The imperfect present is always with us. The right despises it. And so, we have the illusory and temporary alliance of the techno-aristocrats and the MAGA populists; the former want to accelerate the future, while the latter want to revive the past.
For their part, the Democrats have become a genuinely conservative party, advocating slow and incremental change; given the constraints of the McConnell Project and its uncharismatic leaders after Obama, the party’s slogan might as well have been “No, we can’t.” Once Trump is finished wrecking America as we know it, however, the landscape will probably be different. The McConnell Project will be dead; there will be no plausible way back; and the left will be free to advocate for brighter future that is unimaginable today.