The godfather of political sociology was in Munich — unaware of a lost nobody across town. He warned his audience of starry-eyed radical students of “a polar night of icy darkness.” They should have listened.

Part 1. Introduction

A Theory of Extremists

During and after the First Red Scare, as anyone could have guessed, the extremists themselves suffered the most repression. What were they thinking? Max Weber, the father of political sociology, provided the classic answer.

He explained it in a lecture at Munich University just a few months before the Palmer-home bombing, which led to the Palmer Raids of our first Red Scare, and made a dire prediction.

What lies before us is not the “summer’s front” [a time of hope and promise] but, initially at least, a polar night of icy darkness and harshness.

Weber’s lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” is one of the founding texts of modern political sociology. And he predicted exactly the type of radical setback that we’ll be discussing in the next few chapters. He was speaking to an audience of radical students who were allied with Kurt Eisner, a young, idealistic socialist. Eisner had recently led a workers’ uprising in Munich and been declared head of the People’s State of Bavaria.

When put to a popular vote, Eisner’s party won only 2.5%. Weber gave his lecture six days later, on January 28, to warn of the danger. On February 21, Eisner was assassinated by right-wing nationalists. On April 7, anarchists and socialists declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic, and then a communist faction seized control.

On April 28, the Freikorps, a loose collection of anti-communist paramilitary militias, surrounded Munich. The “Red Army” of Munich panicked and took upper-class hostages, then executed 10 of them. Outraged, the Freikorps launched a merciless attack on Munich, killing roughly 1,000, mostly left-wing radicals, in two days.

Hitler, in Munich as part of the regular German army, had his career advanced by the right-shift in Munich’s politics. Sent to spy on the tiny German Workers’ Party, he found it to be anti-Semitic and nationalist and quickly rose to the top. Nazism was the ultimate radical-left setback.

The far-left never stood a chance of grabbing power by force. What were they thinking? Weber described the extremists as subscribing to the “ethics of conviction,” which he defined as follows. A man with such ethics believes that

“if an action performed out of pure conviction has evil consequences, then the responsibility must lie not with [himself] but with the world, the stupidity of men — or the will of God.”

This is a great way to simplify my politics. I just need the most righteous conviction, and I don’t need to think about consequences because all that matters is that I must not deviate from my conviction. Of course that makes no sense if you care about the end results. But many people hate having to choose the best way to, say, raise workers’ wages, knowing that if they choose incorrectly they might fail or make things worse. Responsibility is burdensome.

A contemporary example is “voting your conscience” — meaning you just vote for, say, the Green Party, because it’s the “right thing to do,” even though it may help the candidate you least prefer.

In short, it just feels so much better to agree with your friends that you’re the ones with the most righteous position and that’s all that matters. The shortcut of the ethics of conviction is what tempted Seattle’s general strikers, the anarchist bombers, and the 30,000 American communists who pledged their allegiance to Vladimir Lenin. Without their ethics of conviction, there would have been no Red Scare.

Damaging the Democrats

The First Red Scare did little if any damage to the Democrats — while severely damaging the labor movement — because the irresponsible radicals were not part of the Democratic Party or associated with it. Both parties saw the radicals as un-American and outside of either party.

This situation continued until 1933, and even then FDR wisely kept his distance. “A Radical,” he said, “is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air.” But in 1933 Henry Wallace, FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture, started hiring socialists and sometimes communists. By the end of the year, Republicans were hearing about this and the separation between Democrats and the far-left started breaking down.

So who was more to blame, Henry Wallace or the radicals? Actually, when radicalism is properly defined — as a change that gets to the root of a problem — Wallace was a radical. He favored fundamental — radical — changes, on a global scale, and spelled this out in his “Century of the Common Man” Speech to international acclaim.

So Wallace and the communists he hired were all radicals. Were they all equally to blame? Does Weber provide the answer? No. Using his definition of ethics of the conviction, he would conclude that both failed to take responsibility for their actions.

Let’s test that against the most famous spy case of the McCarthyism era — the case of Alger Hiss who was hired by Wallace in March 1933, the month FDR took office. Both hiring a communist into FDR’s new government and spying for Stalin were irresponsible, which is the very definition of the ethic of conviction — not taking responsibility for one’s actions. Weber would classify them as equivalent.

But Wallace supported America, and the Democratic Party, and Hiss supported the Soviets and felt no loyalty to the party. This is a crucial distinction as we strategize about saving the Party and healing America. While we need to reject the out-of-touch radicalism of both, it is worth going out of our way to reach people like Wallace because they can be won over to a responsible kind of radicalism. And there are many in the Democratic party who, like Wallace, are loyal to America and the Democrats, but have been deceived into believing irresponsible radical ideas.

I’ll call radicals who follow an ethics of conviction (a term even I can not remember) “performative radicals.” They appear and sound radical. But because they don’t think through the consequences, their impact is usually the reverse of what they claim.

