'Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it.'

Donald Trump and how the language of the left threatens democracy.

Sometimes, there are weeks when I check my phone for news just once or twice a day and don't turn on Fox News. The last seven days have not been that sort of week. Last Sunday morning, I was on my phone looking for minestrone recipes, and I clicked on The Australian website and read about what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania. I spent the next two hours on the couch watching Fox News while clicking refresh on the news sites on my phone every ten minutes.

I was sitting on that same couch on a Tuesday night in 2001. I was watching The West Wing when they cut to Jim Waley who said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. From memory I think that was just before 11.00 pm. I didn't move from the couch until about 4 am. Everything changed that day. The world on 12 September 2001 was different from what it was on 10 September 2001. 

I've pretty much had Fox News on all week. I was excited when Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate, and I went to get my copy of Hillbilly Elegy from my bookshelf. His views on Ukraine are not mine, but very few politicians understand what ails America better than Vance. Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016, and on the cover of my edition is most likely the first and last endorsement of Vance The Economist will ever make - 'You will not read a more important book about America.'

Like many people, I've been thinking about the language and imagery the left uses. Until this week I hadn't seen the cover of the June edition of The New Republic. If you haven't and you're curious, google it and you'll easily find the image. It asks, 'Why waste time debating the extent of Trump's fascism when we ought to be fighting it instead?'  Yet somehow it's Trump who the mainstream media label as 'divisive'. This week I also learned something new about Michael Godwin. He's an American lawyer who coined 'Godwin's Law'. The concept has a few varieties, one of the most popular being, 'In an argument, the first person who  mentions the Nazis loses.'  Last year, Godwin wrote an article in The Washington Post, 'Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you.' 

The media outlets that gleefully report Joe Biden's claim that Trump was an 'existential threat to democracy' say nothing about real existential threats to democracy, like the US government coercing social media companies to censor dissent against the decisions of the government. The world's media would rather speculate on what Donald Trump might do as president than investigate what Justin Trudeau actually did do as prime minister of Canada. If the government confiscating the bank accounts of anti-government protesters is not at least somewhat of a threat to democracy, then it's difficult to know what is.

In an article on Wednesday, US author Derek Hunter helpfully listed some of the Republican politicians who, over the years, have been likened to Nazis, including  George W Bush, John McCain, Ron DeSantis, and Mitt Romney. 

Political campaigns lie.  This comes as a shock to no one.  But sometimes the lies that campaigns tell are so big, so absurd, that there really should be lasting consequences.

It's not unusual to attack your political opponent.  It's less common to tell people that you are all that stands between them and the violent death of the republic.

If you are willing to call your political opponent literally worse than one of history's greatest monsters, is it unreasonable to think that at least a handful of your listeners - perhaps a few mentally unstable people with a political obsession - might take you seriously and act to stop the threat?

'Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation,' Biden said just three weeks ago.  'That is not hyperbole.  He's a threat to our freedom.  He's a threat to our democracy.  He is literally a threat to the America that we stand for.'

Hunter makes an important point about the effect of this name-calling.

…much of the left's political strategy is to keep people in an emotional frenzy.  They understand that people in an emotional state are easily manipulable and less likely to think or act rationally.  The problem is, it isn't easy for them to keep that pot simmering without having it boil over.  A constant state of outrage is almost impossible to maintain.

But when your only campaign strategy is 'The other guy is Hitler' - and Biden has little else to run on, given his record - you've assessed the risk and decided it is worth trying.

The government and the media are all too keen to put and keep the public in a condition of 'emotional frenzy'. To Trump, can be added of course climate change, and a few years ago Covid. During the time of Covid, I was struck by the fact that medical officers seemed to prefer to panic people than to comfort and reassure them. Last week, in a speech, Clare O'Neil, Labor's minister for home affairs, warned that 'democracy is under threat due to populism, misinformation, disinformation and foreign interference'. How 'populism' threatens 'democracy' she didn't explain. Nor did she look closer to home and consider that the perpetual 'emotional frenzy' in which governments like to keep their populations is a bigger threat to democracy than anything on her list.

Democracy relies upon argument and discussion. 'The other guy is Hitler' is a tactic deliberately designed to shut down democratic debate. But shutting down democratic debate is the price the left is willing to pay to supposedly 'save democracy'. Similarly, to 'save democracy', the left in America would willingly subvert democracy to prevent Trump from appearing on presidential ballots. These are the strategies the left-wing organiser Saul Alinsky advocated in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals - A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Alinsky had no qualms about admitting that the end does justify the means. Rules for Radicals is the twentieth-century The Prince but it’s set in 1960s Chicago, not sixteenth-century Florence.

The second chapter of Rules for Radicals is titled 'Of Means and Ends' and begins like this. It's brilliant in its simplicity.

That perennial question, 'Does the end justify the means?' is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, 'Does this particular end justify this particular means?'

Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends.  The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it.  Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises.  The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms.  He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action.  He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.  To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.  The real arena is corrupt and bloody.  Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.

Alinsky lists thirteen 'rules'. Number One is 'Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have'; Number Two is 'Never go outside the experience of your people; and Number Three is 'Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy'. The power of ridicule in the face of totalitarianism has often been talked about by people ranging from Vaclav Havel to Mark Steyn. Jokes about communism are not usually of the laugh-out-loud kind. They're ridicule. Ronald Reagan's jokes about communism were devastating. 'How do you tell a communist? It's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.'  Sure enough, ridicule is on Alinsky's list. It's Number Five - 'Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.'

Alinsky's thirteenth rule is probably the best-known. 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it'. Alinsky applied this rule in the context of campaigns against corporations. The campaign is not against an impersonal legal entity - it's against a person. 'John L. Lewis, the leader of the radical CIO labor organisation in the 1930s, was fully aware of this, and as a consequence the CIO never attacked General Motors, they always attacked its president, Alfred 'Icewater-In-His-Veins' Sloan; they never attacked the Republic Steel Corporation but always its president, 'Bloodied Hands'  Tom Girdler…'

When it comes to Donald Trump, picking a target, freezing it, and personalising it is quickly done. The critical part of the rule is the polarisation bit. You can't be more polarising than to claim your opponent will be a fascist dictator who'll end democracy. Alinsky explains why the left doesn't do things by half measures. 

As we have indicated before, all issues must be polarised if action is to follow.  The classic statement on polarisation comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me' (Luke 11:23).  He allowed no middle ground to the money-changers at the Temple.  One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.

A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative.  He can't toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision.  He can't weigh arguments or reflect endlessly - he must decide and act…

Many liberals, during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn't a 100 per cent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity.  Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard and then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as 'He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity, and a good husband'? This becomes political idiocy.

Alinsky's tactics might sometimes be effective, but they're not good for democracy.

Recommended reading and watching

• I've mentioned to you previously I subscribe to the brilliant Substack by David McGrogan in the UK, News from Uncibal and a few months ago, I spoke with David on IPA Encounters, which you can watch here. Another brilliant Substack I subscribe to is The Upheaval by N.S. Lyons (a pseudonym). Written three days after Butler, 'The World-Spirit on a Golf Cart' is outstanding. It begins, 'In the minutes after Trump dodged a bullet on live television, I joked on Substack Notes that 'one does not simply shoot Napoleon.' News from Uncibal and The Great Upheaval are examples of how much of the most interesting, challenging, and informative writing about the events of the world is no longer to be found in the mainstream media.)

• Talking of ridicule, this is a five-minute highlight package of some of Reagan's best jokes on communism. You would have heard some of them before - but they're all good. In more ways than one, it's politics from a different era.