I had a conversation with a friend this week that crystallized something I’ve been wrestling with: the tension between moral clarity and coalition building, between refusing accommodation and winning elections, between naming collaborators and creating exit ramps from collaboration.
We were arguing about tactics. He thinks I’m being unproductive by writing off conservatives who sit on their hands while Trump dismantles constitutional governance. I think he’s being dangerously accommodating by suggesting we should soften our witness to make space for people uncomfortable with trans activists at protests.
Neither of us is wrong. And that’s precisely the problem—and the possibility.
The Disagreement
My position is straightforward: The line has been crossed. Federal agents conducting warrantless mass detentions. The Speaker refusing to seat a lawfully elected member of Congress. Administration officials calling judicial review “insurrection.” These aren’t norm violations—they’re the end of constitutional governance.
The choice is binary. You defend the constitutional order or you collaborate in its dismantling. There’s no neutral position because sitting on your hands is choosing collaboration. And the people who need convincing aren’t confused—they’re showing us who they are.
They know what Trump is doing violates their stated principles. They privately admit it. But they’ve decided that maintaining their social status, their financial comfort, their tribal belonging matters more than their oath to the Constitution. That’s not confusion. That’s cowardice.
So I’m not interested in carefully persuading Megyn Kelly that maybe calling for dictatorship to “crush liberal culture” is problematic. I’m not investing energy in creating comfortable entry points for conservatives who think the real problem with anti-authoritarian protests is that trans people are there.
Six years of Benghazi hearings. Six years of email investigations. If Republicans believed the ethical standards they claimed to enforce, they’d apply them to themselves. They don’t. That’s not confusion—that’s revealed preference. They want power for their side, constraints for their enemies. And I’m supposed to empathize with their journey while they rationalize collaboration?
No.
My friend thinks this is tactically unwise. That moral outrage without coalition-building is just witnessing collapse with good reasons. That you actually have to win elections, which requires building the biggest possible anti-authoritarian coalition, which means not leading with the most divisive cultural issues.
He’s not wrong about needing to win. But he’s wrong that my approach contradicts that goal.
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