Clinton proved the Rejection Defense is simple in 1992. Seth Moulton found it’s simple but not easy in 2024. (Catch up with the table of contents.)

Chapter 2

Social Pressure and Canceling

“If you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?” Bill Clinton did not see this as progressive. It was just Sister Souljah’s performative radicalism, the exact opposite of Dr. King’s authentic radicalism, and she had just staked out this position in a Washington Post interview.

It was 1992, and Clinton was making his first run for president. Souljah’s style of radicalism was still associated with Democrats and not Republicans, because Democrats were afraid to speak out against it and some even applauded it. Something needed to be said. Surprising everyone with his boldness, Clinton made the right choice. He used the Rejection Defense, exactly as described in the prologue. And it worked famously. It’s still known as his “Sister Souljah moment.” That was credited as one of the main reasons he could take back the White House after Republicans held it for 20 of 24 years, interrupted only by Jimmy Carter’s post-Watergate single term in office.

The Rejection Defense requires (1) rejecting the ideology, not the person, and (2) doing so conspicuously. Running for president makes the conspicuous part easy, but timing still matters. Clinton seems to have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to create the distance he and the Democrats needed from this outdated Black Power radicalism, and he got lucky.

Clinton was speaking to Jesse Jackson’s social-justice activist group, the Rainbow Coalition. Jackson had just expressed pride in having Sister Souljah as a guest speaker the night before. The Washington Post, in response to a question about Black-on-white violence during the Rodney King riots had recently reported Sister Souljah’s response. Question: “Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think that was a wise reasoned action?”

Yeah, it was wise. If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? . . . So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

Yes, why not have a week and kill white people? What a cool radical idea. Clinton condemned her violent ideology with Jackson sitting right there. This is exactly what “conspicuously reject” means. Clinton knew this would upset Jackson, who had claimed Martin Luther King’s mantle and was now disgracing it. His speech infuriated Jackson and many left-wing activists. Just as planned, this made headlines, and the incident has still not been forgotten.

As recently as September 2025, Marc Novicoff, writing for the Atlantic, used it to advocate for exactly what I’m calling the Rejection Defense. He quoted Elaine Kamarck — a Brookings fellow and one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Clinton — “You’ve got to go against your party. … If nobody gets mad, you’re not doing anything courageous.” Conflict proves your independence, which is the whole point of the Rejection Defense.

Clinton showed he had the courage to stand up to the extremists. It worked. Clinton won back Reagan Democrats who rightly feared the party had moved into extremist territory. Clinton set back Jackson’s polarizing trend while reducing anti-Democratic polarization on the right.

The far left sees such moves as pandering to the right. No, it’s standing up for decency. Jackson and Souljah’s move signaled to white people that Black people thought having a week to shoot whites was a good idea. That’s an insult to Black people and it only serves to increase white racism. The Democrats do not need the help of “friends like these.” And we must find the strength within our party to speak out against such warped “progressive” ideology.

So the central question behind this book remains: Why has it proved impossible to adopt such a simple, morally imperative strategy, which we saw work more than three decades ago?

We now know that the Rejection Defense is completely feasible, that it works, and that it’s been endorsed and demonstrated by one of the Democratic Party’s most canny and down-to-earth politicians. So what’s stopping us? The two forces discussed in the introduction — deception and social pressure. The Anderson story addressed deception — the creation of dreadfully mistaken true believers.

Clinton was not deceived, and he overcame the social pressure so thoroughly that it’s hard to see. This shows it’s possible, but not why it’s difficult. So we need an example that shows the difficulty, and for some, the seeming impossibility of overcoming the social pressure.

The Price of Speaking Up

Just after the 2024 election, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” He meant a male who self-identifies as female, but may have gone through male puberty and not had surgery. Within weeks, Moulton’s view would poll 66% among Democrats.

Yet, in the following weeks, his campaign manager resigned, protesters swarmed his district office, and Salem’s Democratic Party chair referred to him in an email as a “Nazi cooperator.” She threatened to find a primary challenger, and she did.

Scores of colleagues approached him in the halls of Congress to say in a whisper, “Thank you for saying that, because I really can’t.” Moulton estimates that the majority of US Democratic Representatives are being silenced on this one issue. Surely, there are many more issues like this.

The Way Forward

Clinton proved the Rejection Defense is simple. The Moulton example proved that simple is not so easy. The Marlon Anderson story showed what makes it easier — having supporters who will stand by you instead of whispering their support when no one’s listening. That will take organizing, and I’ll discuss some possibilities toward the end of the book. Countering social pressure is essential. But remember there are still more sensible Democrats than extremists.

The Anderson story revealed the astounding power of far-left deception. That’s a clear and present danger that makes the case for the importance of stopping far-left ideology. But seeing the content of that deception helps make the Rejection Defense easier to apply. That’s because rejecting their ideology can feel like abandoning our allies — because that’s what they claim to be. As you’ll see in the next four chapters, they are not our allies at all. They are out for themselves.

