I'm less concerned about the "why we fight" aspect than I am with the "*how* we fight" aspect. Since 2016, dems have consistently failed to realize 2 things: 1) they keep trying to go back to a bygone era of bipartisanship and have failed to embrace a wartime footing against the GOP and the oligarchy that entails going into scorched-earth political tactics instead of worrying about the "optics" of doing so, and 2) they continuously fail to embrace anti-establishment populism politics, instead opting for the defense of institutions rather than seeking to change them.

Trump got his start not by going after the dems, but by going after the leaders of the GOP. For Trump and MAGA, dems were the "far enemy," but the bipartisanship softies within their party were the "near enemy" that needed to either go away or be brought to heal first. Dems need to do this kind of thing within their own party over the next two years and start replacing their softies with fighters. They need to sideline anyone who still lives in this fantasy of a world where we go back to bipartisanship and start promoting the people within their party who understand that those days are long gone and the only way forward is to fight the MAGAfied GOP with scorched earth tactics that include firebreathing message campaigns that don't give a fuck about "optics", highlighting of the corruption/incompetence/illegality of the Trump administration at every turn, and a messaging focus on economic populism that centers around the American oligarchy hollowing out the middle class with corruption and crony capitalism and the need to take the country back from the rich via economic populism.

The old ways the dems have embraced are not working. They need to move away from "hope" and "joy" and start embracing *anger* and *fighting*. The American public is not in the mood for hope/joy, and they want angry fighters that are going to do something instead of just propose civility and niceties. Dems need to get out of their decency comfort zone and get into the arena and start throwing a whole lot of low blows, or they're going to be continuously rejected by a pissed off working class who are looking for some scapegoats to dish out punishments against. If dems don't turn the American public against the oligarchy and fight to remake the institutions on their own terms, they will continue to lose a critical mass of the American public whom they need to put them into power and they will watch the other side change these institutions in a way they won't like.