Here is a thing that Republicans do not do when they sweep into power: They do not bother brainstorming ways that they can signal a values match with the people who oppose them, and whom they have just defeated. They do not look around, blinking, from the hilltop they have just won, and fret about appealing to the vanquished foes lying half-dead at their feet. When Republicans win, they set about changing the laws, or using the existing laws to their advantage. That is the job. Republican lawmakers express their values through the laws that they make and enforce. They do not get sidetracked by the idea that they can make friends with progressives, and not only because they know that their voters do not want them to do that. They perceive an authentic mismatch of values, and their solution to that is to make progressives eat shit.
You will say that this is a weakness of their politics. You will point to their long-dwindling popularity and last week’s electoral bloodbath, and say that their reflexive and idiotic tribalism is a terminal illness, and that Democrats should learn from it only that it is self-defeating. You fool. Here you have done them the favor of flattening the actual, substantive, qualitative differences between the goals of the right and the left.
You shouldn’t do that, because those differences are important. People on the left want things—actual tangible things: laws and institutions and structures—that make sense, that arise from active, curious, engaged minds thinking deeply about how to run a community of any size or complexity. Those things are aimed at the goal of making society more equitable and less brutal, and making life more dignified and less degrading.