From Ed Burmila's Patreon:

Be partisan. Have a couple core beliefs that aren't negotiable. Don't assume your opponent is interested in playing the game on your terms.

Among the most basic, perhaps the most basic, mistake liberalism has made for the past half-century is to take conservatives at face value - to assume that their motivations are what they declare their motivations to be, and that the things they claim to value are the things they value.

The GOP says it cares about the Constitution, but it's wiping its ass with the Constitution now! The GOP claims to be Christian, but they practice the opposite of Christian values! The GOP says they support the troops, but they don't actually care about them at all!

This is frustrating because each statement is true on its own. The category error is believing them in the first place. This has been a very effective chase-the-rabbit tactic for conservatives over the years, and since liberals never stopped taking the bait they had every incentive to stick with it.

One by one over the decades, liberalism fought to steal conservatives' thunder on every point - all those things the GOP loves are things we love, too. Those are the core American values, the First Principles of our politics, and we the Democrats will not be accused of failing to share them. We are as American as the right claims they are, and we will prove it.

The great folly, which is too obvious only now when it is far too late to avoid catastrophe, is that trying to co-opt another faction's beliefs can only work if those beliefs are sincere. Being amorphous and opportunistic and constantly seeking to take positions that your opponents are only pretending to take themselves leads to...well, this. It leads to your opponents taking you for a permanent ride and exposing you to ridicule from all sides as feckless careerists who believe in absolutely nothing. That the same could readily be said of conservatives is not the point. Truly they do believe in nothing but their own power and their own social, cultural, racial, and economic supremacy. As every conservative accusation is a confession, this too is an exercise in projection and deflection: one group of power-hungry monsters who believe in nothing convincing their opponents to pursue a course of action that will make them look like the same.