Excerpts from "Rules for Radical Conservatives" by David Kahane

Just a reminder from Chris: This book is written from the point of view of a Leftist giving advice to the individualist, freedom-lover, conservative, libertarian, Objectivist--whichever right leaning moniker you want to grab on to.  The author of this blog gives it an excellent review.  The excerpts below are obviously not comprehensive--they are simply excerpts.  This is a witty, fun, exciting read--and as it turns out--is excellent advice to boot!  These are time-tested tactics which every Constitutional, freedom-loving American would be well-advised to adopt; we've been overdue for entirely too long.  Below are some excerpts and brief entries from each section:

Rule No. 1: Know Your Enemy, His Intentions, His Weapons, and His Weaknesses, and Use Them Against Us. You too can play relentless, on-message hardball with every scandal, hypocrisy, lie, and fundamentally flawed policy your adversaries dish up.

Which brings us to Corollary No. 1: Know your enemy.

In other words, you used to know how to fight. You used to know how to recognize a mortal enemy, used to know how to deal with that enemy--by destroying him. Unconditional Surrender was Grant's motto, and Eisenhower's too. Since then...not so much. Now you're in another kind of war, not bloody but bloody serious, a war for your soul and the survival of your country, and you're looking for the exits.

This is, in case you haven't noticed, a fight to the death. For you, elections are a means to an end, usually some sort of corrective to what you see as our excesses. Action and reaction. For us, elections are the ends in themselves, and we won't be happy until we get to the last election. After which, there will be no more elections. The Apostle Saul laid all this out for you to see in Rules for Radicals, but of course your side never bothered to read the American equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book.

If you had, however, you'd understand the truth of Corollary No. 2: Have no illusions about our nature: Pride Incarnate, brimming at once with anger, resentment, and an overweening moral superiority based on nothing more than our own inflated self-esteem.

Which brings us to Corollary No. 3: Forget political correctness and speak your mind, no matter what the consequences.

You might file this one under: "Pair, Grow a." As we've seen, PC is an all-purpose tool for your subjugation, expressly intended to prevent clear speech and thus clear thought. Those two things alone can defeat us, which is why we cannot permit them in our Orwellian version of a "free country."

Rule No. 2: Become What You Behold. Adopt some of our scorched-earth tactics, best described in David Mamet's Untouchables: "They pull a knife, you pull a gun."

Because unless you lose your fastidiousness, and are prepared to get down in the trenches with us, your opponents, you're going to lose. Because if your enemy really is the Liberal/Progressive/Socialist/Communist/Marxist/ Fascist axis of "evil" that has so long bedeviled you, it's long past time that you put aside your nice-nancy-boy ways and come out swinging. Because whereas you see politics as a necessary evil, we see it as a combination of our life's work and a blood sport, the thing that makes our day jobs worthwhile--even if, as in most cases with us, our day jobs are also the things that provide us with the wherewithal to screw you. After all, who's paying our public sector salaries? Suckers!

And yet, time and again what we hear from your side is that you wouldn't want to adopt our tactics, that you wouldn't want to lower yourself to our standards and principles (your first mistake, since we don't have any, other than holding you to yours), that you would rather be right than win if it means fighting as dirty as we do. To which I say: that's why you're losers.

How to Talk Like a Liberal (and You Must)

1) You can't possibly mean that. This is our way of saying you're full of it, but it goes beyond simple disagreement. It means whatever it was you just said, it has put you beyond the pale of polite discussion; it also very likely means you're a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, and/or a practicing Roman Catholic. All of which are, among our crowd, grounds for instant expulsion from polite society.

2) Everyone knows that. Another all-purpose put-down, signifying that you're a complete idiot. It's a riff on the old Soviet "as is well known..." boilerplate, which pretty much signaled that whatever statement came next was a complete and utter lie, although we preferred to use the term "higher truth."

