Moderate Democrats have a foundational belief that left=good, and so they can at most criticize people to their left on strategic or pragmatic grounds, rather than ideological grounds. This results in a situation where they are constantly trying to read the tea leaves in leftists’ statements, giving them delusional levels of benefit-of-the-doubt, and running cover for them. This is why the “abundance democrat” project is absolutely doomed: they don’t have the courage of their convictions and will immediately cave in the face of leftist moral attacks. We see this even from the main proponents of this movement, Yglesias, Noah Smith, etc. They have zero ability to tell the left they are not just mistaken but evil. They chuckle and accommodate, because on some level they feel morally embarrassed by the left, embarrassed that their own pesky reason has precluded them from being open, full-on communists. They are cowards, and they resent both the people who reveal this by pushing them left and the people to their right who describe it.