Posted on 11/14/2012 4:46:04 AM PST by Kaslin
In 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army insurgents rose up against the American and South Vietnamese forces in the Tet Offensive. They were wiped out, yet seven years later they were in control of the country. There are lessons there for us conservatives.
Conservatives, as opposed to the Republicans who partially overlap them on the Venn diagram of American politics, need a strategy. Strategy differs from mere tactics – it is a synchronization of potential ways (think courses of action) and available means (think resources) to achieve a long term end. Tactics are the techniques supporting the strategy. The Tea Party/conservative revolt had effective tactics – rallies, town halls – but the movement’s decentralized nature, with groups springing up around the country, kept it from developing an effective, coherent strategy this year.
Obama certainly had a strategy, to make the election a choice of him versus Romney. In contrast, Romney’s strategy seemed to be not to be Obama, which was not really a strategy at all, and the conservative strategy was merely to back the GOP nominee.
Obama won.
Right now, there is one strategy that offers us hope of turning the leftward tide. Insurgency is the classic fallback strategy for groups that cannot prevail in a stand-up fight, and right now we can’t. It’s clear that while we represent a significant minority of voters, we are facing highly organized ideological opponents who occupy the high ground in the government and who can rely on the unwavering support of the mainstream media. Like the allies in Vietnam, they have the cities and they have the firepower.
Insurgents survive and win by avoiding decisive engagements until a time and place of their choosing. Tet was not the Communists’ time, and right now, we are not in a position for a decisive battle either. So what do we do?
We start thinking like guerillas – political and cultural guerillas.
The first thing we need to do is get out of our head the notion that this fight will be over if we just pull off a victory in 2014 or 2016. This is not just a single political battle but a political and cultural campaign. America did not go from a nation of stalwart, self-reliant achievers to a country full of couch-dwelling EBT moochers in just four years, and we won’t change it back in the next election, or the one after that, or even the one after that. Our role models, the patriots of 1776, didn’t drive the redcoats out until 1783. Our strategic end is long-term – an America where free market values prevail, where all of our liberties are respected, and where a limited government spends within its means and only within the bounds set forth in the Constitution. We need to remember that a good many Republicans are just as opposed to that vision as the Democrats.
Initially, we should work to avoid a decisive battle. The liberals are already pushing the notion that the Tea Party is dead, but they know better and they want to finish us. After all, we are the only real threat to their progress.
We can already see where they are shaping the battlefield to defeat us: the Fiscal Cliff fight. Clearly, Obama will seek to maneuver us into an unpopular position and finish us off. You can almost hear the mainstream media’s cries of “Obstructionist Tea Party/GOP House!" We are nearly guaranteed to lose with this correlation of forces. We need to avoid the ambush.
That may require cutting our losses to retire from the battlefield – a winning guerilla movement spends most of its time retreating. We may not be able to stop them from letting taxes rise on those horrible, horrible wealthy folks, but there’s no reason we should help them. Let the Democrats buy the tax hikes. Let the affluent gentry that supported him see how they like them.
This is key. Insurgents maneuver their opponents into acting to alienate their own supporters. The GOP House can stop some of the left’s more disastrous programs, but it can’t stop them all – and it shouldn’t let itself be drawn into losing fights trying to do so. Sometimes guerillas have to let the populace feel the pain. Look at how Obamacare is already in the process of making 29 hour work weeks the new normal, and not one GOP member voted for it. Voters wanted Obama, so let them have him good and hard. And be ready to exploit the reaction.
In the short term, the fights we choose should be ones we win whether the legislation passes or not. Why not push a bill designed to ensure military ballots are both delivered timely and counted? We win by getting more votes if it passes, and if it doesn’t the Democrats are revealed as shafting the troops. Win or win – take your pick.
