Reasonably fair point, but I think it's worse that they did their controlled opposition, let the Rs win dance. It really was their election to lose, even more than 2016. They only had to exercise the tiniest smidgeon of strategic nous, and to potentially pretend to make minor concessions to regular voters, and they would have won in a landslide, it's so easily within what everyone claims to expect from liberal politicians. Meanwhile I can understand the reticence towards refusing to transfer power. It really is antithetical to liberal democracy, which is of course a great reason to hate liberalism! But people who believe in/are empowered by liberalism aren't going to go there. If they try to refuse to hand over power, it won't be a democracy any more! And then the Republicans will do the same anyway!

But doing the bare minimum to win an election should have been well within their power, they just didn't care. The reality is that a worse than usual republican candidate is seen as an opportunity for them to offer even less to their supporters. "We don't have to pretend we're going to give them health care or stop funding genocide, what are they gonna do, vote for Trump?!" There have in the past and/or other places been liberal politicians who seem more or less to agree with the dream of liberal democracy, people who get elected and go on to try and help their constituents. No one in the modern democratic party can be numbered amongst them, and of course I doubt anyone here would disagree that those people are misguided anyway and shouldn't be part of a bourgeois political party if they want to make the world a better place. That said, I probably wouldn't have survived childhood without socialised medicine, so, misguided or not, critical support to Gough Whitlam and his ilk.