I mentioned at the end of my last post that such success that The Party of Trump has had thus far, and such strength as they still hold after the midterms, is because they are doing a better job with asymmetrical social warfare than the Left, even though in the 60s and 70s, that sort of thing was the Left’s stock in trade. But in the big picture, this shouldn’t be surprising.
If there is anything that the leftist “progressive” and right-wing reactionary have in common, it is a shared contempt for the establishment in both its classical liberal and social democrat faces, the kind of people who run things in Washington, New York, London and the EU Parliament. The all-powerful club to which nobody that we know belongs. But that club is generally more sympathetic to liberal-left concerns than social conservative or nationalist concerns. Those people feel very keenly outside the system and are more willing to work outside it or even tear it down than the “Democratic Socialists” who might get a foot in the door through conventional politics.
That explains why more AM radio talk-show hosts know Rules for Radicals than the average Antifa protestor.
You may ask, what is Rules for Radicals?
Exactly.
Rules for Radicals (ISBN 0-394-44341-1) was written by Saul Alinsky in 1971, shortly before his death. Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer (like Barack Obama…) who wanted to set down the rules he came up with for community activism.
If anything, this book seems to be more popular among the American Right than the Left. I say this because when I looked for it’s entry on the Amazon website, there was at least one right-wing answer book, like How to Trump SJWs: Using Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ Against Liberals.
It kind of makes sense. The fact that somebody on the Left actually did create a how-to handbook for cultural subversion appeals to the paranoid sensibilities of right-wingers who are convinced that everything they don’t like is a plot by George Soros or some other elitist handing down marching orders and strategies. (Even as all the leftists who act like the Koch Brothers go to monthly strategy meetings with David Duke, Montgomery Burns and Count Orlock are convinced that all THEIR ideas are completely organic.)
Now, Rules for Radicals is available for cheap on Amazon and a few other places, but I didn’t want to wait for a copy and I don’t want to subscribe to Kindle. Fortunately I discovered it is available on archive.org. https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals_djvu.txt So I’ve been looking at it.
To start, there’s the Prologue, where Alinsky says, among other things: “There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski (sic) said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude towards change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.”
Well, here we are.
Going into the first chapter, “The Purpose”, Alinsky makes his statement: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
After some discussion of morals versus dogma, this leads to the chapter “Of Means and Ends.” This goes into several rules that Alinsky defines for the ethics of means and ends, such as: “The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”
Rules for Radicals goes on at great length on various subjects, but in terms of my point – how Alinsky’s approach is relevant to various times, and how the Right has (deliberately or otherwise) absorbed it more thoroughly than the leftists for whom Alinsky wrote the book – I want to focus on the section called “Tactics.”
Alinsky starts by saying: “Tactics means doing what you can with what you have.” As with “Of Means and Ends,” this chapter is organized by a list of rules, which I will go over in turn with regard to how they are applied by the “alt” right in general and the Trump team in particular.
Alinsky starts the list with: “Always remember the first rule of power tactics:
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
Certainly Trump didn’t have any real power before getting into politics, but more than one person has pointed out his similarity to P.T. Barnum, the difference being that the discolored circus freak he is hustling is himself. He did a great job of presenting himself as being more financially competent than he actually was, and in this country, people think that being rich means that you’re competent, whereas in Great Britain or Czarist Russia, it was commonly understood that anyone with money usually got it by being an inbred upper-class twit. And even though everyone in the press knew Trump had gone bankrupt at least six times, he still projected himself as someone who knew what was going on, and the Clinton Democrats couldn’t call him on it. Partially because of the rules that follow.
“The second rule is: Never go outside the expertise of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the expertise of the people, the result is confusion, fear and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication, as we have noted.
“The third rule is: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.”
Well, it’s not like Trump has technical expertise in, uh, anything, but he really is great at making other people act outside their expertise. That’s how he won. He ran for the Republican nomination and once he got it, he got elected because his opponents didn’t know how to react to his attitude. They still don’t. I mean, he could say “two and two is five” and you could say two and two makes four, and he would go “fake news.” How do you counter that?
(I mean, besides taking his obvious ignorance at face value and subjecting him to the same deliberate shunning and contempt that the media usually reserves for third-party candidates. But apparently nobody thought of that.)