The Anderson story makes this obvious. On purely moral grounds, we should feel good about opposing the far-left’s zero-tolerance n-word dogma. Those who take such an unforgiving and misguided view of the world need to do a lot more homework before they qualify as allies. As we look at far-left history, it will become clear that this was a very minor example of the immorality of their ideology.

But keep in mind that the Rejection Defense does not call for rejecting idealistic members of the far left, even if they promote truly terrible ideas. It simply calls for rejecting the harmful ideas themselves. This would be the right thing to do even if it did not help us win elections and fight polarization.

Have you ever taken a risk like Moulton did? Or been afraid to because you knew the risk? Also, one comment has already resulted in a clarification in the book itself — added paragraph #3 in the Prologue.

In this installment you’ll see how a Black man at a Madison high school was fired for a minor infraction of a useless rule, because his 15 accusers agreed he was guilty “regardless of intent.” A year later, in February 2021, The Times fired its prized COVID reporter for the same useless infraction because its 150 news reporters said he was guilty “regardless of intent.” What unseen force could have the power to control so many minds in two places?

Chapter 1

Anderson vs. the N-Word Taboo

We do not tolerate racist language — regardless of intent.

—The Times’ executive editor

In late 2019, Marlon Anderson, a 40-year-old playground security guard at Madison West High School, was being repeatedly smeared as a “bitch-ass nigga” by a Black student who’d swiped a smartphone. Eventually, Anderson said, “Don’t call me nigga.”

Who could doubt that a Black man has the right to ask someone to stop slurring him with the n-word? Yet Anderson was promptly put on leave. After a hearing and a week of tense deliberations, the school district did what “had to be done” and fired Anderson.

That made the national news and even the BBC; Cher offered to pay his legal expenses if he sued the school board, and the students went on strike and marched around the board’s offices. In the blink of an eye, everyone figured out this far-left dogma was wrong—everyone except the superintendent, seven school district experts in racial matters, and all seven school board members. Likely, they were all Democrats.

They’d already thought about their “zero tolerance” principle for a couple of years and used it to fire seven others. And they thought hard about Marlon’s case for a week. At the hearing, a Black man explained to them that if they just looked up “slur” in the dictionary, they would realize that Anderson had not racially slurred the student, so he had not violated their rule. Only the thief, who must have been amused by this outcome, had used a racial slur.

(If you say “I’m not stupid,” or “don’t call me stupid,” everyone agrees you did not slur anyone, even though “stupid” is most often used to slur people.)

The 15 public school leaders were tripped up by far-left ideology. It had gotten inside their heads and, without their knowledge, replaced the universal dictionary definition of “slur,” which they’d known since 8th grade, with a crazy one. This definition made Anderson’s modest self-defense appear to them as just as bad as the thief’s vicious racial slur. Under this ideology, justice is impossible. Far-left ideology had replaced moral thinking with a childish rule that erases the difference between right and wrong.

If this weren’t enough, consider the contrast between the far left’s concern for real criminals and how they treated Anderson. The far left wants to “defund the police” and “abolish prisons” with the goal of preventing crime and rehabilitating criminals. Everyone agrees with that goal, not with their policies.

If thieves and vandals deserve rehabilitation and second chances, how could 15 smart, kind, progressive school officials, during a week of deliberations, fail to consider that it might be possible to rehabilitate Anderson (which I am not suggesting he needed)? Apparently, he did not deserve a second chance. His crime was breaking the ideology’s taboo, something this social-justice ideology apparently counted as worse than mugging someone.

Firing someone, with no second chance, because the accusers don’t understand the word slur is so unbelievably extreme that you may be wondering if this isn’t the product of some Madison-only cult. But such behavior had already spread across the country and was still expanding. The reach and power of this ideology is revealed by an identifying marker that it implants along with its n-word taboo—the phrase “regardless of intent.” By 2021 it was embedded in the NY Times’ HR policies.

In early February 2021, more than 150 New York Times reporters wrote to Dean Baquet, the Times’ Executive Editor, demanding the firing of Donald McNeil, their prized COVID reporter. He had committed the same innocuous n-word violation as Marlon Anderson. But this was orders of magnitude more dangerous — not because McNeil deserved more protection than Anderson, but because the New York Times newsroom is vastly more important to America than one school’s playground.

Baquet had defended McNeil as having no ill intent, until the 150 reporters pointed out that the Times’ own HR policies state that what matters is how an act makes victims feel—”victims” like NY Times reporters, who read about it in The Daily Beast two years after the incident. Knowing that he couldn’t fight HR policy, and afraid for his job, and his reputation, Baquet flipped and fired McNeil “regardless of intent.” Bret Stephens, a Times columnist, called it precisely: “A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. It is the difference between murder and manslaughter.” Baquet almost immediately admitted he had “oversimplified.” But how did he happen to oversimplify into the exact slogan deployed in Madison?