3) You're not really... This one's meant to indicate that the person you're speaking with is little better than a cave-dweller, a superstitious moron whose walnut-sized brain is probably stuffed with religious "dogma," and who is profoundly uninterested in all the Major Important Truths discovered in the late nineteenth and early twentiet centuries by Marx, Engels, Lenin, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, and Oprah. Categories include practicing Catholic, Orthodox Jew, Republican, conservative, resident of flyover country, gun-owner, heterosexual, member of a two-parent family, and a driver of a 1984 Chrysler LeBaron.

Time to turn the tables. Come on, this one's easy--you can do it:

"You're not really still a Democrat, are you? Everyone knows that all right-thinking people were switching to Independent, and not moving in lockstep with the neo-Stalinists."

"You're not really still an atheist, are you? Everyone knows there's no upside."

"You're not really still going to stop at one kid, are you? Small families are so antisocial. Besides, everyone knows that we need lots and lots of kids to support the Social Security system."

Which brings us to Corollary No. 1: Forget being liked. You don't have time for a popularity contest, especially insofar as we're concerned. Take the battle to us at every opportunity. After all, we never stop--we attack you in the supermarket, in restaurants and dinner parties--so why should you? Remember, the Left feels emboldened because--based on abolutely no sense of traditional "morality" at all--we feel we are right. Whereas, you know you are right, but have always been too polite to mention it, preferring to indulge our whims rather than run the risk of being called intolerant.

Corollary No. 2: Treat us with the same contempt with which we treat you. Or, to put it in language you might actually understand: Treat us with the same respect we give you, which is none. Same difference.

After all, you don't see us being nice to you, do you? (Unless it's when we desperately need something, or when the "lone" foreign crazy manages to rattle us for a minute or two, or when we're looking down the barrel of an electoral gun.) You don't see us ever reaching across the aisle, extending the olive branch. Laurel wreaths are for winners, but olive branches can go pound sand.

[Side note by Chris: I've said it before--leave the Christianity, Buddhism, and Karma Doctrine to your church, meditation mats and your everday life. Rightees--when it comes to saving this country--you've got to slay a few Romans. So knock it off with the, "I wanna play nice" bullshit.]

Rule No. 3: The Culture Is the Message--So Seize It

This is crucial. Accept the fact that the "culture"--by which, of course, I mean "us"--is never going to reflect your version of reality until you change it from within. Our infiltration and takeover of the "narrative" has been going on since the 1960s and reversing it is no small task. If you're looking for acceptance or, worse, love from the mainstream media, your old college professor, or Hollywood, forget about it. This is a war you've long ago lost--but which you can still win if you choose to fight it. But the first step in fighting lies is picking up an (eek!) weapon and choosing to use it, so until you do that, buddy, you are standing there as bare-assed as Mel Gibson and his band of Scottish merry men in Braveheart. And look how far they got.

Corollary No. 1: Get back in the media game. And how do you do that? Simple: Start by taking your media back.

Let's face it: at this point the U.S. is pretty much a banana republic, riven by two factions that are not quite numerical equilibrium. Which is a fancy way of saying that there are more of you than there are of us, always have been, but by using our pet media as a kind of kinescope, the illusion of an illusion, we have been able to fool you throughout the last century into believing that we have both right and might on our side. On the one side are you, the revanchists, clinging desperately to your faith and your guns and your charming belief in your cherished "Constitution," while on the other is us: revolutionary, amoral, and wanting nothing more than the complete destruction and remaking of your country--a mote in our eye since its inception!--in the egalitarian-collectivist mode. Which, after all, only fulfills the prescriptions inherent in your Declaration and constitutional Preamble. From the Shining City on a Hill to Satan's throne of Royal State of which Milton sang--that's the descent we have outlined for you.

Corollary No. 2: Stop thinking that "Hollywood" is a dirty word.

