Every historical treatise on the Art of War agrees that “knowing your enemy” is the most important. So why is the common foot soldier taught the opposite: to ridicule, scorn, disdain, and otherwise sneer at the “gooks” and “krauts” on the other side? The answer is simple. It’s easier to kill an enemy who is subhuman.
High-ranking officers, however, have to study the enemy and see what they’re capable of at their best. They have to pick out the big picture, not be blinded by feel-good emotions, however satisfying.
Similarly, GOP strategists can’t convince themselves that a one-sided game-plan in itself will be enough to win in 2020. “Do-this, do-that” or “collect-this, spend-that” shouldn’t assume that the enemy is playing the same way. Ask any great quarterback. The biggest mistake that ordinary Republicans now make is to limit their understanding to like-minded people, whether in person or via the media.
It would be a big mistake to think that those out to defeat President Trump are simply the dodo Democrats who were scowling ignorantly in their white costumes at the recent State of the Union address. Any mainstream reporter could have woken the hornets by yelling the joking question “Are You White Supremacists?” Each shallowly represented some Identity Politics voting block. These Democrats, including Pelosi, are simply being used. They are convenient pawns.
The real enemy is the Far Left who have a history of take-overs at the top. “Capture the leaders,” they know, “and the rank-and-file will fall into place.” Fill all new vacancies. Mete out rewards, punishments, and promotions, and you can control the whole thing. Look at what’s happened to universities and mainstream media since the 1960s, and you’ll see what’s happened to the Democratic Party. Running fake GOP candidates like McCain and Romney for president was part of the same strategy.
Those few who have studied the Far Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party are familiar with books like Saul Alinksky’s Rules for Radicals and names like Tom Hayden. This is OLD HAT now. The new “Far Left” revolutionaries have already devised more powerful sequels such as Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. More powerful because little known. Trump’s surprise 2016 election actually empowered them. Nothing worse than losing through complacency.
Websites such as Portside: Material of Interest to People on the Left are training manuals for Leftist leaders who are even now implementing new plans to defeat President Trump, hoping that we will ridicule or dismiss their campaign efforts without actually reading:
The possibility of Trump’s re-election in 2020 is a real one. And it’s one we are determined to stop. When we – a group of left activists rooted in community and labor organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area – gathered this spring, it was with the urgency that came from seeing our communities under relentless assault from a white nationalist, authoritarian administration. But we also knew that 2020 – with the size, energy, and leftward shift among the opposition to Trumpism – would give us an opportunity: if we plan carefully and think big, we can make a difference at the ballot box in 2020, the kind of difference the Left failed to make in 2016. And we thought we could do this while building a stronger and more cohesive Left.
So we launched Seed the Vote. Our practical focus is centered on bolstering 2020 electoral efforts to defeat Trump and the GOP in two key states, Nevada and Arizona. We are already building infrastructure and recruiting to (1) deploy several hundred Bay area activists to work with partnering unions and community-based organizations in Nevada and Arizona for two-week periods in October 2020; and (2) connect volunteers with remote call-in and text efforts from the Bay Area to register voters, protect voting rights and increase turnout in key constituencies in November 2020. We are also considering partnerships in more states and expanding our field work depending on capacity—this may include connecting some Bay Area folks back to their home states and/or work with college students. We launched Seed the Vote as a project of a federal PAC.
