What Does "Winning" Look Like in 2025?

The debate started over flags at protests—whether waving the Stars and Stripes at anti-Trump demonstrations was tactically sound or morally bankrupt. But that exchange, like most political arguments these days, quickly spiraled into bigger questions about purity versus pragmatism, and why one side seems to keep winning while the other keeps losing.

Except perhaps that's the wrong frame to take. Maybe the more interesting question isn't who's winning, but what's working for each side—and what's working against them.

The Infrastructure Game

One could say that the Right figured out the unglamorous truth about power: it accrues to those who show up to the boring meetings. School boards, zoning commissions, water districts—they treat these fluorescent-lit rooms as the engine room where rules get written, not as beneath their dignity. Their advantage isn't just discipline; it's that the existing power structures they're defending often subsidize the effort. Think tanks, legal clinics, and astroturf campaigns don't run on church basement volunteers alone—they run on decades of donor investment from the same corporate ecosystems they exist to preserve.

But that infrastructure can be brittle. It depends on sustained donor interest and cultural momentum that may not last forever. As institutions secularize and younger generations drift from traditional affiliations, the machine requires more maintenance. The Right's current strength is built on patience and subsidy, not necessarily on ideas that can survive generational shifts.

The Left, meanwhile, dominates the cultural conversation. They can articulate visions of justice, flood the intellectual ecosystem with analysis, and galvanize mass attention quickly. Think pieces, podcasts, and viral moments—they can own the zeitgeist. But that cultural production often becomes its own reward rather than a tool for institutional change. A brilliant essay analyzing structural racism can dazzle in the cultural realm instead of building the coalition that could actually dismantle those structures.

The 1619 Project illustrates both the power and peril of this approach. It succeeded in shifting mainstream conversation about American history, influenced educational frameworks, and gave activists shared vocabulary. That's culture as input working—teachers, parents, and students had new language for discussing structural racism. But it also handed the Right a perfect mobilization tool. "Critical Race Theory" became the catch-all menace that energized conservative school board candidates and state legislators. The cultural intervention created the very backlash that swept opponents into local offices where they could ban the materials that sparked the controversy.

So culture shapes politics for everyone, including your enemies. The Left often assumes better cultural narratives will naturally lead to better political outcomes, when the Right has become adept at weaponizing those same cultural shifts to mobilize their own base.

The asymmetry is stark: one side treats culture as input for institutional work; the other treats culture as the work itself.

Events Versus Habits

Where the Right excels is in making politics routine. Churches, business clubs, veteran halls—these dense social fabrics turn civic engagement into habit rather than event. Politics becomes part of the weekly rhythm, not something you gear up for when the moment feels urgent. That creates stamina. Sunday service doubles as civic training, with solidarity baked in.

Of course, as these traditional institutions fragment or lose relevance, those habits may erode. The Right's reliance on cultural conservatism works until the culture shifts underneath them. Their discipline assumes a social fabric that may be fraying in real time.

The Left, by contrast, specializes in events—marches, protests, conferences that generate catharsis and visibility. These gatherings remind participants they're not alone, and at their best, they can shift entire conversations. But episodic energy fades. Without structures that routinize involvement, bursts of solidarity turn into burnout. A weekend of inspiration doesn't translate into a year of attendance at planning commission hearings.

The pattern repeats: the Right builds habits that compound; the Left creates moments that dissipate.

The Complicity Question

Here's where things get philosophically messy. The Right shows little hesitation about working inside "corrupt" institutions because they assume power is there to be taken. They'll staff the bureaucracy, take corporate jobs, sit on boards—whatever it takes to tilt outcomes. Their pragmatism can enable actual corruption and self-dealing, which eventually undermines legitimacy. But in the short term, it puts them in positions where they can write the rules.

The Left's sensitivity to complicity keeps their principles sharp and prevents capture—but it also often sidelines activists from positions where they could actually wield leverage. The moral purity that prevents corruption also prevents infiltration. Clean hands, but empty ones.

Both approaches carry costs. The Right risks becoming what it claims to oppose; the Left risks never getting close enough to power to change anything. The rare moments when progressives break through—like the Fight for $15 combining street protests, city ordinances, and administrative pressure—show what's possible when moral clarity meets tactical flexibility. But those triangulated campaigns remain exceptional rather than routine.

Loyalty and Its Discontents

The Right has mastered something the Left struggles with: singular loyalty. They've fused nation, faith, and people into one emotionally charged package that provides both cohesion and stamina. When you believe you're defending "your people" or "your nation under God," committee meetings don't feel like drudgery—they can feel like service in a moral cause.

That fusion creates exclusion, of course. The bulldozer crushes outsiders and hardens opposition. But it also supplies clarity that can power sustained action across multiple fronts. Even supporters of National Guard deployments or ICE raids often frame these not as autocratic tools but as principled defenses of moral order.