The answer is that the same ideology that captured the Madison School District had also captured the newsroom of the Democrats’ most trusted source of information. An ideology with that reach is a threat to every institution the Democrats rely on. And the most frightening part: with all the outcry over the unfairness of what The Times did, no one asked what ideology was calling the shots. Hardly anyone even suspected there was one. That invisibility is its greatest weapon. Exposing this invisible ideology is the most basic task of this book.

The strategy of invisibility did not come easily to the far left with its roots in guillotining the French King and Queen and Marx’s manifesto proclaiming a revolution by the workers of the world. American anarchism culminated with 100 pounds of dynamite targeting the lunchtime crowds on Wall St. in September 1920, killing 38. Their ideology, part of the first radical setback damaging Democrats, was easy to spot. And easy to get rid of.

The spies of the 1930s and 40s were harder to spot — some operated for over a decade before anyone knew. But once exposed, their Stalinist allegiance was obvious, and the damage to Democrats was severe. The final step toward invisibility is to hide the ideology in plain sight—by convincing everyone it’s the progressism they’ve been dreaming of. That’s what fooled the Madison 15.

Today’s radical ideology has become so good at this that it can walk into your neighborhood soup kitchen, proclaim itself loudly and walk out with its pockets stuffed with cash. Only the old-timers noticed that something wasn’t quite right. But they signed the check anyway, because they weren’t quite sure.

There have been thousands of n-word incidents (having nothing to do with racial slurs) that do needless harm, cost the Democrats credibility, and never make the news. In late 2024, at a soup kitchen not far from where I live, two volunteers were discussing their participation in the Civil Rights demonstrations of the early 1960s. Both remembered being called “nigger lovers.” A young Black woman overheard this, became angry, and excoriated them for saying the word. She also pressured the soup kitchen into hiring a DEI-ideology consultant to educate the staff, at a cost of $13,000. That could have fed a lot of homeless people using the kitchen’s volunteer labor.

From what I can tell—and I’ve read dozens of such accounts—this n-word taboo is the most widespread and enduring achievement of the social justice movement known as wokeness. What frightens me is that it doesn’t just miss the target, it harms good Democrats. The n-word taboo is not about improving society, its goal is enforcing compliance with woke ideology. And it’s far more difficult to get rid of than anarchists.

Anderson’s school officials would all have wanted to do the right thing if they had not been partially controlled by this ideology. It’s a self-sustaining heartless collection of ideas that controls the people who buy into it.

This book shows many other parts of far-left ideology, which, although perhaps not as widespread, are even more damaging. They are damaging to Democrats, the Democratic Party itself and to the nation. Firing Anderson and McNeil simply confirms, for these cases, the worst of the right-wing complaints against us — that our social justice can’t tell good from bad when it comes to individuals.

No one asked what ideology was calling the shots. Was it “social justice” that reached into both Madison West High School and the Times’ newsroom — injecting guilt “regardless of intent”? Not exactly, and I’m not ready to name it yet. But I’ll tell you this: that ideology was launched less than two miles from Madison West, on July 7, 1989.

Stay tuned for installment #5:

Scores of colleagues quietly told Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, “Thank you for saying that, because I really can’t.” Moulton estimates that the majority of US Democratic Representatives are being silenced on this one issue. Who's doing that?

Democrats have been hammered five times in a hundred years — not by the extreme left, but by the backlash they cause. Listening to my radical radio station in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I heard how they were always innocent. What they were actually up to is my untold story (until now). Yes the backlash was nasty, but why should the Democrats suffer that for left-wing crimes?

There’s plenty of action, but few intentional villains — just dedicated, idealistic people sucked in by the likes of Stalin. The cost of idealism, can be 11 years in the Gulag, but in the end she saved my favorite far-left anti-hero and lived happily ever after. (Catch up)

Part 1. With Friends Like These

Introduction

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had just walked past Attorney General Palmer’s house at 11 p.m. on June 2, 1919. Crossing the street to their own home, they’d hung up their coats and walked to the back of their home when chunks of Carlo Valdinoci landed on their front porch. His bomb, containing over 25 pounds of dynamite and a load of shrapnel, had detonated a bit early as he was delivering it to the front door of the Palmers’ home.

And what could this possibly have to do with Trump’s presidency?

The anarchist bombings, followed quickly by two communist parties declaring their allegiance to Vladimir Lenin, led to the Palmer raids that resembled Trump’s ICE operations. But what matters is the apparently inescapable pattern. Fortunately it only looks inescapable, because we have not learned to recognize it and prevent it. We’re now experiencing the fifth episode in 100 years, and on the surface they all look quite different.

This introduction examines these five “radical setbacks” and shows how to diagnose this ailment. Much of the problem is caused by how it mutates and changes its appearance before each new outbreak, even while maintaining its essential features. To avoid confusion, it’s best to know the diagnostic symptoms in advance:

1. Harming: Associating with far-left ideas harms the Democrats.

2. Silencing: Social pressure and deception blind us to the need for the Rejection Defense to break our association with far-left ideology.

