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I want to add a related but distinct thought to this, which is that another consequence of being in the political wilderness is that it makes you afraid and insecure about your own beliefs. That's a big part of the story when it comes to many liberals and leftists today.
There's a complex interplay of history and ideology at work here, but suffice it to say that there are plenty of people nominally on the socialist left who've experienced/witnessed so many defeats/retrenchments that the idea of winning on their own terms has become unthinkable
Some of these people simply become liberals, but there are others who still cleave to the old identity while opposing its core tenets and commitments in practice out of fear and internalized defeatism.
People who were on the left in the 1980s especially experienced a jarring series of defeats and rollbacks - not just of the radical possibilities of 1968 but of even more moderate Keynesian social democracy
Thus, every election becomes a potential McGovern or Michael Foot catastrophe-in-waiting and the mature, adult thing is to moderate all our demands and expectations in advance. This outlook might be comprehensible, but it ultimately produces a poisonous and destructive cynicism
Once more with feeling...