Here's what you need to know: Hollywood runs on fear and greed and as soon as the money lies on the opposite side of the Left-Right equation, fear and greed will switch teams. For a long time its unassailable position as the driver of the popular culture left it immune to the vagaries of the marketplace: as long as big "tent pole" movies made money, it could afford to indulge its leftist political leanings with films designed not to succeed at the box office but to succeed at Beverly Hills dinner parties. Hence the spate of Iraq War duds like Rendition and Redaction and Return to Bethlehem (okay, I made that last one up, sort of), all made with malice aforethought and with the full knowledge that they wouldn't recoup a penny (not that any Hollywood film ever recoups--just ask any writer with monkey points!).

Corollary No. 3: Reclaim academe.

This is a longer-range proposition; we have had, after all, nearly half a century to completely hollow out the major colleges and universities, especially your so-called "Ive League" institutions, largely in the name of our most sacred of sacred cows, the Great God Diversity. The Ivy League sent a disproportionate number of its sons (no daughters allowed in those benighted old days) off to fight in the Civil War, World War I, and the Big One. But after the collapse of the Germany of the National Socialist German Workers Party--and what part of that name sounds like the Reagan Revolution to you?--and Imperial Japan, our elite colleges, especially in New England and on the West Coast, became infested with the scions of Moral Relativism, so that a few short decades after the socialist fascists were suddenly overrepresented among the socialist-communists of Harvard, Yale, and Brown students. Viva la Revolucion!

Rule No. 4: Get on Offense and Stay on Offense--and Take No Prisoners. Attack our premises, expose their true nature and consequences, and pin them on us, hard.

So there you are, lying flat on your back on the canvas and wondering whether the referee got the number of that truck. For decades, we've pummled you and pounded you, if not quite into submission then pretty close to it. We've robbed you of your tongue, of your fighting spirit; we've hamstrung you with lawyers and political correctness. We've made you doubt the worth of everything you once held dear--now there was a practical application of "Critical Theory" if there ever was one!--including your culture, your history, and, well, you. We've practically criminalized everything about you, including your thoughts, and it's just a matter of time before we get those too. Why, we've got top government-funded scientists in their labs woking on a brain wave reader right now!

And I don't mean pattycake. Reagan was able to deflect us with wit and good humor and pretty much got his way. True, he didn't really deliver on any of his campaign promises except cutting taxes and destroying the dear old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--the Panama Canal still belongs to Panama, and the departments of Energy and Educations are happily still with us, continuing their irresistible, malevolent bureaucratic growth and giving birth to hordes of new Democratic voters every day--we sure hated his guts while he was around, although we wept copious crocodile tears after his demise.

Corollary No. 1: No more Mr. Nice Guy. It is better to be feared than liked.

McCains's defeat should have made this clear. The "maverick" who relied on the civility of the Senate and never came to an aisle he didn't want to cross was woefully unprepared for the attacks launched on him by his erstwhile "friends" in the media; the man who had been for years the press corp's favorite Republican was suddenly suspect. "I don't know," a lot of my friends here in Los Angeles said to me over sushi at Fat Faish, "I used to like McCain, but something's happened to him." That something, of course, was running against our guy--not that he put up much of a fight or anything. In fact, the whole election was like watching one of those boxing movies from the late 1940's, like The Set-Up, except that this time the fighter does what the gangsters tell him to do, and that's take a dive. No heroic resistance here: having alienated a large swatch of the conservative electorate, McCain was left alone on the field, and only the Warrior Princess at his side made his ultimate electoral showing as respectable as it was. Naturally, around our campfires, we don't quite tell it that way, since Sarah Palin is the one thing we Hollywood types fear almost as much as Saint Michael with a blazing sword showing up on our doorsteps just as we're about to do a line of coke and slip in the hot tub with a couple of Polish starlets.

Which brings us to Corollary No. 2: Get rid of the RINOS.

As far as you losers are concerned, every RINO is, in effect, on our side, because he or she has already surrendered the high ground of moral principle for the squishy soft middle ground of "compromise." But as that lunatic Rush Limbaugh keeps shouting at you at tiresome length, there can be no accomodation on principle: the minute you agree to meet in the middle, then you've already abandoned your redoubt and are now engaging us right where we want you--on the killing fields of compromise. Those fields are already littered with the whitening bones and bleached skulls of your earlier Hectors, whose corpses we tied to our chariots and drove round and round the walls of your shining city on a hill.

