The Campaign Strategist
Dive into the world of advocacy with The Campaign Strategist. Each episode features in-depth conversations with activists and experts who break down their approaches to planning, executing, and winning campaigns. Learn about the strategies that have shaped policies, changed minds, and mobilized communities. Perfect for anyone looking to amplify their impact and drive meaningful change.
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The Campaign Strategist
A Progressive Art of War with Eric Hensal
What can Sun Tzu teach us about winning political power in 2025?
In this new episode of The Campaign Strategist, I talk with Eric Hensal—veteran progressive strategist, author of A Progressive Art of War and host of the podcast Progressive Conjecture—about applying timeless military strategy to modern political challenges.
We explore:
- Why progressives often lose not because of the opposition, but because of strategic missteps
- How to think like an organizer and a general
- The importance of deception, clarity, and preparation in narrative and coalition work
- Why “knowing the ground” matters more than moral certainty
- What Biden, rural outreach, and “melting ICE” can teach us about smart campaigns
Eric’s approach is provocative, practical, and rooted in decades of experience across labor, government, and political campaigns.
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If we walk away with one thing, if I wanted anyone to learn anything, it would be first put yourself beyond the possibility of defeat and then look for opportunities to defeat the enemy. You lose because of you. You win because of what they don't do right. And I think what happens is in progressive strategy typically is we're right. You know, this is sort of like we're bringing the good news and we go forward and really don't reflect that there's an active opposition who is going to try to subvert what we do.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome back to The Campaign Strategist, where we dig into the art and science of advocacy and campaigns. If you like what we're doing, please like and subscribe and share with others so we can keep doing more of it. Today, my guest is Eric Hensel, author of A Progressive Art of War, which applies Sun Tzu's ancient military strategies to modern political and social activism. Eric is a veteran progressive communications, political and policy strategist with over 20 years experience working with nonprofits, state and local governments, and political candidates. I really enjoyed the book, both because it's been ages since I read the original and because Eric breaks down lessons of strategy that have endured for thousands of years into practical, modern advice. It's a quick read, but it is thought-stimulating, and it kept giving me fresh perspectives on current challenges that I've been thinking a lot about. So, Eric, thank you so much for joining me, and welcome to The Campaign Strategist.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:I wanted to start off with your story. What led you to the intersection of progressive politics and strategic theory?
SPEAKER_01:For this, I have to go all the way back to when I was in high school. It was one of these things that came across this book kind of by accident, you know, back in the day that the first incarnation of Shogun was a big deal on television, and all these books were coming out. And James Clavel came out with his, like, edition of The Art of War. And I remember looking through my mother's Book of the Month Club thing, and I think that looks interesting. So it's really the first book I ever picked up, like, a pencil and wrote notes in to try to figure out. I did that when, you know, I was like 16. So I've been staring at this book for over four decades. I'm trying to think about it. But it's meant a lot to me over time, because I think it's one out of my many experiences that It's really helped shape how I view social change. And it's really given me a window into how to do things that I think a lot of folks in the progressive community don't get. We're more like firefighters most of the time. Like, I'm out of the labor movement. It's just like, oh, crap, what's happening now? I'm going to go run off and take care of it. And you don't really get to think about strategy. Meanwhile, the folks who put Project 2025 together, they spent decades planning it out very carefully and rolling it out. Hats off to them for planning that we don't necessarily do. That was really the start of it. And it's just, as I went, I mean, I had a natural progressive bent. Early on, I made gigs with like service employees, did work with Teamsters for Democratic Union. That was fun. I wound up in the Painters Union for a while, a long time, actually, just doing like politics and labor, you know, how to make that work. I always kept coming back to this. This was always something that was very formative of my approach.
SPEAKER_00:It's amazing how relevant the insights still are today. If you were to give somebody the short version, what's the book about?
SPEAKER_01:It's funny. It's kind On one hand, it's a difficult question because it is a deceptively simple book. It's really when you read it relative to your experience in the progressive community, you go, oh, yeah, that's what's important. Because I think if we walk away with one thing, if I wanted anyone to learn anything, it would be first put yourself beyond the possibility of defeat and then look for opportunities to defeat the enemy. You lose because of you. You win because of what they don't do right. And I think what happens is in progressive strategy typically is we're right. You know, this is sort of like we're bringing the good news and we go forward and really don't reflect that there's an active opposition who is going to try to subvert what we do. Before you act, you really have to think it's like, OK, how is this going to come back at me if I don't do it right? And then make yourself secure and then wait for that chance to capitalize. I think that's probably the most important saying. And I think sometimes I liken it to, I think it's like the 13th rule of golf. I forget which one. you know, where you can't improve a ball's lie, you have to play it where it lies. I think a lot of times, you know, in the progressive universe, it's like people think you can pick up the ball and move it. You can't. If you're underneath that tree and you got something in your way and you gotta hit it and you just have to get it out into the fairway, you know, it might not be pretty. It might not be what you want to do, but you have to do it. And I think that's a lot of what this book says. It's very much consider who your opponent is. Consider where you are, you know, because it's discussions of like heaven and earth, things that are changing around you and things that are the same. So we have a fairly consistent government structure, but elected folks change, you know, economics change, but we're fundamentally capitalist. But we always come at these things just like one dimensionally, like this is correct. And I think we miss a lot because I think progressives don't like to think of, let's put it this way. Sun Tzu says all warfare is based on deception. Now people could read that and go, I don't lie. Yeah. And And that's not really the point. The point is you don't have to let your opponents know what you're doing. You don't have to telegraph it. You just start doing things. So the deception is not really like I'm lying to you. I'm just not fully informing you. It's like social change is not chess. Nobody has a perfect picture of what the opponents are doing. It's more like chess and you can't see like two-thirds of the pieces in any given moment. And that's what I feel like we have to get back to. It's a quick example, I think, of... so much of what I'm trying to get at in this book is, you know, well, I mean, I'm going to say this saying I agree with it, but, you know, abolish ICE. And just back in like Trump's first go around. And I think, you know, people don't get abolished. It sounds like chaos. It sounds like you just want, you know, I always said, you know, we should say melt ICE. We have to melt it. And melting is change. Melting is making something more hospitable. It allows you to talk about all sorts of things, but it doesn't get into the jackpot of like advocating chaos. And I think that's one of the things that happens to us is like, we have to do this. And it's just no real thought is given to how the uninitiated person's going to take it. And I really think that's what part of the book gets to. It's like, you have to know your opponent and you have to know the ground. You have to assume that somebody is actively opposing you. And then how do you make sure that doesn't get in your way?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. To me, that example in Defund the Police struck me as examples of a particular slight of the progressive community is essentially talking to itself and not thinking about how that is going to sound to others. You covered so much ground. I had lots of questions about all those pieces, but let's start at that fundamental of situating yourself in a defensible, unassailable position so that you're secure, you're safe, and then you can wait for the opponents to give you opportunities to go out and we can divide, push them back. What's an example of what that looks like in progressive politics? Start to think about the healthcare bill, which eventually prevailed. but it was one hell of a struggle, but maybe that's not a good example. So I'm asking you, what's a good example of what that looks like? Well-practiced.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I think the ice was good. I mean, I would think that it's kind of hard to give a specific example, mostly because what I always try to tell people is maybe another way to look at it. It's like, I want to do X. I believe X. I want to say X. Somehow you have to think like, you know, what would Aunt Mabel say when you do that? And what would somebody, yeah. And then what would somebody who was trying to, you know, persuade Aunt Mabel to, you know, do the other thing? What would someone say? You have to sort of consider how you move forward. And that's what I always think is sorely lacking. I do have a pet cause at the moment, which is we all know that, you know, the way like Bernie Sanders talks, for instance, is very popular on one hand. But on the other hand, you know, the country's got such a tripwire to class politics, right? It's so much of a built-in ability to jackpot you on that. Our country has spent, you know, 100 plus years, you know, going after social Right. I mean, beginning of this last century, you know, when the American socialists opposed World War One, American government denied them use of the mail. Right. I mean, they really hammered them. So it's hard. I think the language we need to talk about, it's a language of privilege. The book has got a good quote I like from Tom Johnson, who was mayor of Cleveland a hundred some odd years ago. Now, because I think it gets that notion of fairness without sort of getting into the sort of the weeds of like, OK, someone's going to you're going to take all my stuff or you're going to collectivize my whatever. I mean, no, it's just that. that law should treat everyone the same. Somebody should not have access to things simply because of who they are or how much money they have. I mean, one of the problems with progressive argument is it is based in the language of weakness. Like we have to help, you know, minorities. We have to do this. We have to, you're oppressed minority, you're oppressed, LBGTQ+. Nobody really likes to think of themselves as oppressed in some level. No one likes to think of themselves as poor. What was it? Like, I think it was Steinbeck who said, there's no poor people. in America. There's only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. We tend to talk about things in terms of what you don't have, what you're lacking, as opposed to just saying, you know, that guy has his benefits. That's the power of what Trump would talk about a rigged system, because that makes sense to people. You know, I want to work hard. I want to make a living. I know I can do these things. And somehow there is these roadblocks that I don't necessarily even fully understand. When you go after privilege, and I might have to torture you with the whole quote from Johnson at some point. But when you say that, it talks all these things without getting into that kind of class conversation. So that's what's important.
