Why does the Left almost always lose? Why, despite the obvious failures of the prevailing order, do we remain weak and marginal when we should be moving from one victory to the next?

Maybe it’s our own damn fault. According to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, we lose because we’re willfully out of touch with the masses. We’d rather be small, “speaking a language no one understands, in a minority, hiding behind our traditional symbols” — red flags, hammers and sickles, Che t-shirts, rose emojis — instead of engaging with the messy world of everyday life. The Left will remain weak and marginal, says Iglesias, until it understands that “politics has nothing to do with being right, that politics is about succeeding.”

This emphasis on “winning” at the expense of leftist shibboleths isn’t a recent development, of course. It was central to Saul Alinsky’s approach to organizing, and it’s one of the major themes of Jonathan Smucker’s recently published book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals.