The ascension of Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket has prompted, among many other things, a reckoning with the meaning and legacy of the last decade of American liberalism.

It has been a winding road: the conciliatory, technocratic politics of the late Barack Obama years ended on a high note for presidential approval but yielded to the Bernie Sanders insurgency and the shock election of Donald Trump. The “resistance” and social-justice liberalism of the Trump years led to the ideological hodgepodge of the Joe Biden years, which matched a leftward lurch on economic policy with a moderate figurehead and produced the lowest late-term approval ratings average in recent political history.

In trying to draw lessons from that roller-coaster, some have focused on the fact that Harris, riding a remarkable wave of voter excitement, has chosen to plot a more cautious policy course than she did as a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020. After she picked Tim Walz as her running mate, Republicans attacked him on similar grounds — criticizing him as “the Bernie Sanders of Congress,” despite his moderate record in the House and as governor of Minnesota, a blue state, in a time of left-wing ferment, as being too permissive toward the George Floyd protests and for approving driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

Put aside, for a moment, that Trump actually praised Walz’s handling of those protests in 2020. These are familiar right-wing attacks, but what is most striking about this wave of them is that they echo a broader critique increasingly now taken as conventional wisdom across the wide center of the political spectrum — that sometime between the end of the Obama years and the Biden midterms, the left went too far. Occasionally, this is framed as an economic critique — that the progressive left abandoned neoliberalism for something much less productive. More often, it’s framed in terms of the fight for social justice and the belief that terms like “BIPOC” and “intersectionality,” imported from the activists and the NGO-sphere, turned normie voters off. The progressive fever reached a peak in the summer of 2020, the thinking goes, and the party is still in a state of prolonged recovery, damaged by the excesses of that period and today needing to stiff-arm the left to win in 2024.

But did progressives actually overstep? Was the party pulled too far from the country’s center of political gravity? You can assess the claim morally, in which case your answer may well be that the left didn’t go far enough. The political stakes of these arguments are high, since they are already shaping the Harris campaign and could well determine the direction of the next presidency and the future of the Democratic Party beyond. For its part, the Harris campaign has seemed to answer in two ways, tacking toward the center on some policy issues but also making a much more emphatic claim that today’s Democrats represent the natural, common-sense “center” of the country’s politics. For the purposes of this column, I wanted to ask the question purely in pragmatic terms: Did the activism and ideology of that period ultimately prove counterproductive, and is there evidence that the Democratic Party suffered politically as a result? Almost five years on, it is much harder to answer those questions in the affirmative than you might think.

The Black Lives Matter protests, the largest in American history, were also overwhelmingly popular at first, and while support flattened out over time, academic research suggests that they were, on net, beneficial to Democrats that November. There was no mass defunding of American Police Departments. Instead, to the degree that crime surges that year and the next can be linked to those protests, and not just pandemic social disarray, it increasingly seems to be that in response to them, Police Departments retreated from their duties. Are we supposed to call that left-wing excess or right-wing sabotage? Some studies suggest that the protests “radicalized” liberals without having any appreciable effect on conservative opinion, with others showing that those communities exposed to more anti-protest coverage from right-wing Sinclair broadcasts were less likely to support Republican candidates. On the whole, according to polling and analysis by Democracy Fund, opinions on racial issues appear to have moved leftward under Trump and then basically stayed there under Biden — with none of the backlash you might’ve expected once a Democratic president came in. The “Great Awokening” hasn’t died out but mostly persisted. And the subject appears less polarizing now, too: According to the Democracy Fund, among Democrats, concern for racial justice and police reform is lower than in 2020, while among Republicans, it is higher.