A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.”

Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind. Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative.

Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies that those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended.

Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence.

Consider a recent interview in which Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and, in a later interview, adding that “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”

So we are told that leftists are shrewd, long-term planners who are simultaneously stupid and crazy. Which is it? The distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.

We need to distinguish between leftist leadership and its dominant agenda on the one hand and its useful idiots on the other.

To be clear, there are certainly some dim bulbs among the left — both in leadership and rank and file. Showcase examples include Vice President Kamala Harris, who frequently struggles to articulate coherent sentences; Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who worried during a congressional hearing that Guam might “tip over and capsize” if it became too populated; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who told us that America with defunded police would look just like the wealthy white suburbs.

On a broader scale, consider millions of California voters who knowingly continue to vote for politicians whose policies have devastated the Golden State.

But these examples aside, the overarching leftist agenda — and the people who genuinely understand, subscribe to, and orchestrate it — cannot simply be dismissed as stupid. Doing so is dangerous.

The rise of the New Left

As has often been the case with radical leftist movements in the United States, their stated objective is to dismantle existing American institutions, traditions, and governing structures in favor of a fundamentally different social order. Put simply, they despise America as it currently exists.

Once you understand this premise, their positions look less like harebrained, stupid, illogical, or unworkable ideas, but more like carefully conceived, sometimes ingenious tactics intended to advance that larger objective.

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In this light, things like defunding the police, draconian regulations and carbon taxes, mothballing coal and nuclear plants, wide-open borders, turning a blind eye to Medicaid and NGO fraud, supporting genital mutilation of minors, opposing voter ID, massive expansion of entitlement spending, lowering combat readiness standards in the military in the name of gender equality, and support for adversaries like Hamas can be understood not as disconnected examples of incompetence, but as elements of a broader ideological program.

If it does damage to America and hastens the great realignment, they support it.

Whether one agrees with that interpretation of any particular policy is a separate question. The important point is that conservatives shouldn’t automatically assume destructive policies are the product of stupidity.

In “America’s Cultural Revolution,” Christopher Rufo explains how the radical left’s approach evolved from traditional Marxist class conflict toward an emphasis on race, gender, and identity. Traditional Marxism defined the conflict largely in socioeconomic terms, pitting the working class against the wealthy. In the United States, however, the middle class proved too large, mobile, and invested in the existing system for a conventional class-based revolution to take hold.

Influenced by thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, the New Left increasingly emphasized “the war of position,” “the long march through the institutions,” and racial and cultural identity as alternatives to direct political conflict. Barack Obama became a highly consequential figure in this transformation.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama told an audience in Columbia, Missouri, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” In the years that followed, he did precisely that.

The media proactively escalated the new narrative, increasing use of the terms racist, racists, and racism by roughly 700% between 2011 and 2019. The phrase “white supremacy” rarely appeared in the media until 2015, but by 2019, the Times and the Post were using it 17 to 18 times more often than in 2014, with similar jumps for “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” and “whiteness.”

Gallup found that the share of respondents who believed black-white relations were “very good” or “somewhat good” plummeted from about 70% to 47% by 2015.

From the perspective of those who designed it, this was a deliberate and consequential political strategy. Arthur Brooks put it well, pointing out that the president ran on optimism and unity but governed on pessimism and division. In 2011, Obama’s Executive Order 13583 cemented DEI language, metrics, and policies across federal agencies. The resulting fallout has been well documented.

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Stupid or strategic?

To call leftist leaders or their policies stupid is therefore more than an unfortunate choice of words. It can mislead conservatives regarding what they are confronting.

We don’t tend to think of stupid people as evil. Perceived stupidity neutralizes perceived intent and, to some degree, perceived blame. “Stupid” is not the word that comes to mind for figures like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, and it would have done us no favors to describe the Axis powers in World War II as merely stupid or crazy.

Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies that those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended. But what if the opposite is true? What if the policies are producing precisely the disruption their architects sought?

Once upon a time, Democrats and Republicans were two parties with broadly similar hopes for America but sharply different views on how to get there. That time has passed.

Conservatives should not lose sight of what they believe to be the left’s overarching mission. They need to describe political actions, and the consequences those actions produce, not simply as the unfortunate results of incompetent or stupid people, but as those of an underlying ideological agenda.

That doesn’t mean every Democrat is a radical leftist, every leftist is an intellectual strategist, or every controversial policy reflects a coordinated conspiracy. Nor does it mean conservatives should stop pointing out genuinely foolish statements or incompetent decisions. It means something simpler: Stop confusing foolishness with strategy.

Some political actors may indeed be foolish. Others may be highly intelligent and deeply committed to an ideological vision conservatives regard as destructive. Those two categories shouldn’t be confused.

If conservatives want to understand and effectively challenge the modern left, they should focus less on calling its leaders stupid and more on understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. That leadership may be insidious, duplicitous, destructive, morally wrong, and in some cases evil. But dismissing them as stupid or crazy risks missing the point entirely.

Let’s start calling them out on what they actually intend to do.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.