SPEAKER_00:One way of thinking about that, just to pry out this contrast, is rather than saying, oh, we need to address the needs of this particular group and that particular group, it's more like painting a picture for what it should be for everybody. Everybody should have access to health care. Everybody should have the ability to have a job that meets your economic needs and enables you to raise your family in a neighborhood and safety and with the stuff that you need and to be able to get ahead in life. Like putting things in a way that a much broader set of people can actually see themselves in that picture as opposed to narrowly defining the particular sets, which you want to write policy that way because there are groups that are held back by structural things that should be addressed. But selling it, pitching it that way broadly creates some traps that I think we're currently experiencing. We're currently experiencing tremendous amount of backlash over what I think the right would say catering to or unfairly trying to advantage particular groups, when from our perspective, we're just trying to make it fair for everybody. It does have a lot to do with the language and the initial frames that we set up.
SPEAKER_01:The way I try to explain to people is like, look, almost everyone, you know, works for the man, right? Almost everyone gets a paycheck. I mean, even upper middle class are like two paychecks away from really getting screwed over. If you want to find the thing that can unify more people than anything, it's like everybody's getting to Whoever gets a paycheck is there. And I don't care where you are in the economic spectrum, because you make money, you obligate yourself more, and you oftentimes wind up in the same kind of predicament. And, you know, so I think the failing has been, we've been trying to build, like with Legos, a coalition of like, okay, we can get these people if we do this, we can get these people if we do that. And we try to hope to sort of build up the coalition that way. And again, it's important to understand the perspectives of people and where they're coming from. But I think, you know, it's because come almost too surgical. It's like, you know, we're going to find this, we're going to find that. Then people say things like, well, yeah, the voters of color are going to like really come out. And, you know, and then the whole food progressives do weird things and vote for green parties and stuff. I mean, I think it's done. You know, I wrote once, which I always kind of liked, was these people expect, you know, voters of color to do cleanup on aisle five and, you know, their votes will fix Trump. And that's not true. But, you know, but I do think the other thing is, it's like we talk about diversity, but no one ever talks about why it's important. It's just like some sort of fuzzy thing. And I always tell people, it's like, look, what are the strongest metals? You have a pure sort of iron. There's no carbon in it. Well, that sucks. You have steel and you put some lithium in it or whatever. You mix it all up. You get a much better, more resilient metal. Conversely, it's like, who are the healthiest dogs? Mutts. Really, when you get right down to it, they've got a diverse everything. They're just dogs. And they're put together in a way that makes sense for a dog as opposed to trying to be a specific breed of dog, which, you know, is really a problem. So, you know, diversity is important because it's resilience and it's a greater ability to innovate and it's a greater ability to sort of resist adversity. And we never mention it like that. I mean, I think, I can't remember her name, it was a woman who was a sociologist who worked, she was head of the American Sociological Association at one point, but she did research on the impact of diversity training and management. And, you know, basically the way it was portrayed actually made managers less likely to make diverse hires because they were afraid of making mistakes. Because the whole thing was, if you do this, you do that. If you do this, you do that. And they're like, oh crap, I don't want to do that. So it actually made them more gun shy. But if you said, look, if you have a team with a variety of experiences, you can find solutions to problems you might not have thought about because somebody's just coming in from a whole different place. So, I mean, I do think we have to sort of think about how we talk about diversity because I think a diversity that benefits everybody, is a more, I mean, I wouldn't say saleable, but it's ability to connect. It's not just like giving somebody some favor. It's like, look, this is all good for all of us. And you can make the argument, it's like, you know, how did we pull out of World War II? I mean, I think a lot of that was just sort of a diversity of people who made it easier, quicker to find solutions to certain problems as we went on to like, I don't know, make more tanks or whatever. It's like, oh yeah, I remember, we could do that. If everyone's from the same place in the same time, I mean, I think that's like my one sort of criticism of the Obama administration I definitely have heard, you know,
SPEAKER_00:people make the case that, look, diversity makes us stronger. But right now, there's a tremendous amount of scapegoating of that. And that ties for me into a lot of the deception that the right employs. You also emphasize this heavily in the book and in your book. your opening statement, talking about deception, various forms, and the right is much more comfortable than the left is, and that in certain ways, the left needs to get better at using it so we don't just give away our plans to the other side, but without sort of lying to the public. So talk about why deception is so important from Sun Tzu's perspective in this context, and how do we thread that needle?