[Side note by Chris: Ayn Rand would have loved that last paragraph...LOL!]

Rule No. 5: Let the Dismantling Begin

Indeed, make destruction your campaign slogan: Roll it back! Get those clean-cut young military officers out there on the hustings with a vow not simply to restore the status quo ante, but to revel in the destruction. Describe lovingly how each brick is going to be taken down, each monstrous agency of the federal government--a government that, by now, pretty much everybody hates, even us--is going to be cut down to size or eliminated altogether. How lazy, shiftless bureaucrats who make twice what you do are going to be de-unionized, forced to actually work in the dismantling of their own agencies, of their own jobs, and then summarily and publicly fired. How budgets will be first slashed and then eliminated entirely, how excess government property will be closed down and auctioned off, how taxes will be drastically reduced on the productive class and increased on the freeloading class--you know, the 47 percent of all taxpayers who today pay not one dime in federal income taxes. You want to be part of this country, says to the bunch of schmuck loser real estate hustlers in the film version of Mamet's materpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross: "It's fuck or walk."

Here's the best part, the way you're going to sell this. You're not just tearing stuff down and blowing shit up for the fun of it, the way we do, and the way history's first rebel, Satan, tried to do in heaven. Oh, no. You're tearing down the walls of the socialist prison we have been building around you. You're not destroyers, you're liberators! Just like we were back in 1968!

Corollary No. 1: Challenge everyone of our premises and our "accomplishments." Expose their true nature and consequences for real people, and pin them on us, hard. Freeze them, personalize them, polarize them, as we love to repeat ad nauseam.

It's easier than it might look. Since our only real defense against any of your philosophical challenges is to call you a Nazi and walk away in a huff, get in our face at every conceivable oppportunity. Do not let us make one single statement unchallenged; do not let us frame and dictate the terms of any debate. Wouldn't it be one of the great cheer moments in modern American history if once--just once!--you saw a military officer or a captain of industry testify before Congress, subjected to the preening, self-indulgent stupidity of some leftist man-of-the-people millionaire, when all of a sudden the man or woman stops, turns on his tormentors, and says something like this:

You know, I have been sitting here for more than an hour, being lectured by a bunch of clowns who can't tie their own shoes without a pollster, a bunch of boobs I wouldn't hire in my mailroom, if I still had a mailroom, a bunch of lying, malevolent skunks who have used their offices as "public servants" to further enrich themselves and their friends, all at the expense of the Little Guy they profess to care about. By rights, you all ought to be hanging from the lampposts along Constitution Avenue as penalty for the sins you've committed against our great country. You deserve to wind up like Mussolini and Clara, upside down in the village square, where the kids can throw rocks at you. You deserve to be frog-marched out of here, placed under arrest, your finances opened to public inspection, your private papers exposed for all the world to read. In a show trial, broadcast live on national television and streamed live to every computer, iPhone, Blackberry, PDA, iPad, and other devices not yet invented, you should be made to confess your malfeasance, offer restitution, beg forgiveness, and then be shot for the crimes you have committed against our country, its people, and its Constitution--a Constitution you swore to uphold and defend, but which apparently meant to you loot and pillage. That's what ought to happen to you, Senator, and in a just nation, under God, that's exactly what's going to happen.

[Sounds of doors being forced open, a great crowd rushing the hearing room. Senators and their aides scream as an enraged populace, unmolested by any police, seizes the solons and drags them from the chambers...]

Corollary No. 2: Think the unthinkable. Go ahead, it's fun!

