Democrats can’t compete if they’re unable to change

America has two political parties, but only one of them has a reasonably coherent political vision, a leadership that isn’t under the thumb of an erratic reality TV star, and a worldview that implies a policy agenda rather than just a litany of grievances.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, they also sometimes leave the impression that they never want to win another tossup Senate seat and that they would prefer Donald Trump be re-elected if the alternative requires wooing Americans who voted for him.

Consider recent developments in Alabama, where the Republican Party has nominated a Senate candidate manifestly unfit for office, a bigot hostile to the rule of law and entranced with authoritarianism.

And who have the Democrats put up? An accomplished former prosecutor, the very model of a mainstream Democrat — and a man who told an interviewer that he favors legal abortion, without restriction, right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb.

I know that certain of my readers may not consider this an extreme position, and imagine that people who do consider it extreme are also fitting out their wives with the lovely blue dresses from Netflix’s adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

But given that a clear majority of Americans favor banning abortion after 20 weeks, it might behoove liberals to bracket the Gilead scenario for a moment and try to imagine what it’s like to believe that at least some abortions are tantamount to baby-killing. And I mean really make the imaginative leap: Imagine that whenever a politician says, “There shouldn’t be any restrictions on the right to choose,” you hear, “I think infanticide should be legal in America.”

Would you vote for a candidate who said that? I submit that you probably would not — and you might not even if his opponent were also terrible in various ways. At the very least you would be weighing evils, and that weighing process — “bigot or infanticide advocate? bigot or infanticide advocate?” — might plausibly induce you to put a bigot in the Senate.

If the Democratic Party intends to be competitive again in the South, it needs to take the imaginative leap on abortion more often — as it did in recruiting candidates who helped build its last House majority way back in the misty years of 2006-08.

But maybe Democrats do not want to be competitive in the Bible Belt. No retreat on feticide, no compromise with Gilead! Fair enough. Then presumably they should want to make up ground with more secular voters somewhere else — among all the lapsed Catholics and former Mainline Protestants scattered around the Midwest, for instance.

If current trends continue, the Republicans will nominate a ticket of Roy Moore and Tomi Lahren in 2024 — and the Democrats, secure in their historical destiny, will counter by replacing their platform with a loving commentary on John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

As much as the country needs a conservatism with some idea of what it’s doing, some theory of the common good, it needs a liberalism that stops marinating in its own self-righteousness long enough to compete effectively for rural, Southern and Midwestern votes.

But you can’t always get what you need.