{"id":20232,"date":"2013-05-12T09:20:10","date_gmt":"2013-05-12T14:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20232"},"modified":"2013-05-12T09:20:10","modified_gmt":"2013-05-12T14:20:10","slug":"modernizing-the-rules-for-radicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/12\/modernizing-the-rules-for-radicals\/","title":{"rendered":"Modernizing the “rules for radicals”"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole<\/a> suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day):<\/p>\n

Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful ideas, many of which we can steal or adapt. But some of them are ill-expressed or incoherent. Eg Rule 10 \u201cThe major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.\u201d I think he could have omitted that one, don\u2019t you, without jeopardising his place in history as a great revolutionary thinker?<\/p>\n

Who are we? Not the same as the radicals of Alinsky\u2019s generation, that\u2019s for sure. Alinsky\u2019s radicals were broadly on the left: Che admirers; Black Panthers; communist revolutionaries; hippies; communitarians; environmentalists; radical feminists. The hegemony which they were trying to destroy was, very loosely, a conservative one.<\/p>\n

Today, though, the positions have reversed. We new radicals are broadly — but not exclusively — of the right, not the left. Many of us would describe ourselves as conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, UKIPers, Tea Partiers. Revolutionaries, yes, but in the traditions of Burke, Wilkes, Cobbett, and, indeed, the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers, rather than of Marx and Lenin. Some of us might not even think of ourselves as righties, but that\u2019s OK, it\u2019s the direction of travel that matters not the labelling.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re against: arbitrary authority; big government; high taxes; overregulation; corporatism; cosy stitch ups between the banksters, the lawyers and the political class; the EU; the UN; identity politics; eco-fascists; elf-n-safety; wind turbines; quantitative easing\u2026<\/p>\n

We\u2019re for: empiricism; sound money; free markets; liberty; small government; low taxes; deregulation; cheap energy; rigour; meritocracy; integrity; equality of opportunity, perhaps, but most definitely not equality of outcome.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re on the right side of a culture war which currently we\u2019re losing. Why are we losing? Not because we\u2019re bad people. Not because we don\u2019t have all the truth, all the logic, all the arguments on our side. We\u2019re losing because, thanks to Alinsky, the enemy has a forty-year head start on us. They\u2019ve got the techniques. All we\u2019ve got is the moral high ground — except, the way Alinsky\u2019s acolytes have brilliantly spun it, we don\u2019t get to enjoy the benefits even of that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day): Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,53],"tags":[431,262,550,327,533],"class_list":["post-20232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","tag-conservatism","tag-culture","tag-libertarianism","tag-teaparty","tag-ukip"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5gk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20233,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20232\/revisions\/20233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}