If the new progressivism becomes truly politically disastrous for Democrats, on the other hand, it will probably involve not just off-putting or elitist rhetoric, but a dramatic policy failure linked to social justice politics. The two places where that seems most likely to happen are crime and education. Crime is the more urgent case: 2020 saw a major spike in the homicide rate, back to late-1990s levels, which so far is carrying over into 2021. Biden’s speech to Congress last Wednesday made a vague connection between ongoing “bloodshed” and the liberal-friendly debate over an assault weapons ban, but it isn’t AR-15s doing most of the damage in the current murder wave. Instead, police demoralization and withdrawal in the aftermath of protests and riots seem like a crucial factor — along with (more speculatively) coronavirus school closures, widespread masking, and the general Covid-era suspension of normality. Maybe we’ll revert to pre-2020 trends as normality returns. If we don’t, though, the Democrats’ problem won’t be the off-putting rhetoric of police abolition; it will be the reality of a rising body count as liberal politicians struggle to negotiate between activists, protesters, progressive prosecutors and cops. And that kind of failure could take what is, for now, the modest trend of some conservative-leaning Asian, Hispanic and African-American voters drifting rightward and make it an existential problem like the white-ethnic abandonment of the Democrats under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.