SPEAKER_01:It's a difficult thing to sort of get across. The word is deception in the text. It is deception, but it really is just not telegraphing what you're going to do, you know, and give somebody, you know, heads up like, oh, this is where you're coming from. It's just sort of let things happen. I've been thinking about this too. It kind of fits. But I was thinking about promoting girls in STEM in school, right? Definitely need to be done. There's all sorts of things that had to be done. But for instance, you know, you have problems in classroom management where boys pay more attention to boys and girls. You can, you know, or curriculum problems. There's no, you know, there's no women in the curriculum for science. You know, there's problems of like just not encouraging girls. All of these things are important and necessary. But I think what somehow we did, there was a performative aspect to it that didn't have to be there. It's like you could take care of like classroom management curriculum without sort of casting boys as villains sometimes. Because I know, I mean, my kid grew up through that. And it's not the only cause in the world. But I think sometimes we get hung up because we have to look good as opposed to just doing something. You throw all this stuff out there for like red meat for people to go after as opposed to just like, hey, we know this is a problem. Let's fix it and move on. So I would say the problem is not so much deception, but sometimes we are more performative. Like we want to show certain things and be out front in a certain way that, again, we're lacking the awareness of what people are going to do with that come after us. So, I mean, you know, deception's in the book, but it's really more of who needs to know what when and how much do you put out. I think related to this is sometimes deception can also be, I think it's also an important thing in terms of is make sure your enemy can't join their armies together. Make sure that they can't ally against you and figure these things out. That's deceptive in its own way. Also, progressives don't really like monkey wrenching. And I'm a big fan of monkey wrenching. Yeah, because I think in Sun Tzu, he said, you know, we will never know who the greatest general is because the greatest general wins without having to fight. You know, stuff just gets done. I mean, that's what I really appreciated about Biden. You know, he got all this stuff done. And at some point, how did he do it? Yeah, I mean, in some ways, that's a classic Sun Tzu sort of generalism. like, I did it. And I think all these, you know, Democrats and panicking, you know, put us in a real bind because everyone said, well, you know, she could run. I'm like, she's still vice president. Nobody really knows who vice president is. And it's horrible. People didn't understand. They didn't see sort of the Obama smoothness. And they really weren't thinking, well, he's got this stuff
SPEAKER_00:done. What's the problem? That was something the Biden administration was really frustrated by. And I think a lot of progressives were like, he's made all of these things happen, which have clear benefits. And it is so hard to get people to hear that to recognize that the bridges in your community are being rebuilt because Biden shepherded through the bipartisan infrastructure law or that you've got solar manufacturing or battery manufacturing now actively invested in and employing people in your state. And that's because of the Inflation Reduction Act. That's one of the, I think, heaven conditions that I was thinking about as I read the book is that I feel like we're really slow in adapting to is this media environment, which is full of full of deception and also incredibly constantly distracting. I think it's actually the most important challenge the progressive movement has to figure out. How do we deal with we're very far behind in generating the content, the noise, that level of reach? We've got to figure out how to get in there and be able to reach regular people. And part of it, of course, is message, but also the sheer volume of what the right is able to put out there that we have yet to be able to compete with.
