It’s not always getting worse. It’s that things only get better if you have consistent pressure from the left to force Democrats to get better. The pressure to cave to corporate centrism is always there. You have to have some correcting mechanism, otherwise the party will just drift further right. This mechanism has existed for decades and it has served, and continues to serve, to keep the Democrats from decaying further towards conservatism.

Yes, obviously Project 2025 exists. There’s no need to gleefully trot out all the horrible things Trump is doing. Obviously he’s doing bad things. The problem with Democrats is they think that because Republicans are going to do awful things, that gives them a blank check to do anything they want. They can do any evil they want, just as long as they’re a little bit better than the Republican.

And you mention LGBT rights. The same centrist Dems who cited LGBT rights as a reason to throw Palestinians under the bus are now advocating for throwing trans people under the bus. It turns out, when you’re willing to sacrifice one minority group to the fire, then you’ll be willing to do it again. They justified letting the Palestinians burn in order to protect the queer and trans people. Now they’re justifying letting trans people burn, because in the name of the greater good, we have to make sure to protect everyone else.

Centrist Dems are the “first they came for…” poem in human form.

That IS the banality of evil that poem warns about. At every stage of fascist empowerment, a lesser of two evils argument can be made for letting one minority group or another have its rights taken away. Pretty soon all the minority groups are dead, because at every stage you thought sacrificing them made sense for the greater good.