“The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
“The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
This dynamic is one of Trump’s strongest traits. He is not a “radical” in the leftist sense, but he is outside the (generically liberal) establishment. To the extent that he had a grand strategy, it was the realization, shared by Bernie Sanders, that he didn’t stand a chance of promoting his national agenda outside the two-party system. He was an “outsider” in the sense of being outside the Republican political system, but not so much of an outsider that he was going to go third-party. And once he got the Republican nomination, the “rules” suddenly turned to his benefit since now he was representing a (once) respectable part of the system, and by two-party binary logic, anybody who didn’t like Democrats had to support him, no matter their objective qualms. That became much more a factor once he became president. Democrats and others can’t really stoop to his level if they want to preserve the system of rules and norms that they had previously lived under. This also means that as good at Trump is at applying ridicule, it’s harder to turn such tactics against him. Partially because he’s already ridiculous yet still has a support base. It is nevertheless true that however impotent his opponents may be in the political arena short-term, ridicule still serves to serves to infuriate him and throw him off.
“The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
(Corollary) “The seventh rule: A tactic that goes on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.”
This is pretty clearly demonstrated in the playful, unserious dynamic of Trump with the audience he has at his various rallies. He says various stupid and belligerent things, which in the short term at least serve only to tweak liberals and other eggheads, which both he and the audience enjoy. This can indeed go on too long, but boredom with a tactic assumes both a capacity for imagination and a capacity to realize that it has gone on too long with no practical reward, and that is hard to do if you, like both Trump and his stereotypical fan, have the attention span of a fruit fly.
“The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”
This goes along with the general principle of changing things up so that the opponent cannot adapt. Trump, as seen, is very good at this. The non-Trumpers are not so good at this. And as Trump continues in his official role, he and his marginally more professional staff are beginning to adapt to the methods of the establishment so that they can prevail, as they eventually did in crafting a “Muslim ban” that the Supreme Court could live with. This also means that the only way of countering this dynamic is for the opposition to learn its use against Trump. That should be easier now that Democrats have a House majority that they can use to start official investigations of Trump malfeasance, but it’s clear that they don’t have much appetite for pressure tactics even when they have the resources to apply them.
“The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
Where Trump is concerned, this is usually simple bullying. It’s how he’s gotten most Republicans and even establishment Democrats to go along with him. But it works both ways. According to recent reports, Trump had wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI head James Comey but his White House attorney Don McGahn persuaded him otherwise, on the grounds that he could suffer “a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.” The upside to dealing with such a negative personality is that he makes his own weaknesses obvious.
“The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results from the reaction of the opposition that are essential to the success of the campaign. It should be remembered not only that the action is in the reaction but that that action is itself the consequence of reaction and reaction to the reaction, ad infinitum. The pressure produces the reaction, and constant pressure sustains action.”
“The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard enough it will break through to its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”
In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky gave an example from his own history where one corporation that he organized against took the step of breaking into his house and obtaining keys from that home to burglarize Alinsky’s place of business. Nothing of monetary value was taken in either burglary, only records applying to the corporation. As Alinsky put it, “the corporation might just as well have left its fingerprints all over the place.” That being the case, Alinsky told them that they would be confronted with that crime and others before a US Senate Subcommittee. “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”
It should be obvious how this principle applies to Trump. He wins by being so obviously negative and shameless about it that it’s redundant to call it out. The problem with “pushing the negative hard enough” is that in his case the fan club is consistently devoted, but the less devoted are dropping out. We are seeing the results in the Democratic turnout for the midterms.
“The twelfth rule is: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying ‘You’re right – we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”
As I’ve been saying, this has been the issue with the Republican Party, not just Trump, all along. For all their attacks on the Democratic establishment, the Republican Party outside Trump has utterly failed to provide a constructive alternative, and the result was that when the pressure campaign ultimately achieved the desired result – a Republican takeover of government – they failed to deliver on their promises. The result was what we got with the midterms. The problem with not having a constructive alternative is reduced somewhat with the Trumpniks, because they never cared about constructive alternatives. They are in fact so “radicalized” against the establishment in both major parties that they’ve gone all the way to nihilism. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it in this week’s analysis, “Will (Trump’s policies) accomplish anything except chaos? Hell, no. But chaos is what Trump voters asked for.The press has steadfastly refused to understand this aspect of Trump’s pitch. The subtext of his run wasn’t about making America great again. It was, Let’s fuck shit up. If Obama voters understood “change” as a genuine call to idealism, Trump voters understood it as a chair through a plate-glass window, the start of a riot. In a time of extreme cynicism and existential gloom, Trump is a doomsday cult, giving voters permission to unleash their inner monster. What makes this dangerous is that the appeal isn’t limited to racists. It extends to anyone who’s pissed off about anything. Trump is the match to burn it all down.”