Guerillas take advantage of safe havens. We have them, our own flyover country Cambodias. We own a lot of statehouses and governorships, and we can grow out there in the states quietly, unobserved, building strength and putting conservative policies in place. Of course, that can be a double-edged sword. Governor Kasich’s success with Ohio’s economy helped voters feel confident enough to give their vote to Obama. But, overall, building a track record of conservative successes in the states – especially as blue strongholds like California and Illinois spiral down the drain – creates powerful evidence of our potential at the national level.
The states also, critically, allow us to start building a farm team of candidates for federal offices up to and including the presidency. At age four, the Tea Party revolt is not yet a fully matured movement. We still pick candidates on the basis of pure ideology and fail to understand the importance of presentation. It’s not that we don’t have people of astonishing accomplishment to choose from – Ted Cruz comes to mind. We just need to stop settling for candidates who don’t get that that whenever someone asks about rape, you answer "I am against it" and stop talking.
As Andrew Breitbart observed, politics is downstream from culture. We can luck out and grab the presidency, but if society does not share conservative values we will simply end up with another disastrous Bush administration. That means we need to do what guerillas do and infiltrate into the enemy’s turf, slipping conservatives into the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment world.
Springsteen may be a windy hack, but he beats Kid Rock on the Cool-O-Meter. There are a great number of talented conservatives out there – perhaps if some of the money wasted in the last election went to making conservative popular entertainment (as long as the “entertainment” part precedes the “conservative”) we might be further along. Once we get folks laughing at the left, we’re on our way.
We are in a tough spot. The other side, and even significant elements of “our side,” want us conservatives out of the picture. As insurgents, we can win by operating in the shadows, securing ground, undermining their enemy, and biding our time. An insurgent campaign is a series of big losses and small victories that builds up, over the long run, to a final victory. It’s time conservatives thought strategically, and for now that means we must become political and cultural guerillas.
Sounds similar to this:
NET CALL: The Way Ahead
This post is written in anger and frustration.
Angry that we continue to follow the Republican Party’s elite ignorance. A party that continues to pull defeat from the jaws of victory characterized by pompous fools who fulfill the sterotype built by the left.
Frustrated that the reality of politics is this: There will be no third party capable of competing with the coalition constructed by the dems. As a result, true conservatives MUST take steps to eradicate the ignorance of the Republican Party while still adhering to the core values of our forefathers (beliefs that I discovered are considered extreme by over half of my countrymen on Tuesday night, BTW).
I have no solve for exactly how to accomplish this. Only advice based on a long military career in several foreign lands for how to defeat the dems once this is accomplished.
This thought process is based on the concept of irregular warfare with twists thrown in here and there for good measure.
With that, I provide the following advice for the good of the order.
LEADERSHIP: The old crew has proven either incompotent or outdated. McConnell and Boehner must go. They represent a failed plan to defend and resist without clearly explaining their position. They are content with looking like the bad guys and face public scorn when they don’t realize how important it is to manipulate a clearly left leaning MSM. They represent the failure of the last four years to our own and obstructionists to the opposition.
We’ve got to show a new face to the nation. That is the genesis of rebuilding this movement. Ryan or Cantor in the House, Rubio or Demint in the Senate.
We also need a standard bearer and I see no one on the horizon with as much rockstar potential and substance as Rubio. These next four years must put him on the center stage with a unified and consolidated message. It also needs to protect him from the attacks from the left that are guaranteed to come.
Everything the Obamites used to deny, deflect, and difuse will be used against them....including the race card. THAT is what will make Rubio a teflon candidate.
Change is neccesary at the head of the RNC as well. Prebius represents failure and “aw shucks” attitude. A new way to fight requires a true fighter.
I read a headline a few weeks ago that said “100s of Retired Generals Throw Their Support Behind Romney”...It’s time for them to serve again, this time within the RNC.
These men can quickly and efficiently change the organization of a party that seems confused as to what the next step is and what to do now.
Pete Schoomaker, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and long time special operator would be a suggestion. He understands how to traslate what I’m talking about into a living, breathing organization.
