In a column from the “outsider” perspective, Ross Douthat echoes what Harvey Silverglate wrote in a comment here: Joe Biden is the only, the last, liberal with any potential to seek the Democratic nomination for president.

The reason Biden is such an attractive candidate on the Left is that he is one of the very few who are vying for the Democratic nomination who is a liberal rather than a “progressive.” The difference between liberals and progressives is that the former retain the left-liberal’s respect for civil liberties, while the progressives are concerned with ends but not with means (the antithesis of civil libertarians).

There’s no “very few” here; there’s only one. The distinction between liberal and progressive is glaringly obvious to liberals, and non-existent to progressives. The former is principled. The latter is purely outcome-oriented, based on simplistic identitarian zero-sum choices, the intersectional victim hierarchy and a child-like disregard for facts, logic and reality.

The right conflates liberals and progressives because they don’t care about the differences, both are wrong. The left conflates them because its adherents are too blind to grasp that they are the new authoritarians, just with their own special brand of victims. Will Joe Biden be the last liberal candidate?

And the only reason anyone would affirmatively want to vote for Biden is the same reason so many liberals now despise the very idea of his candidacy: because he has that moderate record, because he’s closer to the political center than many of his critics, because he’s out of step with what Matt Yglesias of Vox recently called “the Great Awokening” — the sudden leftward turn on issues of race and immigration and identity.

In contrast to the “Great Awokening,” which reflects a loud, outraged and extreme cadre of white knights who plan to reinvent society whether society wants to or not, Biden appears moderate. That’s a dubious proposition in itself, as Biden has a long history that now, in contrast to the shrieking of the ninnies running the Democratic party, makes him look as old and out-of-step as he is.

To unite this plurality, though, Biden would have to actually appeal to them openly and directly, which would require taking ownership of his record: not defending everything, not avoiding all apologies, but arguing explicitly that some tough-on-crime policies were a necessary response to a destructive multi-decade crime wave, that some moderation on abortion should be acceptable in the Democratic Party and that the Ocasio-Cortezan turn on economic policy should be questioned or resisted.

Back when the Democratic Party reflected liberal values, Biden failed as a candidate. As Harvey notes, Biden’s one virtue now isn’t that he’s any more desirable as a candidate today than he was before his dotage, having spent a political career being a horse’s ass, but because he’s a remnant of a Democratic Party that a broad spectrum of Americans might want to support.

The party has embraced left-wing ideas about structural racism, but there are still lots of Democratic voters — minority voters included, as white liberals have outpaced blacks and Hispanics in their wokeness — who would endorse the rhetoric of personal responsibility and colorblindness that the party’s activists now disdain as “respectability politics.”

See what Douthat did there? Even he called progressives “liberals,” despite there being nothing liberal about their authoritarianism. But his point, poor word choice aside, is that it’s the white crazies behind this left-wing extremism, and not even minorities support the Great Awokening as they do. So if Biden wants to be the candidate, will it be dinosaur liberal Biden or apologist woke Biden?

To run the way I’m suggesting, on his record rather than against it, would exact a possibly extraordinary cost. Just to campaign this way would make Biden hated by many liberals in a way that would make today’s Twitter animosity look mild. To win the nomination this way would produce fury on a scale that far eclipsed the pro-Sanders anger in 2016 and guarantee a strong 2020 showing for Jill Stein’s grifter left (if not a more sincere alternative). And to lose the nomination this way — which would remain, obviously, a strong possibility — would ensure that Biden exited the stage of liberal politics not as an elder statesman but as a wrong-side-of-history bad guy.

Around the time of the midterm elections, the question was how to “sell” Democratic candidates to the public so that they could get elected and reinvent society in their Utopian image. It wasn’t about being liberal, but marketing some vague sense of liberalism so that the Dems could get votes from the vast moderate center who want nothing to do with their progressive fantasies.

If Biden was to run, would he be a real-deal liberal, the elder statesman of a belief that everyone deserves civil liberties, or would he be an apologist for liberalism and succumb to the “shut up, cis white male privileged abled hereto-normative shitlords and do whatever most victimized intersectional black female transgender one-legged scolds tell you to do” progressive?

Douthat wants to see it happen as a test of the legitimacy of the Democratic Party, whether the radical left has the legs to win against the worst Republican candidate ever, and enforce its ideological flavor of fascism rather than the right’s, or whether old white man liberalism is dead.

But even as a biased outsider to Democratic politics, I can see why Biden would shrink from the strategy, shrink from dividing his party by challenging its new consensus, shrink from being hated by his co-partisans.

If so, though, I hope he has the wisdom not to run at all.

If Biden runs as Biden, the vicious woke kids will rip him to shreds for not being woke. If Biden runs as the pale wrinkled version of progressivism, offering apologies and excuses for the entirety of his political career and promising to be every bit as insipid as the young, fresh faces, why bother? The shame is that before progressives seized control of the Dems, Biden wasn’t anybody’s pick for president. And now, he’s all we’ve got, the last liberal standing.