For the pragmatic and political types, the fight happens inside the notion of the way things are. For those doing real things, this simply results in notions about the way things are thought to be becoming more or less useful at given points.
For the great mass of folks,though, the fight happens governed by the prevailing notions of the way things are. Not because it seems particularly veridical, but because it provides a lingua franca, a common currency, a λεγειν that they can use as a background and source of vocabulary for expressive speech.
A thought I came across today: Goethe's distinction between finding meaning in forms of being (Freude des daseins) and the meaningfulness of existence itself (Freude am Dasein). You must take the second view, if you're prepared to recognize that most of the rules of the game are themselves a game, at least for the game-players. For the rest of us, it's just a matter of trying to run the program with unreliable code.
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When I hit a bit of a brick wall after the JD, and had to decamp from the city during a rough winter, I headed to Cleveland, where I had done my conservatory training. I rented rooms in Little Italy from some medical students from the Mideast, and headed right to the university library. I had studied Koine Greek in a class at the parish church with a Fordham classicist for about a year before the JD, so the first thing that I did was get a few of the Loeb octavos down off the shelf, along with a middle Liddell (no Great Scott to be found), and spend a few days re-centering myself by working through an (heavily reliant on facing-page translations) adaptation of the beginning of Sophocles' Ajax.
And in the evenings, the novels of Iris Murdoch. Mass-market, but the difference in usefulness between British mass-market novels and American mass-market is significant. A novel written by a moral philosopher at Oxon. in which she attempts to do the same thing in the novel as she does in her scholarship is very, very useful. American novels are cultural figurations that require us to find meaning in them, usually at some cost. I blame the Iowa workshop. Some interesting scholarship on the connections and motivations there. Saith Ajax.
My first purchases when building my office library during Ph.D. work were inexpensive copies of the Great Scott and the 2 vol. micrographic OED. I also found a very cheap copy of an original Chambers Book of Days, which turned out to be ex libris from one of the large Scottish universities. (All lost in the third year, of course, when the university workers took up the asbestos tiles in the flooring of my rooms without doing any abatement.) During these travels, it's more than once occurred to me that the universities hereabouts are building their English-facing programs very rapidly, and the American universities are trying to get rid of their printed books with almost the same urgency. Seems it would be simple enough just to fill a few shipping containers up, and send them over.