Even Hillary, unopposed, tacks toward an Internet-and-millennially-centric left that tolerates fewer and fewer deviations, and that sees the center as its enemy. And while she may hope she can come back, this too is arguably part of the Hillary deficit: a desire to be liked by the wrong people (a desire to be popular among people who don’t really like her).

The race from the center, on the part of the Republicans and now joined by the Democrats, leaves an extraordinary political opportunity, one that, likely, can only be seized by someone not weighed down by ideologically driven money or afraid of an internecine primary fight.

If, as everybody seems increasingly to understand, political parties now facilitate the opposite of consensus, then an effectively independent political power base — in a sense, the only one in the country — like Michael Bloomberg’s could be a wonderful, even astounding, corrective.

It’s the fundamental duh formula: a progressive social conscience with pro-growth economic views. In the aftermath of the left’s terrible drubbing in Britain, Tony Blair, the ultimate centrist architect, expressed the obvious synthesis necessary for political success: “ambition and aspiration as well as compassion and care.”