Commenter “huxley” observes:
I wish to interject, as an ex-leftist, that the left is not a group of masterminds calculating their next move as in chess.
The left is a complex set of subgroups working in affinity but not top-down. They throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
In 1999 the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization were the big deal. Old leftist strategy: rich vs poor.
In 2011 Occupy Wall St. continued the rich vs. poor, but though expectations were sky-high the whole project collapsed. It didn’t capture mainstream popularity and the tent city squalor (looking forward to today) was considered a horror even by liberals.
However, what sold like wildfire was Obama’s blatant sowing of racial division. So that’s where we are today.
The left does what works, at least in terms of maintaining and extending its power.
No question that the left is not a monolithic group, much less one composed entirely of “masterminds.” But it doesn’t have to be. Like all groups, there are leaders and followers, and like many groups, the organization of the many elements on the left is loose or sometimes nonexistent or even in conflict. Remember this old clip from the brilliant Monty Python 1979 movie Life of Brian?
Lots of “splitters.”
But let’s not make the mistake of thinking there are no planners, and no very clever ones. There are many planners on the left, and there are also groups with hierarchies. Not everything they try works, but I have little doubt that they strategize and plan. Why do we know Alinsky’s name, for example? Because his most well-known work was a set of tactical rules for guiding the left to victory. And of course Obama was an Alinskyite – in fact, a trainer:
Alinsky synthesized his theory of political agitation is his famous 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals”, considered a founding text of modern community organizing and a classic of radical-leftist agitation-propaganda theory.
Obama received a comprehensive course in Saul Alinsky during his years as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience Obama recalled as “the best education he ever had.”
Years later in 2007, The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza interviewed then-senator Obama and found him still “at home talking Alinskian jargon about ‘agitation,’” and fondly recalling organizing workshops where he had learned Alinsky-esque concepts like “being predisposed to other people’s power.”
In those years, Obama was schooled by disciples of Alinsky himself, including Mike Kruglik, who remembered Obama as “the best student he ever had,” a “natural … undisputed master of agitation.” …
… He then went on to teach Alinsky concepts and methods at community organizing workshops and seminars in Southside Chicago.
Obama also served on boards in Chicago, including the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, which dispensed grants to groups specializing in Alinsky-style agitation.
Gramsci was another planner, and a very successful one in terms of his ideas taking hold. One familiar name is Bill Ayers, who started out as a terrorist but later marched a la Gramsci through the institution of education, with great success for the leftist cause:
In short, Ayers uses his position as a professor of education at the University of Illinois to inculcate his students with the notion that they are revolutionaries sent to the schools to brainwash students. …
[Sol] Stern’s conclusion?
If Barack Obama wins on Nov. 4, [2008] the “guy in the neighborhood” [Obama’s disingenuous description of Bill Ayers during the campaign] is not likely to get an invitation to the Lincoln bedroom. But with the Democrats controlling all three branches of government, there’s a real danger that Mr. Ayers’s social-justice movement in the schools will get even more room to maneuver and grow.
We’ve seen it come to pass.
Education is the foundation of the growth of the left’s power, and it is no accident; there was a plan. If all leftists weren’t in on the planning – and they certainly were not – that doesn’t mean there weren’t prescient and insightful planners. One who is less famous in this country and yet influential was Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Here’s a description in an admiring leftist periodical:
… Freire continues to be a lodestar for teachers working in poverty-stricken communities across the globe, and for just about anyone who’s searching for a sense of justice in an unjust world.
Every critically minded educator has at some point used Freire in their teaching — either to gain some insight into the upside-down world of the oppressed or as the inspiration that led them to view teaching as a way to overturn society’s asymmetries of power and privilege.
And all of this was happening in a way that meant that most people didn’t notice it until it had reached critical mass, which made it more difficult to guard against.
No doubt the left still has plans.