Rahm Emanuel, the former Democratic mayor of Chicago, regrets in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that progressive Democrats’ “bad habit of disrespecting Clinton, Obama, and others who’ve gone before them” is a problem for the party. (Emanuel, who worked for both former presidents, also admits that he has a dog or two in the fight.)

I wouldn’t dare to try solving the Democrats’ intramural problems. Yet, it is becoming more evident that where progressive Democrats seek to dispense with insufficiently liberal Democratic legacies, it is because they suffer from an excessively presentist pathology, preventing them from seeing the value in, let alone compromising with, notions of the good entertained somewhere outside their own heads and times.