SPEAKER_01:It was funny, though, I got to the chapter of Attack by Fire And I'm like, well, how can I do this? And then I'm looking at it and I'm like, well, it's a lot like social media. I mean, there's certain things that you do in a campaign that just goes out there and you don't quite know how it's going to go. So, I mean, it's all that discussion about how to attack by fire actually became much more relevant if you look at it from that lens. But sort of going back to deception for a second, because I do think the one thing progressives have a hard time with that Republicans are, I mean, they're good at. They'll be happy to go into some like urban area and shave a couple of points, right? Because they understand that, you know, they got to get up to 50. And so they'll do some things and they don't want to win, but they know they need enough. And we don't do that because we think that's deceptive. I think we have, like, it's criminal how little attention the Democrats have really paid to rural voters. I mean, there is like poverty out there. There is like much less economic opportunity. I mean, you got some of these rural areas that have the biggest employers, the hospital, or maybe one meatpacking plant and a Walmart that, you know, killed off the downtown. It just all sorts of these things that are really grinding folks in rural areas, and we don't talk about it at all. I know, you know, everyone knows we're not going to, like, win all these counties. But if you actually honestly talk to people there, if you got five points, I mean, just look at every election, like, I'm from Ohio, so I pay attention to Ohio a bit more because I know my way around. 88 counties, and you know, and you can run up good totals in, like, Cuyahoga County in Cleveland or, you know, Summit County around Akron, you can run up good. But then it's like 60 tiny little counties that just keep adding like a thousand votes, a thousand. And next thing you know, you lost the state because of all these little counties and all these middle of nowhere places, it adds up. Yeah. And I think we've just sort of passed up that because we don't think of, well, they're not going to vote for us. We have to get, we have to get minority votes, which is true. Like, especially like in Ohio, because minority turnout, like in Cleveland has been dropping and dropping and dropping since Obama years. But yeah, you got like 60 some odd, like rural counties in Ohio that you need to pay some attention to, to sort of help support your toll What
SPEAKER_00:that brings to mind for me is you also discuss, pay attention to what your enemy is doing at the margins, because that can clue you into their strategy, which got me thinking about Trump invested in Spanish language radio in Miami and in other markets. I think a lot of people thought he's an idiot. Like, why waste the time and money? It had an impact. It shaved, well, in the last election, a more considerable margin. They had programs aimed at parts of the Democratic coalition, which yeah, really shaved things down. And you look at any one of them, it's like, that's not of that big an operation. And it didn't have to be. Going from that and realizing you put the whole thing together and it was really impactful. And another one of the things that you talk about is basically not listening to what's going on, even just beyond your opponent. There are several times in the book I went, holy crap. Yeah, I've been doing that. I mean, for like a long time, I'd read about the disaffection with this or that from what has become part of the right coalition. I was like, well, you know what they're talking about or they're dumb or my gosh, they should read the New York Times. And then things will be straightened out, right? I think that probably a lot of people had that reaction. And over time, this thing kind of snuck up on us to where, especially twice, Trump prevailing was a huge shock. I mean, certainly a big shock the first time and an even greater shock the second time because we were like, what? Didn't you get enough of a sense of what this is about the first time? The other thing that you talk about is don't impute stupidity or misunderstanding to your opponent. And that's a mistake I feel like we make a lot of the time where Trump or MAGA does things that are incomprehensible to us and we just I mean sometimes look frankly with Trump it's hard to tell is he stupid or is he actually has he got an actual game plan here I think we should be expecting that there's actually a game plan that we don't understand because we're not tuned in he is willing to sound stupid to some people because he knows he can reach a particular group or audience or he's pressing a button that's really important and I think we're still failing to really grasp that and instead of just going well that's dumb in a way I think the the right has a point. Like, we sort of have been in an elite leftist bubble and not actually in touch. I think that's fair in some ways. I think it's part of why we are where we are, because we haven't been paying attention to a significant number of people in the country. I mean, there's also a lot of deception involved, which doesn't help and certainly makes things worse.
SPEAKER_01:Considering the rural voters here for a second, I mean, I think you should question every assumption that you have. You've got to sort of turn everything over, look at it from all sides. Your biases will kill you. And you know so when you look at the rural voters you're like oh they like their guns or this and they're just whatever they go to okay one so what they like their guns okay fine it's not not necessarily a bar to dealing with folks they just are like really into their guns right you know i grew up my dad got his high school letter in marksmanship you know my grandfather was college rifle team and he was hired by like firestone to be a ringer on his team so i have a whole tradition of people who like shot things i didn't really take that up but i'm still progressive right i was the kid like and i was eight years old, collecting signatures to stop clubbing of baby seals in Canada, which, you know, my dad was kind of appalled by it. We go into situations, we just kind of assume things. And if you assume something, your assumptions prevent you from trying to find common ground with somebody and trying to sort of say, this is what