Third Way is hiring a director of name-calling

The Washington think tank Third Way is hiring a “Director, Anti-Extremism.” The position pays $140,000 to $150,000 a year to “combat the rise of far-left extreme voices and forces.” The duties: assembling “a database of the Democratic Socialists of America’s most extreme ideas and statements” and keeping up “a drumbeat” of op-eds and television appearances. The posting sits alongside a $15 million campaign against the DSA, launched days after a progressive insurgent won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The title says “Anti-Extremism”; the job description targets the far left.

Democrats can argue in good faith about whether democratic socialism is smart politics. But in American public life, “extremism” names two different things. One is ideological distance — ideas far from the mainstream. The other is political violence — the phenomenon that the FBI, civil rights organizations, and terrorism researchers define, track, and count. The title gives a campaign against the Democratic left the urgency of a response to political violence.

Announcing the $15 million campaign, Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, called the DSA a “mortal danger” — to the Democratic Party. This is the language of existential threat, repurposed for a fight over the party’s direction. The posting works the same way. It gestures once at illiberal forces “no matter what side of the political spectrum they occupy.” But the actual duties — the DSA database, the polling, the spokespeople, the media drumbeat — target the left. Third Way’s only advertised anti-extremism directorship is an opposition-research and communications campaign against the DSA and the candidates Third Way links to it.

I checked three tallies of political violence, starting with lethality. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, no one’s idea of a leftist outfit, tracks terrorist attacks and plots, defined as premeditated violence for political ends. In the decade through mid-2025, left-wing attacks killed 13 people in the United States. Right-wing attacks killed 112. The Anti-Defamation League’s broader tally of extremist-related murders, a category that includes non-ideological killings by people with extremist ties, also finds more killings tied to the far right. In the decade through 2024, 76 percent of its 429 killings were tied to the far right. In February, the libertarian Cato Institute published a tally covering fifty years, one that stresses such violence is rare and its ideological shares volatile. Even so: set aside September 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, and right-wing attacks still killed nearly three times as many people as left-wing attacks.

These numbers cannot tell you whether the DSA’s ideas are good, popular, or even extreme. They tell you how much deadlier right-wing attacks have been.

And Third Way cannot claim confusion about the difference between a political opponent and a violent threat, because it once wrote the distinction down. In 2020, its national security program identified white supremacists and other far-right extremists as the country’s largest domestic-extremism threat. It criticized the Trump administration for fixating on antifa, a movement “not suspected of the same level of violence as far-right extremists.” That administration, Third Way wrote, was “more focused on partisan politics than in preventing and countering the real threats.” Six years later, Third Way is running the play it condemned: putting the broad language of extremism to partisan use against a left-wing adversary.

The posting also makes an electoral claim: “These extreme candidates still lose far more races than they win.” It never says which candidates, which races, or over what stretch of time — and the recent record does not cooperate. In the 2025 off-cycle elections, the DSA counted 14 wins and nine losses. That year, New York elected democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Seattle elected Katie Wilson, also a democratic socialist, whom the local DSA chapter had declined to endorse. As of this writing, DSA’s own scoreboard for the 2026 cycle showed 63 wins against 54 losses, with 55 races still running. And on August 4, in the race that set off Third Way’s alarm, Abdul El-Sayed beat Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate, for Michigan’s Senate nomination. The DSA never endorsed El-Sayed; Cowan targets him anyway, as a practitioner of what he calls “the DSA dodge.” Whatever that record is, “losing far more races than they win” is not it.

Then there is the “vital center” Third Way says it defends. Political scientists estimate the ideological positions of members of Congress from their roll-call voting records, using a method called DW-NOMINATE. Pew Research’s summary of a half century of those estimates: from the early 1970s to the early 2020s, the average House Democrat moved from −0.31 to −0.38, a drift of 0.07. The average House Republican moved from 0.25 to 0.51 — nearly four times as far. The scholars who built the measure are blunt: polarization is “a Republican-led phenomenon.” The midpoint between the parties is therefore moving rightward. Stand at that midpoint long enough and the people who barely moved start to look like radicals.

Third Way’s mission statement promises “a critical bulwark against political extremism.” The job it is advertising is oppo research that labels the DSA extremist — along with whoever Third Way decides is close enough. That is not moderation. It is name-calling with a $15 million budget.