Stephen Hay
I have recently finished reading “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2016. It is a completely absorbing book, a big book of the kind you can just lose yourself in for days. I did. A theme that runs through it is that of “representation” and the main character, the French-Vietnamese result of the union of a priest and his 15-year-old maid who is now a Viet Cong sleeper agent in first Saigon then the US, eventually comes to the conclusion that we can only represent ourselves.
Forty years ago Saul Alinsky published “Rules for Radicals”, an “‘impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.'” In it, he advises an activist to cut his hair if that is what is standing in the way of being heard. Pragmatic to the end.
In 2016, Becky Bond and Zack Exley published their book, “Rules for Revolutionaries”, their account of the grassroots campaign that used today’s technology to put Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign on the map.
“It tells the story of a breakthrough experiment conducted on the fringes of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign: A technology-driven team empowered volunteers to build and manage the infrastructure to make seventy-five million calls, launch eight million text messages, and hold more than one-hundred thousand public meetings-in an effort to put Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign over the top.”
Now, all these grassroots efforts are traditionally associated with the left and often the hard-left though the Tea Party did once use Alinsky’s Rules to build campaigns. If we can get past the artificial political divide, and not dismiss an idea because it comes from the “other side”, there is much in these books to assist the design and execution of a campaign from the bottom up, regardless of the cause.
In New Zealand, right now, there are multiple possible causes. The key is to choose one and pursue it relentlessly. The key is also to carefully choose the target of that campaign. Too often we fall into the trap of expecting a Seymour or a Collins or a Luxon to “represent” us – see “The Sympathizer” – when, in fact, we need to be building our campaigns ourselves (Alinsky), using the technology available to us (Bond and Exley).
Couple this with the exhortation of Buckminster Fuller, that “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” and it suggests that politicians might not be the best to target. Rather, perhaps, their experts.
Just as experts who disagreed with the political narrative were sidelined (Thornley, MDs who questioned, healthcare workers and teachers, amongst many) so, too, a campaign based on Alinsky’s Rules can be used to apply pressure on the experts who advise the government. As any lawyer can tell you, if you can damage the credibility of the opposing expert witness you don’t even need to make your own case, all they have to do is lose theirs…
And we, and they (the experts of the day) should be in no doubt. They are the weak link and will be abandoned by the political elite as fast as they were adopted. There is no loyalty when elections are at stake.
Alinsky’s Rules are:
- “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
- “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
- “Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
- “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
- “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
- “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
- “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
- “Keep the pressure on.”
- “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. “
- “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
- “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”
- “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
- “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. “
With a little imagination, one can see how these might be applied to any particular cause one might choose. But choose only one.
Books available at BookDepository