The flip side, as Taibbi’s statement implies, is that not everybody who voted for Trump was a racist. But neither were all of them nihilists. Some of them actually expected a constructive alternative and didn’t get it. As I said in the last post, the conditions of statewide Senate races are such that the culture-war appeals of the Trumpniks are more likely to work than in Congressional District races where politics actually is local. That’s why those tactics still worked for maintaining the Senate lead but failed to hold the House.
Or, as I keep saying, the lesson of the 2016 election for the Democrats was that if making liberals cry was the only thing that mattered, then Trump would have won the popular vote. Some of them seem to have figured that out by now. But what Republicans still haven’t figured out is that Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, because the rest of the country knew that making liberals cry wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
“The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
At this point in his book, Alinsky goes into a great deal of elaboration. But in terms of how the point applies to the alt-Right, let alone the radical Left, it’s arguably the first rule that applies, not the last.
Alinsky admits that in a complex society, it is difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think in terms of a complex society. But Clinton never won any national races (and lost her first attempt at the Democratic nomination) and Obama’s record in addressing America’s long-term issues is in retrospect mixed. Whereas if you single out a target that people can personalize and identify – like Bernie Sanders did with “the billionaire class” or Trump does with whoever put a hair up his ass this week – you have much greater results. In Alinsky’s critique, which remember was meant to be applied by the Left, “all issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” There is no room for middle ground. The fact that reality is not actually all black-and-white doesn’t help the struggle. For reasons of both emotional commitment and intellectual focus, the conflict must be simplified, even by those who know better.
This is how both Sanders and Trump were able to cast themselves primarily as enemies of each party’s establishment at least as much as enemies to the opposing party. It didn’t hurt that both of them actually were a bigger threat to each party’s establishment than they were to the opposing party.
Again, in the broader sense, Trump wins insofar as he can reduce everything down to culture war. He loses when Democrats can turn public attention to other matters. But here’s how old-time leftist radicalism flips around to inspire its reactionary opposite.
I’ve been looking at a few “conservative” sites and the general theme of the bloggers and commenters is that they’re under siege from the PC Left, “Cultural Marxists” and Islamists, who they must know are not all the same thing, but they all seem to be threatening the American Way of Life. (Remember, bringing up complex reality mucks up a good narrative.) But some of the more reflective bloggers, like Rod Dreher, are making the point that the Left, especially at colleges, are that much more prone to black-and-white morality than any Ayn Rand fan. The reason that this country could survive with Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims all in one mix is that legally we weren’t supposed to let religion intrude on civic policy, and in turn that situation allowed everyone to coexist. Now (again, in these conservatives’ minds) leftists are trying to enforce a situation where people with “traditional” beliefs are unwelcome, passed aside for job promotions, shouted over when they speak at universities, and so on. And a lot of the Left’s success in the social arena, particularly the tactic of “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it” can be traced to the thoughts of Saul Alinsky and his peers, even if not everyone on the Left has a deep grasp of the intellectual heritage. It’s not enough to say that the opposition is wrong or mistaken in their premises. They have to be Objectively EVIL. Alinsky is in fact explicit about this:
“The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 1 1:23). He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act.”
So if you’re not on the Left, and you see these guys kicking your ass in the social arena over and over again, and you already feel yourself to be in a “minority-majority country” (because not even all white people agree with you), you start looking for how this came to be and you consider the tactics that the Left used to switch from being the “Have-Nots” to the “Haves.” You recognize that despite all your money, power and White Privilege (TM) you are on the outside where it counts, and you do what the original merry pranksters did- use the enemy’s rules against them, and break their script, because then they won’t know how to react. And this really all comes together when the guy who, despite his money, fame and privilege is definitely an outsider in the Cool Kids’ Club, Donald Trump, shows up. And then everybody is on board with the same polarized strategy: Fight back and make liberals cry.
But the Right, in being so scared of the subversive Cultural Marxists that they were willing to sell their souls to beat them at their own game, didn’t just prostitute themselves to the Bizarro-Ray version of Bill Clinton for the sake of winning elections. They decided that winning elections and grasping political power was more important than all that stuff they wanted to gain power to preserve, like Christian morality. Or the Constitution. And now it’s starting to slip away, because some people are finally starting to pay attention.
It is of course the fault of the Right if they want to take all the wrong lessons from other people’s example, but it was the Left that gave them the intellectual tools to shift the terrain.
If you guys on the Left are still wondering how the Right keeps beating you, it’s because they’ve been stealing your material since at least Mussolini, and you still haven’t caught on.