Gerrymandering is helpful but ultimately useless (and likely harmful) if they maintain the establishment candidates another cycle

It is harmful to democracy, but you'll need to ban it first. But that's not the immediate goal, is it. The immediate goal is to prevent a defeat in 2026 because only R are rigging it.

You're fully missing my points, and maybe I am just not doing a great job. The effect on democracy isn't my concern in this specific case. My point is that it will only be helpful if we choose a different path for the party, if we do not it will appear as same old corrupt Democrats.

The same old corrupt D are better than whatever you have now, and that's not even debatable, I would think.

That’s where you’re wrong. The same old corrupt Democrats LEAD TO the fascists. That’s why we need to fix it instead of accepting it.

That's like saying that the Weimar republic or the Versailles treaty led to Hitler. It's trivially true, but completely shifts the blame, and distracts from the urge to remove the fascists at all costs.

If A causes B, the solution is not more of A.

You confuse ultimate cause with proximate cause. The ultimate cause of fascism is adherence to fascist beliefs, plus a host of other cultural and social issues. The proximate causes is the weakness of the opposition, and all other things we spoke about.

Strongly disagree.

Then you deny that the hard right exists, always existed, and that it's generally refractory to progressive and liberal thought. You may deconvert a bunch of people who got sucked up into it because of their social circumstances, but you will always have a population split along the broad line