Is it uncomfortable? Around the world “the right” is either already fascist or steadily(and happily) moving towards it while centrism is constantly constantly trying to pretend that everything is ok and that half-ass, less scary changes are implemented in place of better, full-fat ones which may alienate the right-wing voters who are increasingly calling for killing anyone who is slightly against them. The center also runs nearly entirely on “we aren’t the right” and people fall for it all the time.

Smart people know how to make shit work, and they know that because their education allows to perform studies to show that these things work but you try to get a bike lane installed in North America and see what happens. Facts don’t matter to way too many people and so many are also so poor that being deathly afraid of the threat of a teething period is not even wholly unreasonable, as much as we do need to just rip that bandaid off(and usually it just means taxing the rich and not the poor but again, try telling that to people who get their news from Facebook propaganda pages).

And if you’re saying that US Democrats are “the left” then we can’t even have this conversation until that’s sorted out.