Fighting is most important because it’s a predicate to winning. Good, hard fighters combine strategic thinking with aggression, and that mixture alone will change an opponent’s behavior. It’s also important as a character trait: We admire people who don’t take injustice lying down; we feel inferior emotions—pity, contempt—for people who are afraid to stand up for themselves and others. But there’s another, ancillary benefit of fighting: It creates context for members of the public who don’t know whom to root for.

Fighting generates suspense and dramatic tension, stories about good guys and bad guys. It gives audiences narrative arcs to follow, causes and characters to favor. It provides plot, which is the essential ingredient in so much of our cultural production—from high literature to professional wrestling.

I spent Friday in New Orleans talking to Democrats of many stripes about the merits and urgency of fighting right now, mostly as it pertains to those first three facets. Beto O’Rourke’s assessment of the political moment, which you can watch here, underscored the value of the fourth.

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For instance, what do you think when you hear or read this chapter summary?

Just to bring everyone up to speed, you know that Trump asked Greg Abbott, our governor, to give him five congressional seats in Texas. And thick as thieves, he and the Republican state legislature have been busy at work carving up the state. They were going to vote on these five new districts on Monday, but thank God for the Texas Democrats, 54 of them left the state, broke quorum, said the hell with that, and um defied Donald Trump and stopped this power grab in the state of Texas.

And these motherfuckers are panicking right now. Okay. So, the reason that Greg Abbott is trying to vacate their seats, charge them with second-degree felonies, sending DPS state troopers to quote-unquote 'hunt them down. The reason John Cornyn has been working with Kash Patel to send the long arm of the FBI after them as well is because they get this. If they cannot steal these five seats, if they cannot hold on to power in the House of Representatives, there's going to be a check on Donald Trump's lawlessness. There's going to be accountability for his corruption and crimes, the cover up of his complicity with Jeffrey Epstein and everything else that he is doing. And there's going to be a real prospect of free and fair elections in 2028.

So they're going to do everything they can to stop us not just from fighting back, but more importantly from taking the fight to them. So yes, they're trying to [stop] our group Powered by People, which is the largest registrar of eligible Texans to vote in the state. It's an organization during the winter freeze in 2021 that made more than a million phone calls to elderly Texans to make sure that they were okay, that they had water, that we could get them to a warming center. We staffed the food banks all across Texas during the middle of of COVID. And we're trying to help everyday Texans vote in a state that makes it harder than any other in the nation to cast a ballot.

So, you know why they're afraid and you know why they're responding in this way. We've got to make sure that we are not afraid and we take this fight to them and we win it with whatever it takes.

If you were just tuning in, who would you be rooting for and against? O’Rourke’s been delivering remarks like these at almost-daily town-hall events across the country. The stories he tells are both topical and thematic, but he is to some extent limited by the fact that most elected Democrats aren’t following his lead.

Democrats could have a story to tell about themselves as scrappy, tireless underdogs. In a different world, they could summarize the first 200 days of the Trump presidency like this:

First he broke the law and stole your tax dollars, so we took him to court. But we know he’s already rigged the courts, so we did two other things: First, we put the corrupt justices on notice: There will be a reckoning for them if they participate in the dismantling of the Constitution; second, we refused to fund his government, unless and until he brought his crime spree to an end. Now the choice is his. And we’re going to rise against him over and over again until he stops treating the majority of Americans as second-class citizens, or we drive him from office.

Every part of that story is unavailable, because they didn’t do any of those things.

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QUALM AND GERRY

The Democratic response to the GOP’s attempted theft of five House districts in Texas, and likely many more districts in other red states, provides a mostly happy exception.

Here at least the argument among Democrats isn’t over whether to fight, but rather how hard.

California Democrats have structured their response to Texas Republicans as a straight up disincentive. They plan to ask California voters to sanction a new, highly gerrymandered map, but it will be conditioned on Republicans moving first. If Republicans retreat (which does not seem likely) California’s independently drawn maps will remain in place.

O’Rourke, by contrast, wants to see blue states gerrymander proactively, no matter what Republicans ultimately do. Building a truer democracy is the ultimate, shared goal, he argues, but it can’t happen unless Democrats gain power, so they need to do whatever’s necessary under the law to win first.

It’s a real division.

“I think the trigger is good,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told me. “If they do it, we do it. It's not just on our own. I disagree with Beto on that one.”

But the disagreement is amicable because in either approach Democrats would be imposing consequences on Republicans for bad behavior. They simply tell different stories about how good should respond to evil. I suspect disillusioned Democratic voters will rally behind Bonta and Gavin Newsom no matter which approach they choose. A problem only arises if they lose heart or drag their feet and miss their window for action.

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There remains the small problem that Republicans wield much more