The prologue introduced the example of Kamala Harris being harmed by far-left ideas and argued that the Rejection Defense — conspicuously rejecting far-left extremism — was needed. But it did not establish that such harm is part of a long-term pattern that’s unlikely to stop on its own. Establishing this is the job of Part 1.

This introduction focuses on the harm done by this persistent pattern and provides insights into the social pressure and deceptions that blind us to it. The chapters of Part 1 explain the power and continuity of the ideology behind this pattern.

Symptom 2 — silencing — is the harder of the two to see, precisely because it’s working on us right now. Here is a recent example. In April 2025, Yale invited a prominent radical to give two sold-out lectures in perhaps the most prestigious international lecture series on ethics and moral philosophy. The publicity materials said nothing about the fact that the invitee had provided the shotgun that was taped to a judge’s neck before it blew his brains out. Left-wing social pressure made this unmentionable, leaving us without the understanding we need to see and fight this harmful pattern.

The antidote, as illustrated dramatically in what follows, is crucial facts from trusted sources. My hope is that this book, full of such facts, can earn your trust. To understand how we got here, start in 1919.

The First Red Scare

The First Red Scare was kicked off by the simultaneous bombing of the homes of seven prominent Americans and a Catholic Church. A month later, Palmer created the Radical Division of the FBI, and appointed J. Edgar Hoover to head it. Hoover served as head of the FBI through its surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, and then the Black Panthers.

For seventy years, Marxism had seemed merely a fever dream of the far-left, but then in 1917 Lenin seized power in Russia. A month after Hoover’s appointment, two thirds of the Socialist Party of America split off to form two rival communist parties, both loyal to Vladimir Lenin. That’s why Hoover’s main target was communists, but Palmer even went after conservative unions. The setback for unionism was long lasting, and between 1916 and 1920, the Democrats went from winning by 3% to losing by 26%. The country stayed conservative until the Great Depression handed FDR a landslide in 1932. That ended the first of the five radical setbacks.

Without far-left ideology, there would have been no Red Scare.

Soon after this Red Scare, Lenin forced the two communist parties to merge into the CPUSA—the foundation for the second radical setback.

Democrats Forced to Hunt Communists

By the end of 1945, Stalin had recruited over 500 active spies in the U.S., with at least 50 in the federal government. On February 16, 1946, the front page of the NY Times announced, “Canada Seizes 22 as Spies—Atom Secrets Believed Aim.” Three days later, a former Roosevelt appointee reacted to this, saying the Russians had “every moral right” to seek atomic bomb secrets through military espionage. Truman’s Secretary of State refused to comment on this blatantly anti-American view. His silence associated the Democrats with the communists.

Henry Wallace (Roosevelt’s third-term vice president), was outraged by Truman’s anti-Stalin position, as exemplified in his famous speech in Madison Square Garden, “Under friendly peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike,” Wallace was so popular among Democrats that Truman was unable to address loyalty until after the election.

The Republicans took advantage of naive Democrats backing radical CPUSA positions and launched their anti-Communist campaign, charging, “pink puppets are in control of the federal bureaucracy.” Come November, the Democrats dropped 12 senators and 55 representatives, losing both houses of Congress, the first time they’d lost either in 34 years. Associating with far-left ideas cost them dearly.

Democrats had rejected a loyalty oath program recommended by a Democratically-controlled House committee early in the campaign. But the magnitude of the electoral loss both freed and forced Truman’s hand, and he set such a program in motion less than a month after the traumatic loss. As the Washington Post reported as recently as February 2025, loyalty was determined by such questions as “‘Do you go to church?’ and ‘Did you and your wife live together before you were married?’” This was not a targeted program. The government generated loyalty forms for more than 4.7 million current and aspiring federal employees. Once again, a severe electoral setback accompanied by human hardship would not have happened had the radicals — the CPUSA in this case — not been up to their ideologically driven schemes.

Because they had not used the Rejection Defense, they were forced into a harsh policy to save their party.

The problem of disloyalty had long been clear from the CPUSA’s membership oaths such as “I pledge [to support] the Leninist line … that insures (sic) the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” Something very close to that was signed, and usually sworn to as well, by something like 200,000 (taking account of turnover). Few of these good Americans knew of Stalin’s role in the millions of Ukrainians who died of famine or the million loyal socialists worked to death in his Siberian slave labor camps.

Because of his liberal record, I was gratified to learn from an Atlantic interview published just before his death that Frank fundamentally agrees with my own political views, as you will read in this post.

By refusing to repudiate far-left ideas, Frank said, Democrats “allowed the impression that we agree with them.” The previous post emphasized the danger of the Democrats appearing to agree with far-left extremists. This time you’ll meet the motto of strategic defense:

Democrats should conspicuously reject far-left extremism.

“I know most Democrats agree with me,” Frank told The Atlantic, “But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.” Again, that’s one of the most central points of both books — his subtitle says it all: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy (out Sept. 15).

