It was rhetorical.
I’ve said before, maybe a half dozen times over the years, that American Liberalism is supposed to be the most left of all the liberalisms the world over, past and present. That’s not meant as a purity test, it’s strictly semantics. It’s just how the etymology shook out over the years. There’s not supposed to be this great divide between liberalism, even Third Way, and progressivism. Perhaps you could employ a ‘pragmatism metric’ and say pre-campaign Liz is liberal and Bernie is progressive, or something similar.
Now, the point is that liberals know this, so they pay lip-service to the broad ideas, that social justice requires economic justice, that capitalism should as be ethical as possible, that FDR wasn’t a fringe lunatic, etc. I mean, the audacity of hope and change, right? In practice though, not so much, but they’ve never had their bluff called. Even Obama showing that yeah, um, maybe it was audacious to have hope, still left enough plausible deniability. Even including Bernie in 2016, there’s never been a hand strong enough to call the bluff, until now. This is it. The curtain is pulled all the way back.
Obviously, we’re not naive spring chickens. Even the least jaded and cynical could easily, trivially say that various people, most people, have been filled with various amounts of shit for quite awhile. What’s shocking now is being conclusively shown that so many people are so full of shit. Bernie’s movement called the bluff and the contrast is fucking stark and glaring.
So, maybe it’s not ratfucking. Maybe it’s something orders of magnitude worse and it needs a new word. Regardless, there are people dealing with being told that they were thoroughly lied to their entire lives and I think that would make anybody, at least temporarily, unhinged.