what it demands and who we are. This book is about the negotiation of specific left-wing identities (or in the case of Ronald Reagan, a left-of-center identity) and how those negotiations fell apart. The suit fit for a while, for meaningful reasons, and then it grew too tight, or too loose, also for meaningful reasons. It's about the humanity of those who abandoned us, politically, and the fallibility of those who arrived late to our side. And the book is a challenge, to the reader, to wrestle with the ways in which his or her own political suit might strain at the shoulders a bit more than is comfortable to admit.

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## In Spite of Noise and Confusion: Whittaker Chambers

In the summer of 1923,persuasive rhetoric as logical demonstration, a brilliant metaphor as argument. Here, I believe, is the heart of the mystery of the dialectic, as it appears in your books and articles: the dialectic, for you, is a device of style—the contrasting epithets, the flowing rhythms, the verbal paradoxes which characterise your way of writing.

"Comrade Trotsky, I will not match metaphors with you. In such a verbal tournament, I concede you the ribbon in advance. Evidence, argument, proof: these only are my weapons."

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In February of 1940, Burnham, Shachtman, and their allies held a national meeting in Cleveland to plot strategy, while Trotsky and Cannon called for an emergency meeting of the whole party, to be convened in April, for the purpose of resolving the disputes once and for