If there's anything we know about successful movements to defeat autocracies around the world,

right? Successful movements to take down dictatorships is that they build broad coalitions.

And the coalition may not be united by anything other than their opposition to what is currently happening.

And that is okay. That is actually a precondition for success in many cases.

And so part of what we're going to have to do during this time is recognize that some people will be with us on some issues that we care about.

And they won't be with us on other issues or other policies that we care about.

And we still need them

as part of that broad product for democracy.

Hello and welcome to why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, as I speak to you, the country's preparing for the second inauguration of Donald Trump.

And the Democratic Party and the broader, let's say, center left, the broad coalition of folks on the center left, ranging from, you know, Noam Chonsky to Liz Cheney, is trying to figure out how they are going to deal with, work against, maybe compromise with this new Trump administration. And there's been a

pretty notable different tune being sung by a lot of prominent democratic politicians about Trump. I think in 2016,

to generalize, Democrats generally thought it was a fluke. He had lost the popular vote by three

million votes, which is like not an insignificant amount, actually. And in fact, it's a larger

amount than he won it by this time. And that he was an aberration and needed to be resisted

from day one. And we saw that with the woman's march that happens the day after inauguration.

We saw it with Democrats skipping his inauguration. And generally this, you know, this notion of

resistance, which became a kind of watchword. This time around, you have a lot of prominent

Democrats saying, we have to take a prominent Democrats saying we have to take a

different tack. We have to work with Donald Trump on areas of shared agreement. You even have Bernie

Sanders, obviously, who's sort of to the left of the Democratic caucus saying, I look forward to

working with Trump on capping credit card fees at 10%, which is some policy that Trump, in his sort of inimitable way, throughout at some campaign stop, which don't hold your breath for that to happen.

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