Get rid of Social Security? Why not? It's always been a giant pyramid racket, borrowing from the unborn Paul to pay the sixty-five-year-old Peter today--and to keep paying him for the next twenty or thirty years. The problem is, there is no unborn Paul, since some young woman proudly taking control of her body just aborted him. And without the Pauls of the future, we have to print extra money to cover the unfounded liabilities inherent in a pyramid scheme such as this one, which was sold to the public (duplicitously, as usual) as both a "safety net" and a retirement plan, as both a "tax" and "not a tax" as it withstood the legal challenge that rightly ought to have strangled it in its cradle. For decades, Social Security was considered the "third rail" of American politics, touch it and you die, but pretty soon we're all going to be like Mr. Blue in the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three and deciding it's easier to touch that rail and get it over with rather than face the consequences of having given birth to the Thing That Devoured Cleveland--and every other American city.

Which bring us, in extremis, to Corollary No. 3: Having thought it, act on it.

The country is ripe for a huge rollback. Abolish many or most of the regulatory agencies, sunset the laws that have outlived their usefulness or accomplished their objective, put a moratorium on new legislation until the old debris is cleared away. Actually act on campaign promises to eliminate wasteful federal agencies, such as the departments of Energy and Education as well as the cumbersome and Orwellian Homeland Security Department. The goal: to try and restore the proper balance between productive citizen and "civil servant," with the former the master of the latter once more.

Rule No. 6: At All Times, Think Constitutionally

The key, of course, is to get the lawyers on the case. As we've seen, one of our objectives was to turn the U.S. into a natnion of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers, and in that you'll have to admit we have succeeded spectacularly. A kind of mystic aura has grown up around the law, as with wine or classical music, except that if you get it wrong you can go to jail. In fact, though, the law is nothing more than shared morality and social goals given written expression. Everything else, as they say, is commentary.

Corollary No. 1: Get back to first principles: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

They're all that's standing between you and either anarchy or dictatorship, and the sooner you figure that out, the quicker you'll bring the eternal battle between your guy and our Big Fella back into some kind of weird, Buddhistic, Asian-fusion harmonic equilibrium.

Rule No. 7: Adapt the Time-Honored Conservative Message for a New Kind of America and a New Kind of American

Corollary No. 1: Put your money where your principles are and demonstrate that you welcome new-look America--as long as it stays America. Because either all men are created equal, or they aren't.

Still, that's no reason for you to surrender to our Brezhnev Doctrine. What we liberals have done to the black community since the 1960s should be a national scandal: though our vast panoply of soul-crushing (now there's a concept!) social programs, enforced by unelected bureaucracies, and a public school system that makes the Western Front in World War I look like just another day in the trenches, we have destroyed black families (and we're working on white families now), encouraged what used to be called antisocial behaviour, celebrated the worst regarding matters of mores, and generally turned a culture updside down, so that it is now ruled by "ganstas." We swooped in, like drug dealers, hooking the people on hopelessness, and at the same time promising to cure the very diseases we had spread around. The beauty of our plan, something we learned from the crooked politicians of the Chicago Machine and Tammany Hall, was that the cure for misery was always more misery, to keep the people in a state of permanent desperation and illusion, a never-ending cycle, always spiraling downward. Sheer genius, really.

Corollary No. 2: Mean it.

Either you're all in this together or you're not; either this unprecedented experiment works or it doesn't; either America succeeds as humanity's last, best hope, or she's ours--another failed state, having fallen victim to "immutable" truths about humanity: that we really can't just all get along on our own and we need Big Brother to act as the enforcer. The country may be changing demographically but acceptance of the bedrock principles of the United States and its Founders must be universal and nonnegotiable. Conservatives need to return to the previous model, in place when great waves of immigration swept the country around the turn of the last century. Nobody gave a sucker an even break back then, and the newcomers were left pretty much to fend for themselves, to take care of their own and, most important, to get with the program. If America really is a state of mind, a collective dedication to the idea of individual rights, then what does it matter the country of origin?

Corollary No. 3: Make new friends.