we would do if we were elected for rural community. You're leaving a bunch of stuff on the table that you're wasting. And I think one of the things about Sun Tzu is like, it was just oddly interesting to me, you know, the older I get, it's this whole conversation about resources. It's expensive to move an army around. It's going to drive up costs, you know, wherever you're invading. I mean, it was all sorts of these conversations about this. So I think this is also a matter of just sort of thinking about how you allocate resources to these things. And in some ways, people think, well, why would we spend any money on rural communities? Because they're not going to vote for us. It's like, that's not the point. You got enough people to vote for you, then it's very much worth the while. As opposed to things like thinking BETO was going to run and win in Texas for anything. You know, people are like giving them money, raise a lot of money And, you know, but I'm looking at the polls. I'm like, Trump is like 20 points ahead. And so, I mean, it's like, I don't care what some weird head to head thing is. It's like the whole like zeitgeist in Texas was not looking promising. And I don't know how people are coming up with this notion that he could possibly win. And I still just think of all that money that could have gone somewhere else, even to state and local races, which is the other sort of progressive weakness. Everyone likes Congress because, you know, no one wants to be township trustee. And that's what the right was good at. They got their people elected township trust. Right. I mean, the right would pick people that they like and sort of develop them. So they would give them a decent job somewhere and then they could go off and be a township trustee and then a county council member and then a state rep or whatever. And they would work their way up the food chain. Because I'll tell you, like, you know, you go to ask somebody, even somebody who's like, I don't like politicians or whatever, I'm running for city council. I'll be like, well, what have you done? People still go back to that. What they were good at is they developed people who had that experience and quite frankly, skill. Because like, you know, It is a skill. The progressives are like, we never really took good care of our staff in any election. It's like, okay, see you later. And everyone was focused on running for Congress or something. And as opposed to just like, we need school board members, damn it. That's important too. So I think in terms of what we have to think about, I would say it was like, how we use our resources and sort of broaden the horizons of what's useful.
SPEAKER_00:I had so many questions from that, but I want to stick with the resources question because that is really important. And he talks about shepherding your treasure, like maintaining an army that This way it will cost you a thousand silver, whatever, pieces a day. I love the specificity of it. I think about it, I mean, you write about it in terms of as a progressive organization or in the movement, one of your most precious resources is the activists that you need to be willing to do X, Y, or Z. That's a resource that takes really thoughtful management in order to not just keep them engaged and energized, but to be able to continually expand that group and have them get more and more enthusiastic. And that's a really hard thing to do I think, right now, when it's just 100 outrages an hour pace that we're at, and there are so many things to be outraged about. In a way, that in itself, I don't know to what extent that's part of the Trump strategy, as much as we've got this frickin' 900-page manual list of things we want to get done, and we're going to get as many done as we possibly can. The effect certainly is to divide attention and to fracture sort of where power and mobilization can happen. What does some have to say about how do you manage a resource and shepherd a resource in those kinds of conditions?
SPEAKER_01:When to fight and when not to fight. It was always very much a priority on what can you do to not fight? Because those resources are like important and you don't want to just go spending them. Like it says in the book, no country has ever benefited from protracted warfare, right? I mean, it's a very prescient kind of thing. So in terms of, I mean, the first thing is like these resources are important. And for our case, we're progressives, like people and their commitment and their hopes for the future and their literal hours of the week they are available and what they can do. And you really have to sort of pick your fights carefully. I mean, I think one of the things that Sun Tzu, his legend is, I mean, although there's all sorts of, nobody knows definitively who he was, when he was, but the legend is, you know, he worked for a warlord that had vastly smaller armies than the person he was opposing. And so his strategy was to go after the larger force by trying to get it to break into smaller sections, get them to scatter. And then so that way we'd have enough to take care of this one part and then take care of that other part, take care of that other part. But you have to, you know, but if you would just go headlong with all your resources all at once in one place, well, that would be it. You know, game over. So, you know, I do think we have to sort of think about how we employ people and what we tell them. I mean, I do think it's like all this sort of like, you know, protesting like no kings and whatnot. It's good to get people out, but I don't know what it does. Because look, I mean, people are like, oh, look all these people that came out in Idaho or something. Well, they have college towns in Idaho, right? I mean, Montana, Missoula, college towns. Even in the deepest red congressional district, you have like 20% Democrats. So you could round them all up. There's these activists and it's good they come out, but it's really not necessarily the best use for them. And it's really not changing anything. I'm concerned about, oh, we have all this. Well, it's like, you know, that four bucks gets you a latte. It's important to get people out, but don't think that, you know, just getting out in your neighborhood and holding up signs and getting people to honk is going to change anything. You know, that's your entry level. You know, that's just like getting in.
