationalist party.

And Trump himself is not going to retire to a quiet private life. A post-presidency Trump is still going to be very dangerous.

I could see a scenario where, especially if Trump remains politically active well into the 2020s, the proverbial waving of the bloody shirt is what keeps the Democratic coalition together.