There is no reason you racist reactionaries can't continue to make inroads among the Hispanics and the East Asians, including the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Filipinos, all of whom have strong streaks of self-reliance and intact families; and the subcontinental Indians, who have already begun to dominate entry-level capitalistic fields and whose numbers will only swelll in the future, as they arrive here with a full command of English and well grounded in the traditions of British democracy. After all, who are the "Reagan Democrats" but the children of the white ethnics who took the Tammany shilling in the bad old days because it was shortest, swiftest, and most effective way up and out? You don't see many Irish on the Lower Ease Side of Manhattan anymore, nor Germans aound Tompkins Square or in Yorkville. Things change, but plus ca change...they got replaced by more or less the same kinds of people.

Corollary No. 4: Expose the Left for who we really are.

In the end, despite the relentless hammering from the anti-civilizational pseudo-intellectuals of the Frankfurt School and its American fellow travelers--as frustrating as we might find it--this country is strong enough to resist the importation of smug, and yet somehow victimized, Centra European socialism as a response to its perceived (or imagined) problems. And once the large population understands that our unctuous manner of speech, our assumed aura of "goodness," and our faux "concern" for anybody other than ourselves is just the same tired old act that fired the beast Marx as he howled in London; brought Mussolini and Hitler to power and sent Lenin to the Finland Station; seized China and North Korea and Cuba and half of Africa and condemened them to a life of squalor and misery and deceit and death--then I, for one, don't want to be on the business end of their wrath when it comes. Once it is frozen, personalized, and polarized, a la Alinsky, the black heart of Marxism will be as helpless as the Wizard of Oz--a deadly illusion that you will be well rid of, and will make me very happy I picked up that beachfront condo in Havana for a song. (I think it was a rousing, if slightly drunken chorus of "The East is Red.")

And that, my stupid friends, is a day you should hasten. But, in order to do that, you're going to have to pay strict attentnion to our next rule:

Rule No. 8: Get Better Officers

Because, frankly, you've forgotten how to fight.

You can't afford colorless Speakers of the House, or go-along, get-along collaborationists like most of your senators. You need officers who are going to inspire the troops, not dispirit them, commanders who've earned the love of their followers precisely by not crossing the aisle, instead preferring to stand on principle. These brave men and women are going to have to step out of the ranks and step up, and when they are attacked by our side--as they surely will be--you must defend them. Nobody wants to lead troops into battle and, halfway across the killing fields, find out he or she is all alone.

Corollary No. 1: Turn in the direction of the skid.

Do exactly the opposite of what your first instincts are.

After so many dreadful years n the post-FDR electoral wildernes, congressional Republicans more resemble battered wives than all-American men. They want to cover their heads and assume the fetal position in the hopes we'll stop pounding on them. But as the reaction to Sarah Palin--on both sides--demonstrated, the base is ready to follow its leaders into battle, provided the leaders show that they really want to fight. McCain's finest moment was his acceptance speech, in which he exhorted the audience to fight with him. Unfortunately, his lust for aisle crossing and the plaudits of his once-and-future buddies in the media got the better of him, so he kept his promise to lose--did he ever!--rather than challenge our definition of "dirty." By which we always mean asking questions about inconvenient truths that make our side uncomfortable and queasy. Stick to the issues! we shout, as our pet media poodles happily arf arf in the background. McCain was our perfect stealth candidate, a military man who didn't really want to fight.

If there's one lesson you need to learn from the debacle of 2008, it's this: never, ever, ever again nominate a man who tells you he'd rather lose honorably than punch our lights out.

Corollary No. 2: Elections are not about programs, but principles.

Hey, Dumbo--"programs" are our thing...

Principles are what counts. So stop trying to outdo us by rushing to the microphones with a silly plan to solve every social ill this side of halitosis whenever our pet frogs in the media croak about a new "crisis" in the daily news feed. In fact, forget about programs completely. Just say no! And if we call you out and demand to know--which we will, you can bet on that, it's part of the playbook--the details of your "plan," laugh and tell them to shove it and start talking about principles. To do otherwise is to accept our premises, which means you have already lost. Instead, stick to the big picture: liberty, self-reliance, faith, freedom. Those concepts are to us like a crucifix to a vampire, but heed not our squeals. Instead, keep brandishing your integrity and have the satisfaction of watching us collapse, writhing, on the floor into a puddle of putrescent malefaction, just like Christopher Lee in all those great Hammer movies.