SPEAKER_00:I looked at that slightly differently and like I was thinking about No Kings, which I thought had value in encouraging people who don't like what's going on to feel not so alone. And that was one of the pieces that I thought was really valuable at how widespread and basically in almost every city there was something going on. To me, that was related to sort of morale among the opposition. You talk about the I was thinking about that also in the context of something Maurice Mitchell and I think others have probably spoken about, which is we need to expand our tent and relax some of the sort of moral purity litmus tests that we have so that we can gather allies. And we may not align on everything, but look, if we're 95% aligned, we still need to be inclusive because we have to bind together around our common goals. and not get hung up on the fact that there is an absolute purity. Because the group of people who have complete ideological alignment on everything is going to be real small. And those strike me as tensions, two different tensions, but kind of related in terms of trying to be inclusive and also tensioning against being exclusive. How do you think about managing that in these times?
SPEAKER_01:What I would say is that for progressives, I do think that too often we see compromise as some sort of moral weakness as opposed to sort of a matter of faith. I think personally, if you're sort of walking in the general direction, I think we're all going to wind up in the same place sooner or later. I don't know, maybe that's a leap I can make because, I don't know, people would say I'm like a straight white guy. So of course you can think that. But I do think that if you are sort of committed to sort of going in some progressive way, some of this stuff over time, people are going to converge. I mean, people get sort of stuck in the moment, but they also don't think about things being teachable moments. I do think like if you look at the evolution of, let's say, how, you know, gay, lesbian, white, developed. A lot of that was sort of teachable moments. I think that we expect everyone to be with us right now or not. We can't talk to you. And I think of it as sort of, if they're engaging, we're all going in the same direction. We'll all wind up at the same place. It's just not going to happen overnight. And we have to recognize that people are just coming in from different locations. So maybe it's more of a religious view of it, I think I have sometimes, because what else do you have? I You know, that's a phase because there's no tangible evidence that that's going to happen. So that's how I see it. It's like, okay, you're willing to come along. Okay. I don't know. I'm a Quaker, convinced Quaker, came to it later in life. But, you know, one of the principles is like, you know, be a pattern, be an example for others. And you don't have to sort of, you know, say everything in your due, just be who you are. And if you're, you know, living a just life, if you're being fair and honest and upright, that is the lesson to everybody around you. So that's why, you know, I can think, you know, okay, yeah, you're not going to be right there, but you're willing to hang out. So we're going the same way. I really like that.
SPEAKER_00:Are progressives adapting? Are we learning? Are we getting any better at reading the battlefield and responding?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, despair could drive some thinking. I mean, I think, you know, so much of everything that was in the playbook obviously didn't work. So there could be some reflection, but just a certain portion of the progressive communities is kind of like lazy. You know, as opposed to people who are really active in the civil rights movement. I mean, they got it. They knew what they had to do. And they did it. And it wasn't going to be pretty, but they did it. And they didn't expect somebody to be swooping in. They got to the bridge. They walked here. They got on the bus. They were on the lunch counters. They did it. Sometimes I think progressives overly romanticize it all. But it was a grind, right? It was doing things you didn't want to do. I think progressives are like, oh, well, the people of color are going to vote and they're going to vote against Trump, which is somewhat racist, assuming all Latino voters are going to vote against Trump. Well, I It's like, well, there's no such thing as a Latino voter. Cuban, Central America, actually Mexican, somebody from South America. Well, South America is Chile versus Venezuela. I mean, it's complicated. Yeah. And we just kind of assume that. But we're always looking for, oh, Trump, they've passed that. They're going to be cutting Medicaid, Medicare. That's going to be, what did Carvel say, an extinction level event.
SPEAKER_00:It does seem as though the right is much more adept to long-term planning and power building than the left is. I don't know how important it is to try to figure out why that is. There was
SPEAKER_01:polling done way back for the 2016 election, back in the Republican primary where there was like all sorts of people running in South Carolina. And there was Pollster did research and he came up with the only statistically significant predictor of what Republican would vote for Trump versus anybody else. The only one. It wasn't race. It wasn't like income. The only predictive variable was authoritarian personality. Yeah. And they do that with a quick screen. like two questions basically how do you feel like you should children like be creative or obey their parents I mean it's a little more subtle than that it's a good question though because it doesn't really sound like what you're looking for so people just answer it and yeah that was it that was the only thing that mattered that could predict so I do think there's a I mean there's two things that favor the right one is I think they're just more naturally sort of get in line kind of folks I also think they're more reactive and more like concerned more fearful I think sometimes you don't have to get complicated to talk to people from a Republican side, from the right side. You're just like, oh, everyone's going to kill you and die. Everything's going to happen. It's like restaurant reviews are like, you are way more likely to believe a negative review of a restaurant than a positive review. You're also way more likely to believe a secondhand negative. Bob said that it was a bad restaurant, or Bob said, Sally said it was a bad restaurant. It just travels more than just sort of the positive pieces of it. And then when you start putting in progressives, which is like, well, you know, we want to do X, Y, and Z, and you haven't seen that yet. But this is how it'll turn out. The other thing, progressives think people are logical and they're not. It's almost like you have to learn how to be more logical. You know, people's emotions present themselves. Like if you look at a car and it's a red car, you don't look at the car and sort of try to figure out what the visual spectrum is and what the light beams are coming. It's a red car and people have emotions that way. And, you know, and then they try to explain their emotions and sometimes they can feel something. I was like that story, the woman in California who said she voted for Trump because of he would fund IV I personally think she probably was just incredibly racist, but that's what she landed on was the IVF. People's connections to their emotions are not what progressives think they are. I remember I had a professor once who talked about grad school, and she was like, you're really fortunate how to learn how to do scientific method and this sort of logical inquiry, because most people don't get this. Most people don't see it. And that's true. So we tend to think progressive, if we just explain it, then they'll be on our side. Well, you're not going to get it. that far.
