Since the Powell memo, their game plan has been to take over not just state houses and win federal elections, but to take over board rooms, Chambers of Commerce, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine/rise of Fox News, and crucially to create Federalist Society-style education paths for interested young conservatives in higher education, creating a path for them to take over the judiciary. It has been a decades long push to take over not just politics, but to use lobby power to be sure that material changes don't challenge the free market.
The GOP has not, since Reagan, believed in improving material conditions for its constituents, unless they be powerful corporate interests. In order to do this but still keep winning elections, they need to find material things to demonize, be they migrant caravans or terrorism, and once they ran out of those, symbolic things like critical race theory and identity politics/political correctness. It is effective in spite of empirical evidence of Reaganomics' failures.
And Democrats, rather than offering meaningful opposition, prefer to try and play by some imagined set of rules or norms. Theirs is less a coalition from soft power to traditional power and more a set of pet projects with no joined up national strategy. Quite the contrary, the left eats its own. Rather than developing a worker-led coalition, the Dems try to also be neoliberal, putting guardrails on the free market and being the managerial party, simply administering the state via HRification and nods at IDpol. People like Biden and Obama say that we need a good Republican party again, but they miss the forest for the trees, we need a Democratic party willing to stand up for progressive soft power on the same terms the GOP is.