These men represent a change in a party that has been beaten soundly in the last two elections by a charlatan and his traveling circus. A fresh choice in leadership represents change you can TRULY beleive in from every angle. It marks a clear start from inside and outside when we actually started taking this enemy seriously.
GROUND GAME: It is IMPERATIVE to develop and foster an intricate ground game. It requires a MICRO-ANALYSIS of every county, every city, and every early and absentee ballot by demographic to find how how, why, and with what method they voted. The dems have built quite the coalition but it’s a house of cards; it’s a fractured coalition of single issue voters held together by a media-invested hollyweird worshipping demagogue. They can be piecemealed away bitby bit without sacrficing principle.
Give it to the dems on their “community organizing” machine. We don’t need to reinvent that model. We MUST develop our own. One that will INSTILL our principles in a language tailored to the audience. They’ve tailored theirs on the community organizer, we can create ours around the military special operator. This the winning of hearts and minds in our own third world backyard dem strongholds.
This isn’t as difficult as it sounds. It requires a patient and immediate effort that starts with the post election analysis looking not for what we WANT to find, but for the GROUND TRUTH. GROUND TRUTH is REAL INTELLIGENCE not Rovian number-crunching wishful thinking.
It will require an insurgent effort at the ground level. An infiltration into dem areas that we identify are weak or vulnerable to start cutting in to the blue.
The COIN (insurgeny/counterinsurgency)effort would include the identification of these areas, the inflitration of the areas through churches and charitable organizations AND PARTICULARLY THROUGH EDUCATION.
There ARE like thinkers in these communities. How do we find them? Ask Jesse L. Peterson. Ask JC Watts and Herman Cain. They KNOW how to splinter these vulnerable areas off the blue.
The hispanic issue is RIPE for moving into the red. Catholic, family oriented cultures who beleive in being left alone and naturally distrust the government. And they voted Obama? This is the epitome of the single issue voter. the RNC needs to go toe to toe, issue to issue with “the Race” and counter it in that community, in that language, at THAT LEVEL.
Think it can’t be done? SOF has been doing it since the end of World War II. It CAN be done.
WE must get deep into the education system to promote the ideals and values of conservatism that should be selling themselves. I’m not talking about traditional public schools and universities. They are ROTTED with liberals. They also aren’tthe keys to education in the 21st century.
I’m talking about the new way to educate - the online universities, the trade schools and nightschools. Corporate allies need to invest and educate with the ideals of economic and fiscal conservatism.
The RNC needs to lead and develop this effort. A novice like me can see that there is a disconnect between the voting habits of catholic-dominated hispanics and pockets of baptist blacks and their actual stated values. That disconnect can be exploited if it is done slowly, deliberately, and effectively.
INFORMATION WARFARE: We are ATROCIOUS AT THIS. Dems get a simple message out early and often. They poison the well and we are left to change minds rather than get the initial impression right from jump. We constantly play defense and think we are sooooo clever when dems (as they ALWAYS do) do something stupid or illegal and shocked when the media all but ignores it. We must take the offensive in getting up in every Candy Crowley, every George Stepenopolis’ face and call them what they are: democratic hacks posing as the “objective media”
We ABSOLUTELY MUST be proactive. We must attack at EVERY OPPORTUNITY then add each fail of the dems to a trend and theme. These themes must be simple, tailored, and repetitively broadcast to each target demographic.
We must look out beyond the 5 and 10 meter targets. We’ve got to effectively interpret what the dem message is on the horizon and confront it at all levels - from the national MSM level filtering directly down to the target group level. Even I can see what the talking points of the upcoming week are by watching the Sunday talking head programs. Defense is unacceptable. we can’t pretent that the most outrageous comment won’t gain traction then act surprised when weeks later, that theme picks up steam. ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK and don’t give the dems a minute’s relief to reset the media battlefield OR the political discourse.
Alinsky tactics must be turned against their masters. There is GREAT power in ridicule and scorn. They make it too easy to use. It needs to be culturally tailored and consistent. Dennis Miller needs his own show on FNC AND a late night show on Fox. Let him source and promote culturally diverse conserative comedians that vulnerable areas can relate to and remember. Bold Fresh tours aren’t enough.
