We are now fifteen months away from November 2024 and the presidential election. Regardless of the outcome it's promising to be a vicious campaign as the Socialist Democrats struggle to win the House and retain control of the Senate and the future of the Biden presidency. Another significant ingredient will be the collective anger among tens of millions of voters on the right and left who remain upset with an embattled candidate consumed by his 2020 loss and a sitting president tottering through a now rapid descent into late stage dementia. It's not a good choice either way and the chorus for change grows louder week by week. I believe the anger translates easily to motivation and in turn to more confrontational election tactics.
Around 1513 Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince, a guidebook advising those in power on how to keep it. Four and a half centuries later, Saul Alinsky wrote Rules For Radicals advising those out of power on how to take it from those in charge. It's all about keeping and holding power. We have a struggle for that power coming next year. You'll have to read Machiavelli for yourself. It can be a challenge. On the other hand, Alinsky's book is nicely structured, very readable as a playbook, and an aid to the critical thinking you'll need to navigate the campaign battlefield.
In preparation for the desperate and emotional battle that's coming, I thought it would be the perfect time to give readers a booster shot of the political tactics we're likely to encounter from our politicians and their organizations. They won't be new to readers here because they've become the subject of an OTR post in presidential election years. Many of the tactics have been a feature of American elections for well over a century. It took the mind and experience of Saul Alinsky, long recognized as the founding father of community organizing, to best articulated them in his 1971 book. He was after all a Chicago native trained at the University of Chicago and a veteran organizer and political activist in the city's neighborhoods. His experience taught him early that politics was a very dirty game. That's one reason he dedicated the book to Lucifer.
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| My copy purchased in 1971 during my revolutionary days |
Democrats, especially those from the party's "progressive" wing, were well aware of the value of the tactics described herein and used them effectively during their convention in Chicago in 1968. They used them successfully against a naive Republican Party until late in the last century. By then American politics had become a vicious game of win or lose instead of compromise. Eventually GOP campaign strategists recognized political reality required them to fight fire with fire. That said here are the twelve rules or tactics we'll see at work every day until the election and beyond. My condensation of supporting information from the book is in brackets.
1. Power is not only what you have, it's what the enemy thinks you have. [Power is derived from two main sources - money and people.]
2. Never go outside the expertise of your people. [It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.]
3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. [Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.]
4. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. [You can kill them with this because nobody can possibly obey all of their own rules.]
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. [There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating.]
6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long become a drag. [Don't become old news. Even radical activists get bored.]
8. Keep the pressure on. Never let up. [Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, recover, regroup or re-strategize.]
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. [Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.]
10. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. [Violence from the other side can become a positive because the public sympathizes with the underdog.]
11. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. [Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.]
12. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. [Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people, not institutions, people hurt faster than institutions.]
Look carefully at these words. Any way you look at them, there is rough play, play for keeps. We've read and heard them daily and watched their consequences unfold on our national stage especially since 2008. Time and experience have taught me well and today I see it as an unsettling and potentially dangerous book now that it has become mainstream. I trust readers will benefit from this information as we face what may well be the most significant national election in our time.
In closing, some readers may be curious how I came to own a first edition of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals [1971]. First, the political events of the 1960's were not good to me. After President Kennedy's murder in 1963 , Barry Goldwater's loss to Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election of 1964, and the physical and mental slaughter in Vietnam and the US, I became an anarchist in the classical sense of the word. That's when I encountered Rules for Radicals. It's been read many, many times, it's a bit yellow here and there, and the dust jacket has a few small tears and scuffs; otherwise, it's in excellent condition.
As a husband and father, and student of the American experience, I moved right of center in politics and economics over the years, but always maintained a fiercely liberal position on many social issues. In essence I'm now a Jeffersonian Democrat and that makes it difficult to place me in context in today's polarized political environment. On the other hand, most folks smile and laugh and many are happy to know I never once liked Richard Nixon. Not even when I was six years old.
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