How the Right Can Organize Like the Left – IOTW Report

How the Right Can Organize Like the Left

Thursday, 5 November 2020, 20:45 MJA Uncategorized 15

The left understands that ideas mean nothing without power. Instead of complaining, we should follow their lead—starting small, but with ambitious goals.

The American Conservative:

Conservatives are understandably upset. In a period of sustained radical leftist action, including riots, arson, and a genuine effort to grow a revolutionary movement, the response at all levels is ineffectual. Lots of conservatives are asking the same questions: what can I do? What can we do? How did we even get to this point?

When things aren’t going the way you want, it’s easy to blame luck, or circumstances, or somebody screwing you over. It’s harder to take a good look in the mirror. But the first step is to internalize an unpleasant truth. In this case, the unpleasant truth is that the entire conservative theory of power is wrong. 

Conservatives tell ourselves power comes from ideas. The body politic is a marketplace; we like marketplaces! Ideas are debated, inspire voters, draw action from politicians, and at the end of the day, win.

Okay, how’s that working out for us?

It turns out that inspiring ideas aren’t useful unless you train people in the mechanics of building power. That’s not what we do. As conservatives, we have trained ourselves to elect politicians, who are seemingly allergic to passing legislation, or to be pundits, who have no actual power. State power is the only kind of power conservatives have taught their people how to understand, and when we gain it, tut-tutting conservative elites argue it is immoral to use.

At some point in the last 40 years, the conservative movement should have taught us to exercise power in ways that don’t involve the state. This is what leftists do. They actively train people to create effective pressure movements that coerce compliance with their demands. The response of conservatives to this coercion is to double down on—the importance of ideas.

If you want to actually produce change, you can’t do it with debates. You can’t do it with pundits. And you can’t do it by sitting at home and assuming somebody else will do something. You have to learn to build a team and work as part of it. And your team has to learn to be part of a larger team.

You must, in short, build community.

If You’re An Elected Official

The words every conservative elected official needs to have emblazoned on his or her wall, in letters four feet high and on fire, are: “Actual Material Loss.”

Hard lefties understand that if you want someone to change his behavior, you have to be able to inflict actual material loss on them. Not devastating bon mots, not status hits, not embarrassment. Actual material loss. For politicians, this means votes. For other people, usually, it means money.

Republican voters don’t want YouTube videos or pugnacious tweets from their elected officials. We can produce those on our own, thanks. What we want is material effect. If you’re an officeholder, and you’re not willing to materially help your allies and materially hurt your enemies, there’s really not any point of you being there.

For an idea of how conservative politicians have shirked this part of their job, consider this: pro-life protestors are a rare exception to the right’s inability to form a crowd the way lefties do. So why don’t we take a cue from leftist tactics and peacefully occupy abortion clinics? Because when the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, they made doing so a federal felony. That’s actual material loss.

The Republicans had the House, the Senate, and the presidency for two years, and they didn’t consider repealing that law, or amending it to give public buildings and thoroughfares the same protections as abortion clinics, effectively shutting down many leftist shenanigans. They didn’t even defund Planned Parenthood. By contrast, Democrats aren’t even back in power yet and already they’re making noises about repealing Taft-Hartley and allowing unions to use secondary boycotts. (A secondary boycott is what the activist group Sleeping Giants does when it targets companies that advertise on Breitbart.) Leftists know: if your enemy has a successful tactic, make it illegal or impractical. If your friends are hampered by legislation, change it to empower them. Read more

15 Comments on How the Right Can Organize Like the Left

  2. Aaron 😀

    Here’s my $.02 on that article:

    So, Conservatives are lousy Republicans and Republicans are lousy Conservatives. But the largest thinking group in this country is Conservative. Go figure.

    They could have just written a sentence like this:

    “Conservatives need to be more active in politics” and spared the lecture.

    The article itself is very “Conservative.” In politics, many Conservatives like to blame each other.

    Personally, I’ve never liked that.

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  4. “You must, in short, build community.”
    Duh…
    What was the Tea Party in 2010? An organic COMMUNITY that took the congress away from Obummer without any support from the RINOs. What did the GOP RINOs do? Nothing! Because they were co-conspirators! They fought us every step of the way.
    After watching these shenanigans for 5 years President TRUMP gathered the Tea Party under his wing and created the MAGA movement. Then for two more years he fought his own RINO party that resisted him every step of the way AGAIN!

    Honestly, at this point I believe both Aaron Burr and Miss Kitty make more sense than the author.

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  5. The right will NEVER organize like the left as long as their elected officials are predominately RINOs. The nature of federal public office attracts, promotes and retains self-promoting, self-serving, self-enriching, amoral people, whose first priority is their own self-interest. It’s unfortunately human nature. This is universally true with democrats and predominately true with republicans. Donald Trump is a rare exception to that rule, as he genuinely loves America and it’s citizens, and wants give every citizen the opportunity to succeed. He doesn’t even accept the salary of the office. What does that tell you?

    Everyday conservative citizens are too busy working to support their families, and following the rules to be as effective as the unemployed, self-disenfranchised loser left radicals who dominate the activist leftist base. It will never be a fair fight until politicians return to be being citizen legislators who put the best interest of the country ahead of their own best interests.

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  7. Related, today I received mail from PP asking for $$$. First time ever.

    P. Trump cutting their funding must be bringing some financial pain and desperation.

    I am female, but registered R for 40 years.

    Included was a prepaid-postage envelope. Thinking of what to send back at their expense.

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  8. I’m reminded again that it’s the CITIES. Conservatives have largely left the cities in our lifetimes and they’re increasingly run by Democrats who cater only to their constituents via local, state and Federal programs and taxes.

    Subtract all the big cities: New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, St Louis, Omaha… and the country is soundly pro-Constitution Conservative.

    It’s the oldest problem with human interaction on this planet: the bad drive out the good… until the good have had enough and fight back, clobbering the bad.

    It’s why we’ve elected Trump and will fight to keep him.

    Fight back! Any way you can!

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  10. @mmm
    I have heard that if you tape the return envelope to a large box filled with bricks the post office has to accept it and deliver to the receiver and then charge them by weight…

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  11. I’m not tired of winning yet, and our man is straight up gangster. He is in it to win it for us. I’m tired of having milk toast establishment pussies calling the shots when all they know how to do is lose.

    They always have their excuses. I don’t do excuses. They need to be told: Put that coffee down, coffee is for closers. In other words, get the hell out of the way and stay the hell out of the way.

    We need a man who bites in the clinches and we have one.

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  14. If Biden wins, that means Americans still need a lot more hard lessons on why we hate tyranny and communism.

    We know Biden will dismantle everything Trump has accomplished to attempt to kowtow to the violent left. It’ll happen unless Trump makes a sprint for the finish line. His lead in Georgia has now been pretty much eliminated. If he loses even one of the remaining 4 states, his only hope is legal action.

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  15. JD

    I’m your huckleberry!
    70 years ago family moved to Va. i got a lesson on Southern. I said “Civil War” in class, All knew that I had self identified as, “a nigger lovin Republican” (WRONG All the men in my clan have been D for almost 180 years
    .) The “proper” “Southern” was “War Between the States”!

    On the way home 2 kids beat me up. i fought like the Devil and bit both.

    The next 3 years they both stepped aside when they saw me commin!
    They won ;the victory was not worth the pain.
    DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR has been a clan belief i think forever!

    I will not only bite I will kick your nuts!

    Im old but I will never “take a knee”! NEVER!

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