From
here:
If there’s one thing righties believe, it’s that they could beat lefties in a fight.
You see this attitude reflected over and over again, to the point
that it’s probably something engrained in the right-wing psyche. Pajama
Boy vs. tactical deathbeast? Pffft. No contest. Look, righties have
the guns, righties have police and they have the military. If one day
the balloon ever goes up, righties will just organize behind a
leadership of their veterans, coordinate with the active service, give
all the lefties free helicopter rides, and live happily ever after.
Right?
That’s pretty much what the Confederacy thought about the Yankees, and it didn’t exactly work out well for them.
From the perspective of a mainstream righty who’s a
right-to-keep-and-bear-arms guy, this dismissive attitude is remarkably
familiar. It’s the same attitude of somebody who buys a gun “just in
case” but never goes to the range, which is a great way to discover when
somebody kicks your door in at three a.m. that you don’t know the
difference between the magazine release and the safety. Organization
requires time, communication, networking, and above all practice, and
vanishingly few right-wingers are interested in doing the necessary
work.
Some of this is due to disillusionment. The determination of
ostensibly right-wing politicians to resist giving their voters what
they want has, unsurprisingly, motivated a growing number of righties,
most notably neoreactionaries, to consider going post-politics. In this
view, the Right cannot achieve its goals through participation in the
political system; what the Right really needs is a Moldbug reset, or a
restoration: a one-fell-swoop by which the government is fired and
rebuilt. The idea is to build right-wing structures in anticipation of
reality’s inevitable selecting-away of inefficient (left-wing) forms
when they can no longer propagate themselves. Entropy will set in and,
perhaps, a defining moment will emerge.
Of course, that’s not necessarily going to be the case. Political
violence isn’t fun for the whole family: it’s long, and it’s ugly, and
everybody suffers. And nobody ever thinks this when they have a Great
Cause, but maybe, just maybe, your Great Cause won’t win. And then what?
“It couldn’t be worse” is the sort of thing Turkish coup plotters say
right before their attempt fails and leaves their
bete noire in
undisputed charge of writing the purge lists. When it comes to
political violence, everybody imagines themselves piloting the
helicopters; nobody imagines themselves clinging desperately to the
skids.
There’s a famous cartoon by Sidney Harris that shows a couple of
researchers at a blackboard, on which is a series of complicated
mathematical equations. In the middle of the blackboard are the words
“then a miracle occurs.” The cartoon’s caption, dialogue from one of
the researchers to the other: “I think you should be more explicit here
in step two.”
“And then a miracle occurs” is a long-standing fringe-right
temptation. You see it in all sorts of places: in Ayn Rand’s hugely
influential
Atlas Shrugged, once a lone scientist moves to
Galt’s Gulch and doesn’t have to worry about the leeches, he literally
cures cancer. In the much less influential wish-fulfillment novels by
literal Nazi Harold Covington, his Mary Sue goes from poverty-stricken
and railing into the ether to the inspiring force behind a mass white
nationalist movement because, for no reason, white people suddenly start
listening to his screeds and mailing him five-figure checks. Bluntly
put: “and then a miracle occurs” is the equivalent of “I don’t have to
change or put forth any effort; someday I will be great and people will
like me for who I am.” As Righties know, this is something lazy and
inadequate people say.
The organizational capacity required to build a new world is the same
organizational capacity have Lefties built to pressure government. So
who’s in a better position to shape the big moment when it comes? Hell,
if tomorrow civilization goes completely Mad Max: who’s got existing
local networks of people who they’re used to turning out and doing stuff
with on a regular basis? Answer to both questions: not the Right.
Passivists say activism accomplishes nothing. What it actually accomplishes is
practice.
Practice for networking, practice for turnout, practice for speed,
practice working as a team. Anybody who’s ever tried to get five people
together for dinner knows it’s a pain, but look at the airport protests
after the travel ban, and see how many people the hard Left can turn out
on next to no notice. Say the balloon were to suddenly go up: forget
having a detailed and specific plan; in that first five minutes, do you —
not some veterans’ network you’re hoping will salvage things, not some
imaginary Great Man; *specifically you* — even know who you’re going to
call?
The Lefties do. And that’s why righties who say the Right has nothing
to learn from the Left are wrong. That’s because righties don’t read
lefty books.
I read lefty books and organizational manuals, and I can tell you: they’re smart.
Accordingly, righties face two major challenges: building things, and
understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and tactics of their Lefty
opposition. Righties won’t do the same things as the Left, or do them
in the same ways, but that doesn’t mean the Lefties don’t have lessons
we can learn.
The first thing righties have to understand about Lefties is that
lefties
have a lot more practice building their own institutions, and assuming
control of existing institutions, than their counterparts on the right
do, and they share their practical experience with each other.