Now, as the book continues, I’ll keep my promise to you last time and explain the Super PAC that Got “They/Them” Backward and

What Charlamagne Tha God Had to Do with It

This is the second installment of a serialized book. Installment one is here.

Learning from mistakes. I know what some of you are thinking: With Republicans in power and Trump back in office, why are we criticizing Democrats? That feels disloyal. I get it.

But here’s what every sports team knows: you’ve got to watch the game footage—not to mock or blame the other side, but to assess your own mistakes. That’s painful. The natural reaction is to make excuses or just focus on what the other team did wrong. But mocking “them” and making excuses will not win games.

Looking at our mistakes isn’t disloyal—it’s the only way to win. The Republicans aren’t going to fix this for us. We have to learn from what we’ve done wrong, or we’ll keep losing easily winnable elections.

So we are going to watch some game footage that I’ve spooled up for you. We’ll examine real plays—some catastrophic, some successful—to understand what defense looks like in practice. Our goal: learn the kind of defense that wins championships.

I’ve been learning defense since seeing what happened in 1972. It was painful, but it taught me that, as much as I liked Dick Gregory, that was not the way to win. Running our most far-left presidential candidate ever had just cost the Democrats 20 million votes. Back then, that meant 40% of the base that the Democrats had acquired by 1964. We still have not completely recovered, but it’s time to look at the most relevant mistake we can find.

When Trump played offense with his most powerful attack ad—” Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you,” Harris had no defense. None at all? Consider what California’s Governor Gavin Newsom said on his first podcast: the issue concerned people who are “illegal, incarcerated individuals getting taxpayer-funded, gender reassignment surgery.” That, he said, “is a 90/10” (90% against Harris).^{}

Law-abiding Americans have no such right to government-funded surgeries. Understandably, many Americans saw Harris as favoring “illegal, incarcerated individuals” over Americans, just because they were trans.

And, as Newsom pointed out, “She didn’t even react to [Trump’s ad], which was even more devastating.” She had boxed herself in by taking far-left positions during the 2019 primaries, and there may have been no escape. But here’s what she should have done back in 2019 and 2020. This is the strategy I’ve been building toward—the one that wins elections and depolarizes the country at the same time.

The Rejection Defense is simple to explain but almost impossible to use. It blocks the other side from successfully labeling us as extremists—as socialists, Marxists, police defunders, or “no borders” advocates. The goal is not to attack the far left, but to prove that loyal Democrats are not them. Here it is:

Democrats should conspicuously reject far-left extremism.

That’s it. And if you’re thinking “I already understood that from your examples”—you’re right. The strategy isn’t complicated. What’s complicated is finding the courage to use it when you know the far left will come after you for doing so.

That’s why “conspicuously” is the hard part—and why this defense works. It’s not easy for Democrats to prove they’re not controlled by the far left, because far-left activists operate within the Democratic Party. In the bluest states, they win by championing ideas that sound reasonable until you examine them closely. You’ll see a dramatic example of this in the next section.

Other difficulties are easier to handle by keeping certain facts in mind. The Rejection Defense does not mean “Cut back on our offense!” It does not mean rejecting everything the far left believes. And it does not mean rejecting people. Most on the far left are dedicated idealists—we’re rejecting their harmful ideas, not the idealists themselves.

The Super PAC that Got it Backward. The main super PAC behind Harris’s campaign, Future Forward, spent over $900 million^{} on ads based almost entirely on Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, whom I’ve mentioned. In March 2025, he published a graph as part of what was supposed to be an autopsy of the 2024 election. Blue Rose is where Harris got most of her advice up until the final three weeks.

One data point on that Blue Rose graph shows LGBTQ as the issue of least interest to voters out of 35 issues. “Pay no attention to LGBTQ issues,” was the Blue Rose message. Just focus on the highest-interest issues—the three purely economic issues. Trump’s team must have seen roughly the same ranking of issues according to public interest—and did the exact opposite of the Blue Rose advice. They spent more than $200 million on their LGBTQ-focused ad, “Kamala is for they/them.”

In late September, Charlamagne Tha God, host of the popular radio show The Breakfast Club and a strong Harris supporter, saw Trump’s “they/them” ad while watching NFL football. He reacted on air, saying, “That ad was effective. … That ad was impactful.”^{} With Shor’s focus on high-public-interest issues, it would never have occurred to him to run a defensive LGBTQ ad or any ad on an issue with such low-interest statistics.

By mid October, a new version of the ad, featuring Charlamagne’s comments on the Breakfast Club, was being aired against his wishes. It worked even better. Shor had assumed public interest was fixed. That ad showed it could be changed in 30 seconds.

After the election, someone at Blue Rose leaked to the NY Times that “The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots.”^{}

In December, the Progressive Policy Institute revealed that Blue Rose had tested the ad and “After watching the ad, 2.7% of voters shifted to Trump.”^{} That may not sound like much, but Shor himself said, “Imagine you say 70 words to someone and there’s a 2.5% chance they changed their mind? I think that’s incredible and a big deal.”{} Although he wasn’t referring to Trump’s LGBTQ ad when he said that, he was implicitly admitting that the impossible had happened. Trump’s ad had scored better than what Shor called “incredible and a big deal.”