The Left's commitments, by contrast, are plural and sometimes conflicting: solidarity with workers, justice for marginalized groups, care for the planet, internationalism. These are noble, and they're diffuse. They don't always deliver the same visceral pull as "God and Country," and they sometimes clash—environmentalists versus unions, global solidarity versus local jobs.

This creates a fundamental asymmetry: the Right wins cohesion through loyalty to a single axis; the Left risks fragmentation through loyalty to multiple, sometimes competing principles. Take Latino voters who support Republican candidates—their identities don't automatically dictate their politics. Faith commitments, military service traditions, or small-business identities can resonate more strongly than ethnic solidarity. Intersectionality explains oppression, but it doesn't automatically produce predictable allegiance.

What Winning Looks Like Now

This is where 2025 gets interesting: the scoreboard is messier than either side wants to admit.

Winning at Governance: By traditional metrics—office-holding, enforcement power, judicial dominance—the Right is visibly operating the levers of state. Trump's return, tightened immigration enforcement, conservative court majorities: these are concrete institutional victories.

Winning at Legitimacy: But governance isn't the same as legitimacy. Policies that energize the base can mobilize opposition, alienate younger voters, and invite international criticism. Power exercised too bluntly can undermine itself over time.

Winning at Imagination: The Left's victories show up differently—cultural shifts, expanded definitions of justice, localized experiments in mutual aid and alternative governance. They preserve radical possibilities and moral clarity even when they can't prevent harmful policies from being enacted.

Winning at Enforcement: Yet these can feel like moral victories, which any losing coach will tell you are still defeats. "You know who talks about moral victories? The team that lost." Symbolic wins without institutional gains leave vulnerable communities exposed when enforcement comes.

The most honest assessment might be that both sides are succeeding at what they're optimized for, and failing where their models break down. The Right wins at consolidation and enforcement; it struggles with adaptation and legitimacy over time. The Left wins at articulation and resistance; it struggles with coordination and institutional persistence.

The Paradox of 2025

So what's actually working in 2025? The Right's advantages—institutional leverage, donor networks, loyalty-based cohesion—are real but not necessarily permanent. The bulldozer approach achieves results until it meets immovable objects or shifts the terrain underneath itself.

The Left's strengths—cultural influence, moral imagination, coalition diversity—are also real but often ephemeral. Their ability to diagnose problems exceeds their ability to solve them institutionally.

Maybe the question isn't who's winning, but whether either approach is adequate to the challenges each side actually prioritizes. The Left sees climate change, inequality, and democratic backsliding as existential threats requiring urgent action. The Right focuses on cultural decay, border security, economic competition with China, and restoring traditional values. Global instability matters to them primarily through the lens of American primacy, not multilateral cooperation.

Each side is optimized to address its own priority list, but neither approach seems adequate to handle what the other sees as urgent. The Right's institutional leverage works for cultural restoration and immigration enforcement, but it doesn't address systemic inequality or climate change. The Left's moral imagination speaks to justice and environmental crisis, but struggles with the cultural disruption and economic anxiety that fuel populist anger.

And perhaps those inadequacies are features, not bugs. A synthesis might be conceptually impossible when the sides disagree about what the problems even are. In 2025, that kind of shared diagnosis feels further away than ever.

Just as with the flag debate that sparked this inquiry—whether waving the Stars and Stripes at anti-Trump protests was a practical move or a moral sellout—the bigger question isn't whether to wave or burn symbols, but how those symbols translate into power. For now, we're left with competing experiments in how to hold power and how to challenge it.

Afterword

This analysis was written before the assassination of Charlie Kirk reminded us that some forces don't respect the boundaries of normal political competition. The patterns described here—infrastructure gaps, episodic versus habitual engagement, complicity versus purity—may still hold, but they're now playing out against a backdrop where one side is potentially moving beyond politics into the realm of holy war.

The comparative framework that structures this essay assumes both sides are operating within recognizable bounds of democratic competition. But martyrdom mythology operates by different rules entirely. It's not about winning elections or policy fights; it's about constructing a cosmic battle between good and evil. And that transformation doesn't happen symmetrically.

The Right has spent decades building cultural machinery that can mythologize, memorialize, and mobilize around symbolic figures. The Left's response—measured condemnation, calls for calm, workshops on channeling rage into civic engagement—suddenly looks almost helplessly civilized by comparison. While Multnomah Democrats recruit 20 people learn to navigate municipal bureaucracy, the other side may be constructing a martyrdom narrative that mobilizes thousands around the idea that their enemies are literal murderers who must be stopped by any means necessary.

This isn't just an acceleration of existing dynamics; it's a qualitative shift. The doomsday clock for political discourse just ticked closer to midnight. The asymmetries mapped in this essay remain visible, but the stakes are escalating beyond what either side's current playbook can handle. When the Overton Window gets blasted into a hole, what pours through instead of debate is myth, grievance, and retribution. And once the wall is breached, the question isn’t how to shift the frame, but whether there’s still a house left to protect.