They win and immediately start trying to co-opt and neutralize any independent actors and spend half their time distancing themselves from them, and not in a productive way.the insane complacency that set in because biden won was something i worried about for a long time, cause i saw this same thing back in 2009. democrats win an election and they think that's the whole ball game, so they just lean back and relax. and we get fucked.
— Oliver Willis (@owillis) October 27, 2022
The productive way is to say, "Those guys are nuts, but we are reasonable, here's our reasonable version." Not "those guys are nuts fuck them we are not them we hate them we are not the party of doing that horrible thing we love working with our good friends the Republicans!!!
We can argue about who "they" refers to, precisely, but it is a pattern. When out of power there is some openness.