Note: Given all the time and effort we put into putting together every episode of the Professional Left podcast, it occurs to me that it is madness just to let our show notes disappear into the ether. From time to time, why not use all the stuff we'd already researched and structured into a long for audio essay and reuse it for a... long form written essay! I know. I can be kind of slow.
Anyway, the word of the day today is “effective”. Read it, learn it, use it in a sentence!
So let’s talk about what it means to be “effective”.
First, you gotta figure out what is it you want to accomplish? So let’s start there, armed with the foreknowledge the place we'll inevitably end up will not be as satisfying as you would like. But we’ll have some rueful laughs along the way.
What does "effective" mean? And as long as we’re doing this, lets also ask what its antonym, “ineffective”. mean?
Here's an example of "ineffective" from 20 years ago. From The New York Times, March 31, 2005:
Editor Hit With Pie
William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, was splattered by a pie thrown by a student during a speech on Tuesday about foreign policy at Earlham College. Members of the audience jeered the student, then applauded as Mr. Kristol wiped the pie from his face and said, "Just let me finish this point."
The pie incident went on to make headlines in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, NPR and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Was it satisfying to the person who threw the pie? Definitely. Was it satisfying those of us who loathe Kristol? Sure. A little bit.
But did pie-ing Bill Kristol 20 years ago slow down the Iraq War or derail his career or undo the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush? No. Like Haldeman in the early days of Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein screwed up, it actually ended up making him more sympathetic to his audience.
That was ineffective!
Did you know that Rupert Murdoch got hit in the face with a pie in July 2011? It's true, and yet Fox News remains. Westboro Baptist Church’s hatemongering scumbag Fred Phelps took one in the face in May, 2003. Phyllis Schlafly, April 1977. Tom Friedman, April 2008. Milton Friedman, October 1998. Ann Coulter, but she ducked in time. Bill Buckley. Anita Bryant. Dozens of others.
You might also remember that on May 17, 2011, Nick Espinosa threw a box of glitter over Gingrich and his wife, Callista, at a book-signing event in Minneapolis. Espinosa, a gay rights activist, shouted, "Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics!". And yet, Gingrich abides.
Remember David Vitter? The senator from Louisiana who may or may not have had a thing about diapers?
At Netroots Nation there was a movement afoot to send dirty diapers or something to Vitter which got eyerolls from professional comedians, who went on to explain why this was a dumb idea.
Do you remember the consistent refrain from the Mark Rylance character in Bridge of Spies? Every time Tom Hanks asked him why he wasn't alarmed or afraid he replied, "Would it help?"
Good question. And if you are interested in saving our democracy, this is the question you should always be asking yourself: Will what I plan to do help? Will it be "effective"? So let's move on to defining what "effective" looks like within the context of what we want to have happen.
Here's an example of something that worked. That was effective. The grapefruit ladies of Ireland.
During the Civil Rights movement, in places like Birmingham and Selma, the mere fact of the stark contrast between the protesters' peaceful discipline and the violent, segregationist thugs with police dogs and fire hoses was not enough to force the system to change. It was the fact that it made the national news. That people outside the Jim Crow South got an unsparing first-hand look at how the South really was. This shocked the public and helped build the political pressure needed for the federal government to take action.
The difference between then and now is that thugs with jackboots and tear gas are there because the White House put them there. The difference between then and now is that the president of the United States is orchestrating and applauding state violence, shopping for a race riot, not trying to stop it.
In our bones we know this is all horribly wrong, because in our bones we know what "fairness" should look like. It's all over our popular culture. Jack Reacher. Justified. The Black List. Hell, Superman. Ideally, when we are treated unfairly, we as Americans believe we should have recourse to someone, somewhere who will make it right. Beat up the bully. Put the crook in prison. Some higher authority.
We're sure most of you remember that, in June of 1963, the segregationist governor of Alabama -- George Wallace -- planted himself in the schoolhouse doorway of the Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block two African American students -- Vivian Malone and James Hood -- from entering
Malone and Hood had done everything by the book -- signed in early at the courthouse, picked their classes, and filled out their papers. But when it came time to actually walk into Foster Auditorium and finish registering, President John Kennedy's folks knew things could get very ugly very quickly, because Wallace was itching for a confrontation. He was shopping for a race riot. So Attorney General Bobby Kennedy basically said, fine, let the asshole put on his little show -- better that he preen for the cameras than spark a riot. The feds kept the students in the car so it wouldn’t turn into some ugly face-off between a segregationist governor and two Black students. They wanted it clear: this was the federal government versus one stubborn governor, not Black versus white.
So there’s Wallace, literally standing in a schoolhouse door, putting on his show for the press. Deputy AG Katzenbach steps up with marshals and tells him to move. Wallace filibusters with some bullshit about states rights, so Katzenbach calls President Kennedy, and that's when Kennedy finally lost his patience and federalized the Alabama National Guard.
Hours later, a Guard general ordered Wallace to move. Wallace rants a bit more, then steps aside. And then, without fanfare, Malone and Hood walk in and register.
Wallace was the racist thug. Malone and Hood were the victims. And President Kennedy was the higher authority which could be appealed to for justice.
In the here-and-now, you may have noticed that there is now a whole cottage industry of centrist goofs and social media complainers who spend day and night carping that Democrats are not fighting hard enough, or doing enough, or swearing enough. But when you push against that even a little bit and ask what, specifically, should Democrats be doing.
Remember the word of the day? "Effective".
What should Democrats be doing that will be effective? No answer. You get a lot of handwaving about stuff that is never going to happen or is structurally impossible without a Democrat in the White House and a supermajority in the Senate. Something something Citizens United or Fairness Doctrine or pack the Supreme Court or DC statehood. They just know that, damnit, somebody oughta do something!
Because in the here-and-now, what we have lost, possibly forever, is a deeply ingrained, American sense that out there, somewhere, there should be some corrective mechanism to which we can appeal for justice.
But thanks to all the millions of Republican voters who voted for this, and the millions more who stayed home or pissed away their vote because voting for the smart black lady would have made them feel icky, the fascists who are now in charge are in the process of smashing those corrective mechanisms or are turning them against the rest of us
Because now, thanks to decades of work and billions of dollars spent building a relentless Conservative propaganda machine, the whole Wallace-in-the-schoolhouse-door dynamic is backwards.
Now the racist thug is in the White House, and runs the Congress and the Supreme Court by proxy. Now state power -- a federalized national guard and the United States military -- is in the hands of monsters because Republican voters wanted it that way. Now the innocent victims are ... anybody Trump and Stephen Miller want to harass and destroy. Parents snatched off the street. Innocent kids, zip-tied and dragged off naked in the middle of the night. FBI agents fired for honoring George Floyd. James Comey being indicted for ... nothing.
Now the schoolhouse doors are the cities of Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago, where brave citizens are working hard to try to find ways to block the fascists who Republicans have put in power.
In case you didn't know it, this dynamic where the whole idea of the Apocalypse and the End Times originally came from.
Hong tight because we're going to take a quick jump back in time almost 2,200 years. During the 160 BC's. For centuries, the foundation of most Jewish thought rested on the biblical idea that if Israel obeyed God's covenant, God would bless them in this world with peace, land, and prosperity.
And while the American Dream elides the presence of God in that equation, the ideals behind it are remarkably similar: if you work hard and play by the rules, you will succeed and prosper.
In 200 BC, the Seleucids beat the Egyptians at the Battle of Panium and took control of Judea, and for 40 years or so things went along fairly smoothly. Then under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, things took a hard right turn.
Antiochus IV decided to make it his mission to suppress and destroy Jewish religious practices. He installed a pagan altar on the sacred altar of the Jerusalem Temple and slaughtered pigs there as an intentional insult to the God of Israel. Circumcision, Sabbath observance, and Torah study were all outlawed. Mothers who circumcised their sons were executed, sometimes with their infants killed alongside them. Possession of Torah scrolls became a capital offense. These weren’t political laws—they were aimed at erasing Jewish identity.
This all led to what became known as the Maccabean Revolt, which radically reshaped Jewish thought because it wasn’t just a national uprising. It was an existential crisis. A spiritual crisis.
Under Seleucid persecutions, the most righteous and faithful suffered the worst precisely because they were righteous and faithful. So where was God's covenant in all of this? What happens when God’s people do everything right and are made to suffer for it?
And because these deeply religious people could not give up on the idea that God existed, that God was just and God honored his contract they ... invented the idea of the End of History. That at some point in the future God would intervene in history and clean all this shit up. God became like the divine cable installer: please be in your homes obeying the law between the hours of Right Now and Forever, and eventually God’ll show up and get you all straightened out.
The Jewish sects that you might be familiar with that grew out of this belief in the End Times were the Pharisees -- with whom Jesus has a huge beef in the New Testament -- and the Essenes, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. As part of their End Times theology, they invented the ideas of the resurrection of the dead, the coming of a Messiah, and the divine judgment of the wicked.
And psychologically we are right about where the Maccabees were before they took up arms against the Seleucids.
We might still pray, but as a practical matter we don't look to God to save our democracy: our democracy has always rested uneasily on the foundation of "Vox populi, vox Dei". The voice of the people is the voice of God. And the voice of the people has deserted us, which is why this is a spiritual crisis and not just a political one.
What are we to do with the fact that, on three separate occasions, nearly half the people who bothered to show up for elections voted for Donald Trump? That the first time it wasn't a fluke? That our neighbors and colleagues are now actively siding against democracy, and have knowingly put the instruments of government into the hands of fascists and sadists, and lunatics? That many of those institutions that we supposed would protect us, are run by cowards and bean counters for whom protecting their corporate mergers is much more important than protecting democracy.
And very much as it was in 167 BC under the Seleucids, so it is right now under the Trump regime: those who are the most vocal in speaking up for democracy and defending our constitution are some of those who are targeted most aggressively by the regime.
This is White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
From The ACLU, October 15, 2025:
...on September 25, President Donald Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” essentially adding them to an ever-growing list of what he calls the “enemy within.”
Civil society nonprofits and activists thus join segments of academia, the legal profession, public health professionals and scientists, and so many others President Trump sees as his political opponents and critics.
From The Hill:
A typical academic year for Mark Bray, an assistant teaching professor of history at Rutgers University, turned into a nightmare after President Trump signed an executive order to designate antifa as a terrorist group.
Soon after the order, conservative activists targeted Bray, who wrote “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” and he began to receive death threats. Once his home address was posted online, he knew it was time to act.
With the support of Rutgers, Bray and his family fled to Spain, where he will remain at least through the end of the school year as he fights what he calls false allegations regarding his beliefs and work...
The further irony is that, on an emotional level, the source of their anger is very similar to ours. MAGA meatheads believe the system has failed them, and from their point of view, it has. We also believe the system has failed us, and from our point of view, it also has. Each side believes their government has failed to deliver what they wanted it to do, and what they thought they had been voting for, for decades.
The problem is, our goals are diametrically opposed to one another.
Broadly speaking, we want clean air and clean water for everybody. Good, safe schools for everybody. Enough to eat for everybody. Affordable health care for everybody. Affordable housing for everybody. A decent standard of living for everybody. We want women to have control over their own bodies.
We want all the things, and all of that horrifies MAGA.
Modernity and change terrify them and have left a lot of them confused and angry, because they want the 1950s back. They firmly believe their straight, white, conservative, Christian, male privilege was stolen from them by George Soros and us dirty, commie Liberals, and they want it back by any means necessary.
Which is why they are immune to Democrat persuasion. Because while Democrats keep trying to talk about policies which would materially improve the lives of the working class and the poor -- as flawed and imperfect as Democrats may be -- demagogues on the right, who never gave a shit about the poor or the working class, continue offering their base something much more emotionally satisfying.
Scapegoats!
Back in 1981, when Reagan told his supporters that their government was the problem, the Republican Party had already begun its long march down the road to Donald Trump. To the Republican base, Reagan offered up black and brown people as the scapegoats for all their fears and troubles.
43 years later, when Democrats were proposing to help the poor and the working class by doing what used to be bipartisan things like extending the child tax credit, and more progressive things like offering serious, detailed plans to lower the cost of housing, Republicans countered with this.
Trump: Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your son comes back with a brutal operation. pic.twitter.com/ChmwpavFAH
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 7, 2024
And this:
As you can hear, the propaganda is the same. It’s just gotten so much stupider, because the Republican base has gotten so much stupider.
The Republican base don’t see themselves as villains, and they never will. They see themselves as patriots, who have been cruelly forced by decadent Liberal culture to endure gay and interracial couples on commercials for Tide or Cheerios --
-- or just knowing that out there, somewhere, there is a thing called “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”.
From their point of view, our mere existence and our insistence on diversity and tolerance and treating people humanely might as well be Antiochus IV defiling the temple. Monstrous! Intolerable! And, most importantly, the mystical reason why their lives suck.
Over and over again, they have been told that we -- you and I -- hijacked their American dream, drowned it in soy milk, wrapped it in a Rainbow Flag, and buried it in Benghazi, while Obama and Hillary and Kamala and Joe Biden and George Soros watched it all on closed-circuit TV and laughed and laughed. Solar panels and windmills are the graven images of our blasphemous modern god, and Trump is the anointed one who will smash them. So through the power of “Vox Populi”, they have raised up their own god based on a new covenant: a promise to smite their enemies and make Liberals cry
The problem is that the Right has a 40-year propaganda head-start on us, which is why we’re stuck in this kind of asymmetrical warfare. Where, through the power of massive fascist propaganda, Fox News can just make up a story about how “The Entire Democratic Party Is Giving Away YOUR Health Care to lazy bums and illegals who are also stealing your job!!!” and have it turn into something which Democrats are obliged to carefully debunk over and over again.
It’s the same with the ICE goons who are terrorizing American cities. All the violence and criminality and thuggery is on one side, but let one person coldcock some anonymous masked brownshirt beating up a kid and everyone knows, through the power of massive fascist propaganda, within the hour the headline from the White House all the way down to your MAGA neighbor will be “Out of control Antifa terrorists attack innocent police trying to protect your Freedom and your grade school son’s junk”
To repeat, this is not a Trump problem or a Mike Johnson problem, this is a voter problem. A Vox Populi problem.
Through lies and conspiracies and direct appeals to racism, homophobia, xenophobia and some good, old fashioned bribery, Republicans convinced enough people to hate the imaginary Democratic boogeyman under their bed enough to install a dictator in the White House. Twice. And so, with appeals to God not an option, and appeals to the government a lost cause since, at last, Reagan is right – the government is the problem – the only alternative left is an appeal to the people.
So, back to the word “effective”
No Kings marches are a good start since it clearly scares the hell out of the Trump regime. October 18, 2025 was too big to ignore, which is the point. Record numbers. Millions of peaceful, loud patriots in the streets. Catnip for the media. And the next one will probably be even bigger.
And those patriots in frog and unicorn costumes are also using an excellent strategy. No one is hitting anyone in the face with a pie. Instead, the ICE goons and their paymasters are being made to look ridiculous.
And the devil cannot abide laughter. As Thomas More said, the devil…that proud spirit… "cannot endure to be mocked".
Also kudos to Nancy Pelosi for wheeling around and going straight after the blond whore from My Pillow TV. Here’s a pro-tip: do not meet any MAGA person on the ground of their choosing. Do not accept any premises of their arguments. Instead, be like Nancy. Tell them to shut up and, for good measure, call them liars and whores.
Also be prepared to deal with the reality that, at some point, some decent citizen may very well find themselves so shocked and indignant at the way some ICE thug is treating a child or a senior citizen or a pregnant woman that they will rise in defense of them against Trump’s gestapo and kick the that ICE goon's ass.
Be prepared for the fact that some "allies" have so completely internalized the asymmetry of this war that they take it as gospel that all Democrats at all times, everywhere must never lose their cool no matter how brutally they’re provoked. They believe this so strongly that they’ll be pissed off at the citizen who aggressively got between the fascist in the mask and the person the fascist was clubbing, because now Trump has an excuse to escalate.
I don’t buy that. If none of Trump's dickless Cossacks are ever coldcocked by a righteous citizen… then fascist propagandists will just make some shit up, just like they’re making up reasons to murder people on the high seas.
But for now, enjoy the fact that we are many --
-- and we are being heard.
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