SPEAKER_00:I like to wrap with asking you, what's a piece of advice or a lesson from a mentor that you got that has really helped to shape your outlook or guide you through life?
SPEAKER_01:In the book, I have that sort of section of Tom Johnson. One of my earlier gigs was I worked for Cleveland City Council members. So I was like up and around and in all those places that Johnson hung out. Johnson was a wealthy guy. He started out with not that much, but he invented the old-fashioned fare boxes where you can see the money and then turn the lever. Tom Johnson invented that. Oh, wow. Made a lot of money. Donaldson took his money. He became mayor of Cleveland and he did it for, he was mayor for eight years back when you had to run every two years, back when you had to elect your cabinet. He did all sorts of amazing things, very practical things like public power, built the first one, probably at the time was the largest, first major city that had that. Food deserts in these certain areas, he built markets, west side market, east side market, you know, so that you can get fresh food to where poor people are. Bathhouse is the same way back before everyone in Cleveland had plumbing. Okay, we're going to build a All these really sort of very concrete things that he did because he had a very practical notion of politics. I mean, I think progressive at its core is evidence-based, right? As opposed to sort of this cronyism here or that. What do people need? Where do you need to go? Granted, there was some progressives had problems with eugenics sometimes. We don't talk about that. But generally speaking for someone like Johnson, it's like, I'm going to run a government that does things that I know provide good for people and I can kind of measure that. And I can kind of quantify it. if he was a different person, he might have been, oh, I know how to do that. And he probably could have worked in an entirely different way. Unfortunately for everybody, he's kind of nuts. But I do think that, and just also, I think, you know, people I came up with, like Mayor Ed Boyle, North Homestead, early on in my life. Mayor of a little town outside of Cleveland, you know, like 35,000 people. We were the first city, I drafted it, we're working with Unite Union. We drafted legislation that prohibited the city from purchasing sweatshop products. First in the nation. There's like probably 40 or 50 cities that did it. I mean, I presented at the U.S. Conference of Mayors on that. It got a lot of room. And it was just like a little city. And that legislation is sitting in the Smithsonian. They actually requested a certified copy of that thing when they were doing an exhibit on sweatshops. Oh, that's great. And we did the same sort of thing with fair housing. We had the first fair housing ordinance, I think, in Calgary County that protected sexual orientation. So, I mean, those are the kind of things I learned. I really sort of think about how, what practically that we can do to make people's lives better today. And then you can sort of build out from that I'm very retail politics in some ways and it's like you know I think the big picture will take care of itself if you work the ground right you know which is what the Republicans have done forever I mean they elect everyone to these local offices and take over state legislatures so they can set the gerrymanders you know they do that work and build it out and
SPEAKER_00:so that's what we need to do thank you so much for taking the time to talk I really appreciate it this has been great well thank you I really enjoyed the book where can people get the book by the way and where can people tune in to you?
SPEAKER_01:The book is on Amazon. So that's probably the best place to find it. I do have a sub stack called Progressive Conjecture, which tries to do the kind of things I talk about. It's like take something and try to find some other way to think about it. Because as I said, I mean, if you don't fully examine things, if you don't question things, if you don't make something prove itself, you're doomed to failure. So I try to write up things that are like, you know, sometimes quirky or odd, or but at least something that someone has thought about. Thanks for
SPEAKER_00:tuning into the Campaign Strategist. Thanks again, and see you next time.