*Infiltrate our organizations and, if they're criminal, expose them in the free media and turn them in. We're the side who hates "rats," remember, which is why we still hate Elia Kazan for "naming names" during the "commie witch hunts" of the 1950's, and directing that revanchist move on the Waterfront. Throughout the twentieth century, we've done our best to implant the notion in the public's mind that there's something dishonorable about taking down criminal organizations from the inside. We expect there to be honor among thieves!

*Call us out every chance you get. Personalize the target, freeze it, polarize it--go ahead, give it a try. Two can play that game! Because what happens when you do this? Well, your instinct is immediately to apologize, grovel, and promise never to let it happen again. Our reaction is to snarl, snap, bark, and, when necessary, bite. We become the unloveliest of unlovely people (I'm sure you can think of many current examples). Punctuate that unctuous, self-righteous "argument from authority," the everybody-knows-this subsumation we always trot out before the discussion is even held. Challenge the sense of entitlement, which often cloaks itself in victimhood, mostly imagined, since Harvard-educated lawyers really have a hard time playing the victim card. In other words, turn Alinsky's fourth and fifth tactical rules--Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules and Ridicule is man's most important weapon--against us; make us live up to our absurd preachments and ridicule us when we don't. We hate it when that happens.

*Take to heart the first rule of Alinskyian tactics, that real power is what the enemy thinks you have, not what you really have. All our snarling betrays the deep inner insecurity we feel when we face you, because we know that if you wanted to, you could crush us under your heel. In our tiny, never-been-west-of-the-Hudson or east-of-Palm Springs souls, we envisage a great dark ugly world or armed militias, God-fearing church folks, country music, and women who can shoot and look great in little black dresses at the same time. As Alinsky's ninth tactical rule has it, The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

*Always keep the pressure on. No time to go home now to spend more time with the wife and kids. Your side may not have picked this fight, but you're in it so you'd better be in it to win it.

Rule No. 9: Never Stop Fighting Until the Fight Is Over

Corollary No. 1: You have an honorable history--use it.

Not only did you clean out the rats' nests of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, you also won the Cold War against an enemy who preached liberty, equality, bread, and peace even as it enslaved and starved and murdered millions. And you did it despite a forty-year record of often open treachery and sedition by the Left, from the Soviet spy rings of the 1940s through Jimmy Carter's private letters to various heads of state, asking them not to cooperate with George H.W. Bush's Gulf War coalition.

Show us for the haters we really are, people who hate the United States even as we bristle when you "challenge our patriotism," people who hate Western Civilization ("Hey hey/ho ho/Western civ/ has got to go"), people who hate organized religion (the sainted Alinsky told us to attack Christianity, and have we ever) for its proscriptions and it contributions to the rise of the West. Strip away our masks and reveal the skulls beneath our skins--not the skulls of ordinary human beings, but the titanium skull of the Terminator. As entertaining as it can be, rage is all we have left, instead of a coherent philosophy.

Corollary No. 2: Go Radical Conservative

The Left loves to fight, at least symbolically; it's what we live for. Conservatives tend to fight only when roused by intolerable provocation. But the Right's attitude should be more like the old joke about the Irishman who stumbels into a back-alley brawl and asks, "Is this a private fight or can I join in?" Hit the Left, hit us for profit, hit us just for the sheer hell of it. But hit us, and keep hitting us until we scoot back to Lanskyland, or Beverl Hills, or Minnesota, or the Upper West Side, wherever we feel most comfortable, to lick our wounds and plot our comeback. Modern conservatives roll over and play dead. Radical Conservatives take the fight to the enemy. Because, at this point, you have no other choice.

