Too many Democrats believe that fighting for justice and equality is a losing proposition. This gets boiled down to the shorthand that Donald Trump won because Democrats were too “woke” and paid insufficient attention to the economic issues voters really care about, driving those voters away.

This mindset is misguided and potentially politically suicidal. Explicitly and aggressively fighting for justice and equality is the best – and possibly the only – winning strategy at this stage of US history.

Trump and his Maga movement are waging an all-out assault on the progress of the past several decades in a targeted, concerted and meticulous attack on every effort to address racism, sexism and homophobia. As Erica Green wrote in the New York Times last year, the Trump administration is working to “remedy what he sees as the disenfranchisement of white men”.

Throughout US history, most people have underestimated the political appeal of white racial rage and resentment. The majority of people voted against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election, and he only won – with 39% of the vote – because the white pro-slavery vote was split between different candidates. In 1963, 103 years later, George Wallace, the unapologetic white supremacist governor of Alabama who had declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”, rocketed to national prominence. He ran for president in 1968, winning five states outright. In 1990, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, ran for the US Senate and received 44% of the vote.

Trump learned this lesson during the Obama presidency when his attacks on the authenticity of the birth certificate of the first Black president resonated with voters who were not happy that we had a Black president. Many have forgotten that before Trump officially entered the race in 2015, he was trailing in the polls, with just 5% of the vote. But after he called Mexicans rapists and murderers and positioned himself as the defender of white people and white culture in this country, he rocketed to the top of the polls and has never looked back.

While Trump and the Republicans are waging an all-out assault on efforts to move the country past its racism, sexism and homophobia, many Democrats fear fighting back too aggressively, for fear of alienating white male voters. That fear infects most recommendations for the path back to power.

One of the biggest myths about the 2024 election is the notion that large numbers of people who supported Democrats in 2020 changed their minds and switched their votes and cast ballots for Trump in 2024. You can look just at four key states to show the fallacy in that notion: Harris got more votes in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin than Joe Biden had received four years earlier. So if all these people were abandoning the Democrats, how did the Democrats’ numbers go up? What happened is that Trump did a better job of scaring, stirring up and mobilizing his core supporters than the Democrats did.

And yet the power of that myth persists, and it impacts the thinking about 2028 by insidiously encouraging Democrats to try to tone down the “wokeness”, which is really just code for distancing themselves from the movement to eradicate racism, sexism and homophobia and make this country a true multiracial, multicultural democracy where people are all embraced.

Ultimately the only way to defeat the enemies of equality is to defeat them. Offering a milder version of Republicans’ anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-equality policies won’t work. People drawn to those politics want the real thing.

For Democrats in 2028, the challenge is not to try to change the minds of Trump supporters by pointing out the economic impact of his policies or their unintended consequences. Facts no longer matter in Trump’s America, and his supporters will never hold him accountable for policy failures. Instead, Democrats must force a referendum on what kind of country we want to have: one that moves toward justice and equality or one that retreats into division and white supremacy.

Despite the deep misgivings of many Democrats in positions of power, the majority of people still want this to be a multiracial, multicultural nation. As of 2020, the majority of those under 18 were people of color, and by 2028, 16 million young people who were under 18 in 2024 will have become eligible voters (Harris won young voters by 19%). Trump won the popular vote by just 2.3m votes.

Winning in 2028 will require inspiration and investment.

Inspiration requires championing bold, unapologetic progressive policies. “Woke” policies, if you will. The New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s success has proven the power of speaking to, inspiring, and galvanizing young people and a multiracial electorate with bold, pro-equality stances.

Investing means moving massive amounts of money to groups doing voter mobilization work instead of squandering millions on ineffective ads designed to persuade Trump supporters of the error of their ways. Electoral organizing is fundamentally a mathematical proposition. Every person can be counted, every person should be on a list, and you can track whether they are registered and whether they have voted.

We need a million precinct captains in this country. We need comprehensive voter registration drives in every high school and on every college campus. We need sustained, year-round investment in the community-based organizations that do the unglamorous but essential work of building Democratic power.

The fundamental question facing Democrats is whether they will learn the right lessons from 2024. The path of retreat – moderating on justice issues and chasing Trump voters – leads only to continued defeat. The path of principled engagement – standing firmly for equality while investing in the hard work of mobilization – offers the only realistic route back to power.

• Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and author of Are White Men Smarter than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America, Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good