You aren’t getting the point. There is nothing to fight for if we are just the other side of the same coin. Given a choice between voting for authoritarians who use the power of the state to punish those who don’t agree with them and authoritarians who use the power of the state to punish those who don’t agree with them... I choose neither. I am rapidly losing what little faith I still had in the GOP. And Trump is not helping by regularly demanding (via Twitter) that the Justice Department lock up his political enemies.
I understand your larger point, and you may well be right that if we use the power of government to stomp our political enemies we will become as bad as our political enemies.
But I see that as less risky than letting those who love the power of government to use it. Most of us have a dislike of an overwhelming powerful government, and want it cut back, but the other side has no such qualms about it's size and scope. They are literally wanting us to become Communists with the Government running everything.
You think these people will refrain from abusing the power of government? At least with people who distrust this idea of government power, there is some hope for restraint or scaling back, but with the opposition there is absolutely no hope of scaling it back.
Besides that point, I have long noticed that one of the best ways to convince people that the government needs to be reigned in and rendered more passive is for them to bear the brunt of governmental abuses.
Give the Liberals all the government stomping on them that we can manage, and they will quickly change their minds about letting the government run their lives. In fact, I see this as the only possible way to convince them that their ideas about government are wrong.
Yes, philosophically I am opposed to the idea of utilizing government power to achieve an end, but strategically and tactically, nothing else makes better sense.