Let’s not mitigate our censure with cutesy fraternal nicknames.

If Barack Obama was capable of muscling through the sort of laws that the labor movement—and Barack Obama—would like to see enacted, he would not have to give labor leaders a summit. He could give them political victories. But that does not seem to be the reality of the moment. So we all got invited to the White House instead, to talk about “outreach strategies” and to “#StartTheConvo” on labor issues. I did not get the impression that the conversation needed more starting. We all seemed pretty well decided on what we wanted. Left unspoken was the fact that the working class will not be getting what it wants, any time soon.

But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.

So perhaps a simpler way of putting the conclusion is that the Republican Party is motivated by a general philosophy while Democrats are motivated by specific policies they want to achieve.

The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It's a hoax, so we shouldn't do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It's happening, so we should do something about it. The "centrist" position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it's happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. That's not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.

What's really being measured is heterogeneity of opinion, not centrism.

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate.