In its final months, Hillary Clinton’s campaign depicted the election in Manichaean terms: the forces of light against darkness, love against hate, the guardians of a virtuous public against a world-historical bully. In this story, we lost the election not because we did something wrong, but because we did something right in a world that’s wrong. We fought the forces of misogyny, xenophobia, and white supremacy, but they were too strong; they overwhelmed us. And how could they not? This is America after all.

HEGEMONY HOW-TO: A ROADMAP FOR RADICALS by Jonathan Smucker AK Press, 290 pp., $16.95

The left—especially the activist left—makes this mistake all the time: imagining there is some meaningful consolation in losing righteously. In 1934, Bertolt Brecht wrote, “It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.” A lifelong organizer and educator, Jonathan Matthew Smucker has been hearing versions of this story his entire adult life. In his new book, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, he writes “I take no solace in the prospect of history listing me among the righteous few who denounced the captain of a ship that sank.” Being right about what is wrong in the world is no excuse for allowing wrong to proliferate. Those of us who aspire to a socially just world, says Smucker, must conspire to take the helm.

Smucker’s is one among a batch of new books that offer practical advice to aspiring change-makers. There is Becky Bond and Zack Exley’s Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything and there is Mark and Paul Engler’s This is An Uprising, both of which came out in 2016. A Google doc titled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” went viral this past December; composed by former Democratic Capitol Hill staffers, it helpfully translates the practical lessons of the Tea Party for the anti-Trump left. All of them have Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their DNA, the “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” he published in 1971. Together with Smucker’s work, these new writings constitute a revitalized genre of “what works” journalism for movement building.

Since the election, the demand for such analyses has spiked. Every left-of-center magazine has issued a “guide to the resistance,” and every day, a new take on the appropriateness of this or that strategy circulates on social media. There’s a hunger among self-understood leftists and people new to movement politics alike for a roadmap, a blueprint for how we keep the worst from happening and start building something better. Smucker’s book is one of these, a roadmap, annotated with the insight of a traveller who has been down many roads and found himself at many dead ends.

At the age of 39, Smucker has lived the life of a left wing Forrest Gump, his face appearing in the crowds of countless left mobilizations large and small since the early 1990s, from the Christian pacifist Plowshares Movement, whose members symbolically “beat swords into plowshares” by hammering on military equipment (and earning impressive felony records in the process) to Occupy, to the Movement for Black Lives. Hegemony How-To is Smucker’s tough-love letter to this American left, a diagnosis of its self-undermining tendencies and an ambitious guide to overcoming them. Most of all, the book is a defense of power and a polemic against the left’s crippling ambivalence about contesting for and wielding it. We rightly criticized the excesses of power in the hands of our rulers. But if we want to build an egalitarian world where we are less subject to the whims of presidents, corporations, police, and bosses, writes Smucker, “we have to arm our critiques” with power. We have to win.