You've been standing by helplessly, watching the growth of the Leviathan state as it gradually but inexorably slices away freedom after freedom like some slow-moving threshing machine, and you're the poor sod who's bound hand and foot and lying directly in its path. As you lie there, you have a chance to reflect that, like the hero of any good Greek tragedy, you've brought this doom upon yourself. You think back to every time you've nodded, acquiesced, and even voted for our liberal agenda, which always came to you couched in the language of "progress" and "rights." Of "why nots" and "It can't hurts." You cheered when our orators vowed to continue the fight; hell, you even got a little misty when loser Teddy Kennedy took his leave of the 1980 Democratic convention with his famous peroration: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

What cause? What hope? What dream? That's the part you never thought to ask. Because you never realized that, far from being real progressives, we're Odoacer at the Sack of Rome in A.D. 476 (oops! I mean "Common Era")--the pillage is the point, not the progress. By the time we have to deal with the consequences of our destruction, we'll be dead. But, to look on the bright side, so will you.

When we look at the founding documents, particularly the Constitution, it is our intention, through the assiduous application of "critical theory," to exactly reverse their meaning, to force them to justify our statist goals and to get you to agree to the revised meaning as a truth to be held self-evident. When this happens, and we are working as hard and as fast as we possibly can to at last unveil our new earthly paradise of complete state control in the one country explicitly and deliberately founded on its exact opposite, our work will at last be done. Our long march through the institutions will be over. Our command and control of the universities, the media, the civil service, and the very institutions of government enumerated in the Constitution's first three articles will be absolute...

Never again will you shudder at the words "We're from the government and we're here to help." All those awful alarmist books they forced you to read in school (well, private school anyway), the ones about good and evil and the dangers lurking under the so-called "totalitarian" bed--Paradise Lost, 1984, Animal Farm, Darkness at Noon, The Gulag Archipelago-what did those writers know? It's a brave new world, comrade. That's the proposition we are currently putting to the test, and unless you stop us, and soon, we're going to find out together just that means. As always, you'll be the last to know, waking up only when you find yourself in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, instead of the United States of America.

Commit this to memory: there is nothing we will not do to tear you down. There is no lie we will not tell, no falsehood we willl not spread, no fact that we will not twist or manufacture. There is no accusation too base for us to deliver, no area of your life that we will not examine, no personal or family secret that we will not expose if we can. At long last, sir, the truth is out: we have no decency and we are proud of it. In our agony and misery and our self-hatred we are determined to take you down with us.

Commit this to memory: never stop punching. No victory is permanent, no defeat is final. So if you really believe that stuff about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty, then you have to start acting like you believe it. There may be legislative compromises along the way, but there can never be compromise on principles. Established societies are rarely conquered from the outside; indeed, they are established societies precisely because of their adherence to shared principles and cultrual norms. You don't create a social structure by beginning with who you're not. You start with who you are and build from there, brick by brick, block by block, city by city. You don't create lasting institutions by starting to question their foundations from the minute you've invented them. You can't have "critical theory" unless there's already something there to tear down. To wield the wrecker's ball first requires the work of a master builder.

And whose side would you rather be on? The builder or the destroyer?

Or, to put it another way, the builder, demonized as a destroyer? Or the destroyer, hailed as a builder? We are nothing if not always through the looking glass.

Commit this to memory: always be on the attack. Oh, we'll come at you with every smear in the book, you can rest assured of that, but instead of getting all weepy and apologizing for whichever sin we've just accused you of, try this: laugh at us: If there is one thing that the Devil cannot abide...but let the ignoble C.S. Lewis--an atheist who became a Christian, the rotter--cite appropriate authorities:

"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to tests of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear the scorn."--Martin Luther

"The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked."--Thomas More

The proud Devil will not be mocked for he cannot bear scorn, and neither can we. Destroy the myth of our moral superiority and watch us crumble. And then club us and keep clubbing us. Oh, we'll have one final trick up our sleeve, and that will be to make you feel bad about using our despicable, reprehensible tactics against us. Ignore us, and keep fighting.

Which brings us to this last and most important rule:

Rule No. 10

The fight is never over.