This is only part of an overall information operation plan that is constant in a simple party message and what it means to each target group.
WE DON’T DO THAT WELL. WHY NOT? I find it unbelievable that Obama has hijacked the reputation and imagery of the Party of Lincoln.
COIN operations involve a very in depth understanding of cultural idocyncracies and how best to exploit them to our advantage. It’s not a “wool-over-the-eyes” approach or a “free shit” approach like the dems sell. THAT ALWAYS COMES UP SHORT.
It’s a sell based on how it effects each target group and what it means to them. If it’s done right, I am CONFIDENT that the tenets of conservatism sell themselves.
In Civil Miltary Operations, assistance in areas that seem unrelated builds trust in the agency. Granted, there’s a fine line between assistance and the giving of free shit but, the special operations forces walk that line well. It can be done. Community outreach in areas that we identify, in ways that we haven’t before can build a larger tent without sacrificing our beliefs.
The military has been doing this in third world countries for years. We’ve been more successful in some areas, less successful in others. In the United States third world strongholds of the Democratic Party,I am confident that it can be done.
Here’s the kicker: There are countless retired special operations planners and operators working overseas as contractors RIGHT NOW. It’s too easy; the RNC needs to hire them as contractors over here.
This is, by far, not the only avenue we’ve got to pursue in order to turn the tide. We must confront and use the power of law, media, technology and the corporate world to form a UNITED MOVEMENT.
WE ARE AT WAR. the RNC must look to the military to rediscover and reorganize. The number-crunching beancounters have their place in the organization but, on their best days, they can only identify who will and won’t vote Republican.
This is a “Hearts and Minds” effort.
It requires a new way to think about the political battlefield.
Rangers Lead the Way.
Liberals have taken control of all the cultural influences, often under the guise of fighting poverty or racism, often with high profile lawsuits. We need to take them back. We won’t be winning this fight in the political arena. Start having conservatives apply for positions in liberal institutions and foundations, and suing for discrimination when rejected. Take the cases all the way to the supreme court, make them high profile. That will get conservative philosophy into the public arena.
We also need to use a few Alinsky tactics, such as making the liberals live by their own rules, and live with the consequences. If you see a liberal smoking, remind them that you don’t appreciate the second hand smoke, then fire up a cigar, so that we live by OUR rules, not theirs. If you see a liberal eating in McDonalds, remind them that the fat and salt are bad for them, and then order a Mac and fries. If you see a liberal in Wal-Mart, remind them that it’s nonunion, and then go shopping.
IOW, use their own tactics against them, although you may be assaulted, you then can trash them for bullying.
Enjoyed the read, Kaslin. Thanks for posting it. Is a strategy which has merit. Worked for one of our Founders, when he was General George Washington.
The MEDIA lost the Viet Nam War.
The Tet Offensive was a dismal failure and yet the libtard media reported it as a loss for us making the war ‘un-winnable’
This is the power of the whorenalists.
There is a book out called, “Rules for Radicals.” excellent read.
Apply those rules the conservatives. Reagan also gave us a set of rules to play by. Seems we forgot how we became a nation.
Civility is not an option. Winning is the only option.
The problem is, the establishment republicans are not conservatives in any sense. Worse, they are all educated in the same schools, with the same philosophy. They share the same world view as most of their elite democrat counterparts. No great strategic vision or cultural change will come from them at the top of the party. They simply want power to shift to them so they can pass along the spoils to their cronies instead of democrat cronies. The constitution has as little meaning and value to them either.
Of course, alienating their own supporters is exactly what the Republican Party does by not fighting Obama. So this doesn't exactly fit the writer's narrative.
It's also why I no longer identify with the Republican Party. I'm tired of being ignored.
Agreement. Plenty of Ways to Win. What lady singing? Thank You!
