Can we “match the level of in-the-streetsness”? Moonstruck Cher GIFfrom Moonstruck GIFs “I can’t seem to get out of my own way,” my best friend from college used to complain. By that he meant that all his smarts and cleverness were stumbling blocks to getting what he wanted out of life. Which was another way of saying he thought too much. Democrats and lefty allies have the same problem: stubbornly insisting this is a survival-of-the-smartest world when it isn’t. Anand Giridharadas the other night issued a warning about that. First he notes that while lefty anger is dialed up to 11, our actions do not reflect it. Are we serious about stopping fascism or what? Do our actions “really match the level of in-the-streetsness” we saw in the 1960s, Giridharadas asks. Just as I’ve argued before: Winning in your head is like bringing sports visualization training to the Olympics and thinking you’ll be competitive when you show up with no conditioning and no skills. At some point, you have to play the game for real. At some point, you have to run the election and count the votes. At some point, you have to win on the ground instead of in your head. You’d best be good at it. And that “on the ground” fight is won in part through stories, not data. Stories are how humans process data and make sense of their actual experiences. Abstractions like “the economy” or GDP do not carry the same weight. Giridharadas doesn’t…