Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (17 page)

1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
Deception is useful, and giving the other side incomplete information is just as useful. If it was good enough for Gideon, it’s good enough for Alinsky.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
You can’t preach abortion to Catholic priests or pork to Jews. Work with the material you have, or you’ll confuse your own forces.

3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
If they can’t handle you because they’ve never handled anything like you, you’ll win.

4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
Alinsky writes, “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Hypocrisy
is obviously the key word here, and it’s the left’s favorite
charge for the simple reason that the vast majority of people with standards are “hypocrites” at some point in their lives.

5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
Just ask Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase), George W. Bush (Will Ferrell), or Sarah Palin (Tina Fey).

6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
You’re not going to win if your people are bored out of their minds.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8. Keep the pressure on.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Don’t be scared of the opposition—even if they level their most feared weapon at you, it probably won’t be that bad. Meanwhile, level threats whenever possible, because that will scare the opposition.

10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
Pressure causes reactions, and you can work off of the reaction of your target.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
Find the enemy’s most cherished belief, then exploit it against your target. Alinsky uses the example of passive resistance in India—by exploiting the British pride in their civility, Gandhi defeated them. It goes without saying that the Frankfurt School used precisely this tactic in twisting their First Amendment freedoms against the First Amendment in the United States.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Make sure you have a plan once you’ve achieved your goals.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize, and polarize it.
This is the most important and famous of Alinsky’s rules. You have to pick a target, then freeze it and prevent it from shifting
blame elsewhere, then personalize it by making sure that it is something specific and identifiable rather than general, and finally, polarize it by demonizing it. It does you no good to talk about the pros and cons of your target—you must show the target as entirely evil, and yourself as entirely good. This is commonly known as the politics of personal destruction. (See Palin, Sarah.)

Finally, Alinsky provides a simple reminder:
the real action is in the enemy’s reaction
. You must provoke your enemy into reacting so that you can work off of the reaction. If you do a good enough job, you can force them to make a mistake. When they do, you must be ready to exploit it.

It’s worth exploring one of Alinsky’s case studies in order to see these rules in action. In 1964, he moved to Rochester, New York, in the aftermath of race riots and targeted Eastman Kodak, the largest company in town by far. He quickly implemented rules 13 (target, freeze, personalize, and polarize) and 5 (mockery is the best strategy). The media interviewed him when he stepped off the plane in Rochester, asking him what he thought of the town. “It is a huge southern plantation transplanted north,” Alinsky said.

This got him the reaction he was looking for from the opposition, which gave him more targets to attack. W. Allen Wallis, president of the University of Rochester and director at Eastman Kodak, went after Alinsky. Alinsky responded by comparing Wallis to George Wallace of Alabama.
³⁵
Did it matter if the charge was true? Of course not. But it was effective.

Putting into action the rest of his rules—using the law as a tool to make the establishment obey its own rules, moving outside the experience of the enemy, letting your soldiers enjoy the experience, etc.—Alinsky suggested another tactic in Rochester, a flamboyant
and outrageous tactic sure to get a response simply because of its pure outrageousness. He suggested that blacks buy tickets to the Rochester symphony orchestra, eat beans beforehand, then fart over and over again to disturb the upper-class white folks.
³⁶

This is brilliant. Farting for a cause is about as smart as you can get, because there’s no way to defend against it—it’s not illegal to fart, it’s completely offensive and makes people uncomfortable, and even as black folks are passing gas in a chamber music concert, they get to claim the moral high ground and pillory their enemies as racists.

Alinsky is infuriatingly awesome—he’s smart where his compatriots are “intellectual,” and always reaches his intended audience, something professors often fail to do. He knows what he wants and how to get it, and he makes it easy for anyone to follow his pattern. The trickle-down intellectualism of Marcuse and Horkheimer might have worked on a college level, where students substituted professors for parents as authority figures and felt liberated by their new, less stodgy, “be yourself” quasi-parents, but it took the brilliance of an Alinsky to bring the Marcuse Marxist creed to the common man by fooling him into thinking it was purely American. It took Alinsky’s thug tactics to enervate the happy, healthy American middle class and get them to accept major changes to the status quo, and to mobilize the racial and sexual identity groups that Marcuse needed to substitute for the generally complacent middle class. It took Alinsky to shut up the opposition using the methodologies of political correctness, to frighten people into submission and create an informal anti–First Amendment regime where if you speak out, you become a personal target. It took Alinsky to put the Complex totally into effect. Every successful interest group and social movement in the United States since the 1960s has used Frankfurt School ideology and Alinsky rules.

It’s tragic it has taken conservatives so long to realize it.

After I wrote
Hollywood, Interrupted
, and as I was helping create a conservative Hollywood network and creating the barrel full of liberal eggs that is the Huffington Post, I felt good. My journey into the culture wars had begun auspiciously. We were making strides by using the left against itself at the Huffington Post and by creating a conservative underground in Hollywood.

But I hadn’t been tested by fire. I hadn’t felt the pressure cooker. I hadn’t put myself out in the open.

What would happen once I forayed into the bright sunlight of public scrutiny and faced the music?

I was about to find out.

In March 2005, I got invited to appear on the HBO program
Real Time with Bill Maher
.

At the time, the left was starting to get its sea legs in terms of framing the Iraq War as illegitimate and President Bush as a heinous commander in chief. I knew the audience would be composed of Maher’s loyalists, the
MoveOn.org
plants. It wasn’t my
first time before a studio audience—I’d done the
Dennis Miller Show
many times—but this was my first time before a hostile studio audience.

It went relatively well. I defended Bush on the war, which made me performer non grata, but I also got off a couple of one-liners, especially one mitigating the concern that people were having about teenage boys having sex with attractive twentysomething teachers. At the time, there was a spate of those things happening, and I said something predictable that your average red-blooded male would say, explaining that there’s a double standard and a fundamental difference between a teenage girl having sex with her older male teacher, and a teenage boy having sex with his hot female teacher. It was a throwaway line that in my mind ameliorated my presence on the panel, a line that conveyed that I wasn’t one of those stodgy conservatives.

I got off the show after having been fearful of the audience and Maher pummeling me, and I had survived, without a problem.
Maybe I’ll get invited back again
, I thought to myself. At the postparty, I received universal plaudits from the crew, and I was treated like a regular citizen by Bill Maher and by an actor from
The West Wing
. It felt good to be patted on the back instead of being treated like a pariah. I was riding high.

The following Monday, I got a call from a friend of mine, a closeted conservative Hollywood filmmaker.

“I saw your appearance,” he told me. “Why didn’t you stand up for what you believed in?”

It was the deepest cut, because in the recesses of my mind I was fully aware that I had gone on Maher’s show wanting desperately to be liked instead of trying to make my best case. I realized that I talked a mean game, and I thought a mean game, and I gave a lot of people great talking points and great ideas, but I’d spent too
much time thinking about the persona I could craft for myself that I and my family could bear while living in the middle of West Los Angeles, the heart of the beast.

For the next four years, that Maher appearance gnawed at me. I had been flirting with acting like myself in public, but I was still afraid. Sometimes in the midst of my sleep pattern I would wake up from nightmares in a cold sweat, one thought running through my mind: what if I went in front of the public and got booed? What if they rejected me? It became a constant, growing fear in my life.
Am I going to be who I am
, I asked myself,
or am I going to craft a more sophisticated yet untruthful public persona where I pull my punches?

Then, in March 2009, I was asked to be on Maher’s show again. It was at the beginning of the Obama administration, the height of the Hope Brigade and the Change Parade, and there was every opportunity to be an accommodationist. Even moderate conservatives were still telling their followers to give Obama a chance.

I knew Obama, and I knew he didn’t deserve a chance to turn America into a Frankfurt School dystopia. He was a Frankfurt School scholar, a Marxist gradualist in moderate’s clothing, a community organizer in the Alinsky mold. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stake out that position with Bill Maher. Perhaps they even invited me on because I had complied with the rules of the game back in 2005.

When I arrived at the studio, my adrenaline started flowing. I had forgotten how much trepidation comes up by doing a show like
Real Time
, where you go to a CBS soundstage and they bring you to your dressing room, where they give you a jacket of the show and a fruit basket, where they delicately dress you up with makeup and make you feel like an actual member of the glitterati. It’s an intoxicating sensation. It’s validating. But don’t be deceived.

Being invited on
Real Time with Bill Maher
is the quickest way to kick in the groin any past perception of inferiority. You know
you’re going to sneak up onto HBO and an ex-girlfriend or a highschool bully or a teacher who gave you a D is going to be there, and sitting on that stage is a giant “Screw you” to all of them. The narcissism is appealing—but the problem is that you’re only affirmed in your narcissism if you buy into the system, if you get the cheap laughs and convince the audience to love you.

Again, I was faced with a choice. I could appeal to the composite audience, which was a conglomeration of all the insecurities of my childhood and young adulthood, saying,
Hey, look, I’ve arrived, I’m on television—and what’s more, I got the host to laugh!
Or I could appeal to my true conscience.

In the green room, I greeted the staffers I remembered from the last time and spent time preparing with Maher’s longtime executive producer, Scott Carter, an old-school liberal with an immense respect for difference of opinion. I met Professor Michael Eric Dyson, and I started to piece together what the show was going to be like. I knew who he was—
Hey, that’s Cornel West Jr.! You’re the guy who speaks in iambic pentameter def poetry slam clichés. Prepackaged speechifications that nobody understands. Oh, brother!
—and I realized that they weren’t even having a third panelist who could alleviate the tension with a joke. I recognized that Maher, with political correctness on his side and as his chief weapon, was going to use Michael Eric Dyson to frame me as the racial Other, as the oppressor himself or, at the very least, as the unwitting aider and abettor of the oppressor.

We walked out onto the stage, or rather, onto the stage behind the stage, as Bill was beginning the show. I stood on the secondary set waiting for the discussion to begin, in the dark, next to Michael Eric Dyson. I was thinking only one thing:
Stand up for what you believe in this time. Stand up for what you believe in this time. Stand up for what you believe in this time. Don’t divert into comedy mode.
Don’t take the easiest pathway out of this experience. Stand up for what you believe in.

It was an incredibly committed moment in my life. I knew I was going to go out there and face down an audience predetermined to hate my guts, Bill Maher predetermined to make mincemeat out of me using his winks, looks, nods, dismissive gestures, and comedy to make me the outsider. And I knew I wasn’t going to run away this time behind my shield of jocularity and submission.

The bell rang, and it became obvious very quickly that this wasn’t going to be the kind of fight where the two boxers tiptoed around the canvas looking for openings, testing the opponent’s commitment to the match. The rumble began immediately. And I was right—the audience was predisposed toward hating me. And Bill’s eyes, from the very outset, asked me,
Why are you even here?
despite the fact that he had invited me.