Righties who like to build churches will build a church and worship in
it. Lefties who like to build churches will build a church, write a book
telling people how to build churches, go out and convince people
church-building is the thing to do, run workshops on how to finance,
build, and register churches, and then they’ll offer to arrange church
guest speakers who’ll come preach the Lefty line.
Righties need to do a better job of teaching each other. And not
just teaching the right-winger closest to them. The most organized
groups on the Right are the pro-life and RKBA activists; everybody else
on the Right should be learning from them.
The second thing to understand about Lefties is how they actually
function. There’s a lot of independence involved. Righties like
hierarchy, so often think of the Lefties as taking marching orders from
George Soros or whoever in a very hierarchical fashion. Not so much. A
lot of left-wing organization is very decentralized, and they negotiate
with other lefty groups as to exactly how they’ll do things and time
things to not hurt each others’ work, so the labor movement’s march is
not derailed by black-bloc window-smashing (see, for example, DIRECT
ACTION, L.A. Kauffman’s excellent history of the Left from the 60s on).
The Lefties call that approach “embracing a diversity of tactics,”
which, taken to its logical extent, is a weasel-worded way of saying
that the lefty mainstream is comfortable with radical leftist violence.
People don’t like to talk about this much. But while it’s impossible to
imagine, say, an abortion clinic bomber getting a cushy job at an elite
university, that’s exactly what happened to a number of alumni of the
1970s leftist terror group known as the Weather Underground. As
fugitives, they were financially and operationally supported by members
of the National Lawyers’ Guild; afterward, they were so normalized that
the 9/11 issue of
The New York Times infamously ran a profile
lauding Weatherman alumnus Bill Ayres. By contrast, right-wing
terrorist Eric Rudolph’s fugitive days were spent hiding in the
wilderness because no one would help him. He was caught literally
dumpster-diving for food. Potential right-wing extremists face
opportunity costs that their left-wing counterparts do not.
Righties frequently make allegations of paid protestors when Lefties
get a bunch of people together. Again, that’s not how it works. Think of
Lefty protests as being like a Grateful Dead concert. People
absolutely got paid at a Grateful Dead concert: the band got paid, and
the roadies got paid. But the Deadheads who followed the band around
didn’t get paid. They weren’t roadies, they weren’t the band; they were
there because they loved the music.
Lefties are excellent at protests, not because they pay seat-fillers,
but because they’ve professionalized organizing them, as you’ll
discover if you read any of their books. The protestors aren’t paid.
The
organizers are paid. The people who
train the
organizers and protestors are paid. Basically, the way the Lefty protest
movement works is sort of like if the Koch brothers subsidized prepping
and firearms classes.
Left-wingers have a combination of centralized and decentralized
infrastructure, because they have different kinds of groups. Some
groups use centralized organization: they’ll go out tabling, recruit
people, trying to grow big. Other groups, particularly anarchists,
favor a decentralized approach, where actions are performed by the
collaborative actions of multiple small cells called affinity groups.
The affinity group structure began in Spain: anarchists there
organized themselves into small groups of very close friends who knew
each other very well, because such small groups were difficult to
infiltrate. Even if they were infiltrated, exposing one group wouldn’t
blow the whole organization.
The American Left picked up on affinity groups in the late 1960s.
They started as a means for organizing protests and turned into a means
of organizing movements. To coordinate, they send members back and
forth to spokescouncils. The idea is to create a very collaborative
discussion. This is partly due to the influence on the modern hard Left
by Quaker organizers — if you remember those lengthy Occupy meetings
that just went on and on and on, it’s because that’s how decision-making
is done in Quaker meetings, and Quaker organizers taught the technique
to Lefties in the ’70s anti-nuclear movement. And it spread, because
lefties in different movements talk to each other and work together all
the time.
By contrast, righty organizations have historically been slow to
organize. When they do, right-wing activists tend to stay in their own
lanes and not work together, share notes, or reach out to one another’s
followers. Think about the mishmash of signs you typically see at a
Lefty protest, and then try to remember the last time you saw, say, an
RKBA sign at a pro-life rally. More unfortunately, when righties do
become active, they tend to do something like start a blog. Or make a
YouTube channel. Or write a magazine article. In short, they become
street-corner evangelists. They tend not to do things in meatspace.
Lefties do the work in the real world. Guess who wins?
The recent Battles of Berkeley have shown that right-wing defense
groups can acquit themselves admirably in street-fights, but hard
experience has taught Lefties that an all-one-tactic mentality is a good
way to give your opponents time to figure out how to counter you. If
righties are going to build things, they need to look at how the lefties are
doing it, because they’ve been working on it for forty years. To
paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics
are interested in you — and you can learn a lot from the people who’ve
been working them to their advantage.
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Let me just drive this home to you ,too: The COPS and government ARE part of the "
Left Wing!"
Don't believe me?
Check it out, here, too!