Shor likes to say, “People who answer surveys are really weird.” Well, people who analyze surveys are even weirder. Blue Rose should’ve hired Charlamagne Tha God; he’s the kind of person they wish they understood.

The disturbing end of this story is that the Democrats permanently buried their 2024 Election autopsy on December 18, 2025. That’s like a sports team burying their game footage so their players won’t have to see their mistakes. It might make them feel better—until the next game.

Back to depolarization. I advertised a double benefit for the Rejection Defense, but you might have noticed the depolarization benefit seemed half missing—we only depolarize Republicans. And you might think: If the Republicans won’t depolarize the Democrats, what’s the use—the country will still be half polarized?

But Republican polarization is what we fear most—not the polarization of Democrats against Republicans. Of course, the Rejection Defense won’t eliminate inter-party disagreements, so some polarization will remain. However, as I’ll document when I discuss the practicalities of implementing the Rejection Defense, research since 2020 has discovered that the Rejection Defense targets the most dangerous type of polarization.

Rachel Kleinfeld, writing for the Carnegie Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, documents this major breakthrough. She explains that political violence stems from fear, not merely dislike or even hatred.^{} And the fear targeted by our Rejection Defense—that the radical left will utterly change life as Republicans know it—is the fear that’s most dangerous. Although we may only be reducing polarization in half the population, we would be eliminating most of what we fear about polarization—acceptance by Republicans of political violence and other anti-democratic behavior.

So why do we keep fighting with one hand tied behind our back—playing offense, but not defense? Two problems make defense hard to use: First, rejecting far-left ideas feels wrong—like abandoning our allies. And second, those who try to play defense get punished. Let’s start with the first concern by looking closely at some left extremism that you’ll feel good about rejecting.

Next: The hero who dared to say, ““Don’t call me nigga” in Madison.

Some of you signed up two years ago, most likely after reading one of my comments on Persuasion. You trusted I would eventually get this project started. So here we are.

I’ve been working hard the whole time, but wanted to have the book nearly ready to go before I started serializing it. It will be published on Amazon — print and Kindle — with a target date of August 15. Subscribers get the entire book free, serialized here before and after publication.

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The About page explains the project and a bit about me — worth a look before we dive in. Now, without further ado …

Prologue

Offense sells tickets, defense wins championships.

—Paul “Bear” Bryant, Legendary American football coach

To win, play defense. Democrats played offense, but added some defense in 2020—just barely. That tipped the balance for us. In 2024, Trump added some defense, while Kamala Harris had none. You know what happened.

But here’s what everyone’s missing. Offensive strategies polarize the country, while winning with defense depolarizes us. It’s that simple. So why don’t we play defense and win? The full answer takes a book — the one you’re reading.

First, what do “offense” and “defense” mean in politics? If the Republicans say things like, “Those crazy Democrats want to defund your police,” they’re playing offense — they’re attacking. Blocking an attack is playing defense, as Joe Biden did when he said “The answer is to fund the police. Fund them!”

The far-left hates it when we reject their ideas as Biden did in this case, and they put enormous pressure on those who do, unless their name is Biden—and even that is not full protection. That creates the trap the Democrats are in—the same trap that caught Harris. And it will take both clarity and courage to break free.

The right wing faces similar pressures from its extremists. So both sides are playing almost pure offense. That’s why America is polarized.

Defense takes more courage than offense, but the double benefit is worth it. It lets us win, and it helps depolarize the other side. Perhaps unexpectedly, it works because it provides reassurance to swing voters. They are truly afraid of our extreme left taking over. And a newsworthy rejection of their ideas proves we mean it, especially when it draws a backlash from the far left.

But why on earth would we want to reassure the other side? First, being afraid of us fires up their base, and they turn out to vote against us in droves. No, it does not help us to let extreme left ideas frighten them into voting against us! Second, it’s recently been shown that polarization based on fear is what leads to political violence. No, it does not help us to frighten anyone into approving of political violence.

I’ve always been a Democrat, except for the first time I voted—for Dick Gregory, a Black comedian aligned with Malcolm X. So when I say “our,” “us,” or “we,” I mean Democrats. Because my goal is to help the Democrats dominate, many will expect me to spend my time attacking Trump or his base. But the Party, the liberal media, and the Resistance have been doing that for a decade, with the volume turned up to 11—and it hasn’t worked. That’s because we’ve barely played defense. But don’t we need to know how bad “they” are to play defense? Not really. They’re predictable; they will attack where we’re weakest. And we’re weakest when we back unpopular issues. We can’t find those by criticizing them.

That’s why, despite clearly taking sides, this is not a very partisan book. In fact, I hope Republicans will read this and apply the same strategy. If both sides do this, it creates a virtuous cycle that would return the country to healthy political competition.