Obama had a strategy: it was to cheat, and he won. After the Tet Offensive the media had a strategy: to have Walter Cronkite go on TV and tell everyone how we had suffered a major defeat in VietNam, which was, I believe, the beginning of when the media realized they could create their own reality, even one which was fictional. The commander of the North Vietnamese forces even commented that he couldn’t believe we ended the war right after his army had lost such a crucial battle.
Obama had a strategy: it was to cheat, and he won. After the Tet Offensive the media had a strategy: to have Walter Cronkite go on TV and tell everyone how we had suffered a major defeat in VietNam, which was, I believe, the beginning of when the media realized they could create their own reality, even one which was fictional. The commander of the North Vietnamese forces even commented that he couldn’t believe we ended the war right after his army had lost such a crucial battle.
And the key word is “organize.”
Right now, conservatives couldn’t organize a three-man protest against a sidewalk tax in a small town. The Founders organized Committees of Safety to take on the British Crown. At present, conservatives are completely incapable of matching that feat. Conservatives are focusing all their energy on national political offices which is a major strategical error. The Founders put all their effort into controlling local and state and offices. After they had control of local political offices, then they took on the Crown directly.
I am tired of political meandering and tactics. We are a divided nation beyond a political solution. The two sides are incompatible and mutually exclusive. Can the G-D CWII get started so we can get it over with? Sic Semper Tyrannis
Ping for later reading
Democrats can buy votes, republicans can't. Even when a republican gives away free stuff, he gets no credit for it. Every time there is the slightest downturn, the populace goes for the democrat because he will toss money out of the treasury.
Culture. Americans waste their lives in front of the television. It is entirely left-wing and fosters an attitude of instant gratification and instant solutions to problems. Work? Sacrifice? Decisions? Not part of the equation.
The media. Journalists occupy the part of the political spectrum between Pol Pot and Stalin. Every syllable they utter is intended to make us part of a communist collective. And yet we mindlessly tune into their shows and pay attention to their opinions.
Ultimately, you have to find someway to undermine the democratic party base of looters, communists and libertines that now make up half the country.
If you don’t stop voter fraud, anything else you do is just a dog and pony show.
The better the conservative message, the bigger the voter fraud.
21 precincts in Cleveland had absolutely NO Romney votes.....21!!
59 wards in Philly had no Romney votes!!!
That is just plain mathematically impossible.
The spineless leaders we have in the Republican party are acting like nothing happened. . After 52 years of being a registered and voting Republican, either I join the Tea Party or I never vote again.
>>>Start having conservatives apply for positions in liberal institutions and foundations...<<<
Already in place at a high school somewhere in Alaska, teaching each generation about natural rights, American exceptionalism, and the principles of freedom and liberty. To paraphrase Gramscii, I’m taking the long march through THEIR institution.
My students are about to read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” To demonstrate how communism works, on a certain day each student walks into class and hands me his or her backpack. Private property, of course, is not allowed. Then I take the contents and start handing it out to other students based on who needs what according to the standards of the party (led by me, of course). Malcontents are “executed” by being sent to the principal (who is in on the whole lesson.) After a morning like that, the students are safely innoculated against leftist thought when they go to college. The other English teacher is now having his students read “Animal Farm.” There are more of us out there than you know.
I was arguing with a kid from a leftist family here in town. He is a real achiever, with great grades. I told him that it wasn’t fair that he was in the 1 percent of grade earners, and that he wasn’t contributing his fair share of grades. I proposed that the school take some of his grades and give them to the less fortunate who aren’t the winners of life’s lottery. He got pretty upset and told me that he earned those grades. You didn’t earn those grades, I said, someone helped you - teachers, parents, the school, books. He was really frustrated, so I let him in on what I was doing. Then I asked the zinger: “If it’s not OK to take your grades away that you earned, why is it OK to take away someone’s money that they earned?”
I’m having fun out here.
Keep up the good work. I’m impressed at how your turned that kid’s grades into a discussion about sharing the wealth.
Just rename the parties to The Takers and The Makers.
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