As I watched Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear tell Rev. Al Sharpton how honored he was to attend Sharpton’s recent conference, my mind turned to a topic I’d kept it safely away from: the Democrats’ fight over Hasan Piker.

Finished for now, impaled on Ezra Klein’s pen, the drama over a popular left-wing Twitch streamer started with a March 19 op-ed from leaders of Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank. In their column, Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen told their party that “Hasan Piker and his fellow Jew-haters belong” on the other side of a bright line.

Five days later, Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed announced a rally with Piker to support his campaign. Within 48 hours, both of El-Sayed’s primary opponents had condemned Piker; state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said the streamer “says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11.” The rally went ahead; El-Sayed told Politico that he thought people were over “cancel culture.”

A version of this same mini-controversy played out more than 20 years ago — with Sharpton. He ran for Senate in 1992; Democrats initially refused to give him a forum, citing his links to a fringe far-left party and questioning “whether Al Sharpton is even a Democrat.” Sharpton talked his way into the race anyway, then a 1997 campaign for mayor, and then a 2004 presidential bid, which some Democrats also said the party shouldn’t have tolerated.

“A true Democratic insurgent should compare Mr. Sharpton to [Pat] Robertson and [Jerry] Falwell,” wrote Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic. “Before the Democrats can truly challenge the GOP, they have to challenge themselves.”

Piker isn’t running for office. But like the young Sharpton, he’s trying to steer the Democratic Party’s direction by encouraging people who agree with him to get involved with it. And no matter how much a party or candidate might like to try, voters can’t be controlled when it comes to what they watch and listen to.

And many voters are putting up with opinions, language, and content that used to be campaign-killers. During Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and first term, he could start a whole news cycle with a retweet of some far-right account. Democrats would pile on because they wanted to beat him and genuinely found the post to be offensive. Republicans would distance themselves.

That rarely happens anymore. (One notable exception: Trump’s sharing of an image that portrayed him as the son of God, which got some genuine Republican outrage.) Our polity simply couldn’t contain two contradictory ideas — that Trump would say whatever he wanted, and that offensive speech must be strictly policed. The backlash to censorious liberalism has been a tremendous success, and the decline of traditional media has helped.

Republicans would still like some jokes to hurt candidates, though. The Third Way/Piker fight gave them a hook to ask if other Democrats would reject Piker. When the host said that Sen. Jon Ossoff was one of his top picks for a 2028 presidential nominee, the NRSC demanded that the Georgia Democrat “immediately condemn Piker.”

Ossoff ignored that, and I see no evidence that the people of Savannah or Marietta care that their senator, who has never appeared on Piker’s show, has a fan in a left-wing commentator who’s rooting for Hamas. Ordinary people are simply not policing this stuff.

Did Third Way’s challenge to Democrats over Piker backfire? Cowan told me, in a statement, that the goal was warning Democrats that if they embraced Piker, they’d be tagged with his radicalism, and that the gambit worked.

“Had Third Way not focused a spotlight on Piker, exposing the depth and breadth of his bigotry, mainstream Democrats might well have campaigned with him, just like El-Sayed,” he said. “Now they’ll stay away.”

Michigan primary voters, however, aren’t exactly staying away from El-Sayed, who’s running as a progressive insurgent ready to grab attention and win arguments. His campaign told me that it saw a “29% increase in volunteer sign ups, and a 221% increase in dollars raised via our website and social media” once people started talking about the Piker stop.