To win in politics, you need to raise an army of voters—that’s playing offense. In 2020, both sides played maximum offense, turning out 21 million more voters than expected. But few noticed: Biden also played some defense while Trump didn’t. The result? Biden won by 4 million votes. In 2024, Trump played defense, taking 8 million of Biden’s votes from Harris. All of this happened because of negative partisanship.

What’s negative partisanship? If you see your candidate as pretty good and the opposing candidate as mediocre, you’ll probably vote—unless it’s raining. That’s old-fashioned (positive) partisanship; you’re voting for a candidate you like. But if your side convinces you that the other guy is truly dangerous—a threat to everything you value, then you’ll vote come hell or high water—against the other guy. Voting against is negative partisanship.

Although Biden got 12.5 million of the 21 million extra votes—all of which were negative votes—that means those 12.5 million were actually not voting for Biden.

They were voting against Trump.

You can’t tell the difference in the voting booth, but the psychology is very different. And it’s the swing-vote psychology that makes a defense strategy work.

Most of Biden’s voters were, of course, solid Democratic voters, not fickle swing voters. They were positive partisanship voters, the ones we send postcards to. That’s not the kind of offense I’ll be discussing, which is mostly attack ads.

To demonstrate the power of this negative concept, let’s look at the last two presidential elections. This will completely change your understanding of what happened.

Biden’s Defense Wins. Democrats remembered their shock from the 2016 election and could not bear the thought of a repeat. They voted against Trump—56% (45 million) said they voted for Biden “because he wasn’t Trump.” Much of that was true negative partisanship. And Republicans felt almost the same about returning to Democratic rule—but only 19% came out to vote for Trump “because he wasn’t Biden.” The difference? The Democrats chose to play some defense, cutting into Trump’s negative partisanship vote.

Who were the Democrats with the foresight to push for defense? Only a few understood the need for two strategies—offense and defense. South Carolina Representative James Clyburn was one of them.

Socialist Bernie Sanders had beaten Biden badly in the first three state primaries and was closing in on South Carolina, Biden’s firewall state. Then Clyburn, the most revered Black politician in South Carolina, gave Biden his strongest endorsement. Biden beat Sanders 49% to 20% and swept Super Tuesday three days later, ending the race.

The Democrats had chosen defense. Biden’s moderate history was built-in armor against Trump’s attacks. He could say “don’t defund police” and “I’m no socialist.” Sanders couldn’t. He’s a lifelong socialist, who sang the Soviet national anthem while living in a Kibbutz and who spent his 1988 honeymoon in Moscow.

The result for Biden was that 12.5 million of the 21 million negative-partisanship voters voted for him, but only 8.5 million went for Trump. Because of Biden’s defense, Trump’s offense—calling him a “helpless puppet of the radical left”—didn’t land. That saved the day.

Harris’s Missing Defense in 2024. Eight million of Biden’s 12.5 million negative-partisanship voters vanished in 2024. About six million of these just didn’t vote, and the other two million switched to Trump. Many blame Harris for the fact that her attack ads failed. But could Trump have been playing defense?

Politico’s Capitol Bureau Chief, Rachael Bade, interviewed Jason Miller, who was implementing the campaign’s strategy of “humanizing” Trump. Humanizing Trump, that’s about as defensive as you can get—Hey, guys, I’m actually human! The point, as Bade explained, was to erode his social stigma of being seen as a “danger to democracy,” “a fascist,” and “unfit to serve.”

Miller secured Trump’s appearance on a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that got 46 million views on YouTube and 17 million on X during the week before the election. According to Newsweek, that was the first time Trump’s approval tracker registered a net positive since they launched it in June 2020.

Newsweek said Rogan’s Podcast showed him as “personable and showcased his humor.” It concluded that for Rogan’s audience, that “shattered the perception that Harris’s campaign is trying to promote—that he is a fascist who poses a dire threat to the U.S.”

This made Harris’s fair-weather voters comfortable enough that they stayed home and didn’t vote.

They had lost some fear of Trump being fascist. David Shor, the leading Democratic pollster and advertising strategist, identifies these voters as being “politically disengaged.” This explains why they would be easily switched by Trump’s defense.

Trump’s personal humanizing defense is not a model for how Democrats should play defense. Ezra Klein asked Shor, “What do you do about the reality of the Democratic brand? It’s toxic.” Shor thought we would need to “spend the next two or four years changing the party’s brand — especially among working-class voters.”

Our brand didn’t become toxic because we failed to have good ideas; that would only make it uninteresting. It’s toxic because of extreme far-left ideas and our failure to keep our distance from them and to stop making excuses for them. This apparent complicity left us wide open to partly justified attacks by MAGA. They’ve been playing offense; we have not distanced ourselves from far-left extremism, and now the party itself needs to play defense for two to four years. So we’d better learn how, as quickly as possible.

Next: The Super PAC that Got “They/Them” Backward — and what Charlamagne Tha God had to do with it.