There seems to be four characters in Washington political life today: Decision-Makers, Inside Advocates, Outside Advocates, and Grifters. They all have different MOs.

The decision-makers mostly want to keep their jobs and therefore are mostly vectors of pressure. The Inside Advocates want to advocate but they also want to keep their seat at the table. The Outside Advocates want to speak truth, no matter consequences. The Grifters are grifting.

People get mad at different folks in different roles, in different directions. Some people, for example, get mad at Outside Advocates for speaking the unvarnished truth. But that's their job—to speak the truth!

We can't have everyone strategizing for power—we need some people just telling it like it is. This is why I find it goofy when cable news panels include active, insider political players—they're not going to serve the audience the truth; they're going to serve their strategy.

Some people also get mad in the opposite direction: For example, they get mad at Democratic senators or major advocacy organization heads for praising new cabinet picks. But what are they going to do: alienate the person they want to persuade over the next few years?

And then often people have these parasocial dramas with major Decision-Makers about whether they're, in their hearts, good or bad, true or fake — but again, the way we should think about them is as vectors of pressure, not as people to be relied on to be "truly good."

What's the upshot of such a schema? It's that each role has a specific response. For Decision-Makers, we should stop solely passively grappling about their goodness and instead actively pressure them toward the good (and replace them if they're found to be unpressurable!).

For Inside Advocates, we should judge them on if they're adequately balancing strategy and truth — if they're not winning anything by maintaining their seat at the table, for example, they need to be held accountable to the mission.

For Outside Advocates, we should just hold them to speaking the unvarnished truth and structuring their work in a way that allows them to speak the unvarnished truth. "Don't be corrupted!" is the important message for them.

And then, as for Grifters, it's just important for everyone to call out grifters. If someone is just playing the role of "Inside Advocate" or "Outside Advocate" or even "Decision-Maker" without any connection to advancing the public interest, they're harming everyone.

One final thought: There is a fifth character that changes the game board. It's the leader whose power comes not from insider relationships, but from an independent power base—a politician or org/union leader with a large enough, powerful enough, and strike-ready constituency.

Such leaders can be Insider-Outsiders—they can speak the unvarnished truth and still maintain a seat at the table. Why? Because the independent power base becomes a risk to the Decision-Makers if their leaders were not included in the conversation.

So the upshot of this final point is that if you don't have an independent power base, all you have is either speaking the truth as an Outsider Advocate or working insider relationships strategically as an Insider Advocate.

Those can get you some wins, but having an independent power base really gets you more—and eventually pushes you inward toward, soon enough, becoming the Decision-Makers ourselves.