What Righties can do: a treatise on how to organize for power.

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Some Righties argue that we don’t need to learn from Lefties, because Righties are just better. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: “Lefties are weak, Lefties are cowardly, Lefties are afraid of work.” But absolutely none of that is true. Lefties are tough. Lefties are brave. Lefties are smart. Lefties are the hardest workers you’ll ever see.

Part of the issue here is cultural. Some of the ways Lefties get and use power are very culturally offensive to Righties. It’s hard to intellectually appreciate a difference in values when every fiber of your being is telling you that the other person is just being an asshole. And it’s hard to see the mechanics at work, because the press talks about Lefty movements and moments as if they magically just happen.

But other parts of this attitude go back to high school civics class. Political movements are part of civics, too, but schoolbooks don’t talk about how they actually work. In high school civics we talk about bills, and we talk about laws, and we talk about the three branches of government, but we don’t ever talk about power. We talk about Rosa Parks, but not the ; we talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., but not . Which means that we don’t address huge parts of how the world actually gets changed.

The legendary biographer Robert Caro mentioned once that he had heard college professors talk very convincingly about how the paths for freeways in New York City were chosen. The professors listed variables, and considerations, and trade-offs, and they talked very knowledgeably and nothing they said was worth a damn because the paths for freeways in New York City were chosen for one reason and one reason only: a freeway was where it was because . Considerations meant nothing next to power.

That’s what movements are about: gaining power. Movements don’t just happen. And they’re not the product of orders from on high, or rent-a-protestors paid out of somebody’s checkbook. They’re the product of a lot of people doing a lot of hard work over a very long time.

Righties don’t want to believe that. Thus, the same old horseshit: “oh it’s all George Soros.” “Oh we don’t get turnout for protests because we all have jobs.” “Oh we’d win a Second Civil War in five minutes anyway because the Lefties are wusses and we’ve got all the guns.”

It can’t possibly be that there’s work we need to do, work that we’ve been neglecting because we don’t understand how it works and we’re lazy. That’s unthinkable.

Well, think it. Because it’s true.

Some Righties talk about the idea of a post-political world — the idea that a system with less citizen input, on the continuum from Singapore to monarchy or neocameralism — would be more stable. But in a world without elections, there would still be shifts in power. It’s just that the mechanisms by which power shifts wouldn’t have occasional moments of relative transparency. And those circumstances, I hate to tell you, favor the Left: look at how often the Right wins elections but doesn’t get what it wants, while the Left doesn’t win as many elections and gets what it wants anyway. Leftist organizers are some of the most important political figures in the country. I didn’t vote for them, did you?

I don’t know about you, but I like getting what I want, and I like the idea of having as much power to get it in as many ways as possible. I like the idea of having power to keep my politicians honest, power to exercise directly in my world, and power that can be used directly to make my country, the world, and people’s lives better.

And let me be frank about where I’m coming from politically. I’m not coming at this from a hard righty perspective here. I’m not even a fringe type, not a reactionary or an ancap or anything. I’m a normie, and this is me screaming at normies that we have to get up off our asses. Listen up, normies: if we don’t organize for power, other people will.

The good news is: there are a lot of us.

So let’s organize for power. Here are some brief thoughts about how to get it.

Briefly put, the organized Left has power because it has lots of organized groups that

employ different approaches
communicate, negotiate, and cooperate
serve their side’s goals
show value
provide service to their community

The Right has groups focused on electoral power and getting out the vote, mainly.

This divergence has led us to the position we’re in: the Lefties are better at winning the culture, the Righties are better at winning elections, and neither political party is what you’d call responsive to its base.

The bases on Left and Right have had different approaches to this situation. On the Left, the base is focused less on pure electoral power than on capturing Institutions and pressuring for power directly. This has actually worked out quite well for them, and provides a foundation from which to press for electoral power. On the Right, the base is focused on evangelism: saying, repeatedly and without means for enforcement, what it believes people should do. This approach has worked out much less well. Righty action is mostly devoted to electioneering, meaning that a Righty base that wants change gets no practice in the mechanics of obtaining it, unless they serve on campaigns which are by definition mostly run by establishment types. This suits the Righty establishment just fine.

The only area where grassroots Righties have had actual measurable success in the last couple of decades is gun rights. And there’s a reason for that: literally everything about guns mandates local activism and involvement. State and local firearm laws vary, so you have to know what’s lawful where you live. And unless you have a lot of acreage and are willing to put in the necessary work to build your own range, you need to go someplace to do your shooting, which means a gun club or a range. Which means you’ll be encountering, on a regular basis, people like you who share your self-interest when it comes to your ownership of firearms. You can’t buy guns on Amazon dot com, meaning that you have to go to a gun store or a gun show, which offers chances to meet people. And at a gun show somebody’s probably tabling for something political, or selling books you won’t find in your local Barnes & Noble, or… you know the drill. Gun shows are onramps to activism. That’s why gun nuts do so well.

Righties need more onramps.

The dichotomy between Lefty and Righty approaches persists on college campuses. Lefty students are trained to build capacity and power. Righty students are trained to listen to speakers (evangelism) or run a campus newspaper (evangelism). So we’re pretty good at talking, but not at actually accomplishing anything.

So let’s be something more than evangelists. Calling for personal transformation is inefficient without mechanisms that back it up with pressure.

Mechanisms aren’t as fun as just telling people what to do, I know. Everybody wants to be Malcolm X, nobody wants to be Third Brother From The Left X who stuffs envelopes in the mosque’s basement for ten hours. But we need Third Brother From The Left X. And we need somebody to tell him what to do, and somebody to buy the envelopes, and somebody to run the mailing list.

That’s the stuff I’m going to focus on here: making a place for Third Brother From The Left X, and how we do it.

I’m not claiming to be a leader of anything here, and I’m certainly not an expert. I’m just the guy who’s saying, “This is the workshop; the tools are over there.” Even if I were an expert, it wouldn’t do us much good: we don’t need An Organizer. We need tons of organizers. And lots of organizations.

So that’s step one: creating lots of organizations.

I don’t mean social clubs, either. Righties love to make social clubs: get together, hear a speaker, bitch about liberals, punch and pie. Well, screw punch and pie; we need to create effective organizations that have, as their focus, actually doing stuff.

The first thing I’m going to recommend is a decentralized approach I’ve been talking about occasionally for a while. It’s called Five Righties, based on the affinity group structure. Basically, put yourself together with a group of (ideally, but not necessarily) four other Righties you know well who share your politics. Give your group a goofy name. Boom: Five Righties. We’re not doing anything fancy here; these are the principles (cheerfully ripped off in part from Food Not Bombs):

Five Righties is about people, not money; about making positive rightward change, not making a buck.
Five Righties has no formal leaders or headquarters. It’s a tactic, not a movement. Every group is autonomous and makes its own decisions.
Five Righties is dedicated to nonviolent direct action and works for nonviolent social change. It is not a home for garbage people. If that doesn’t work for you, go somewhere else.

Again, it’s okay if you’re not actually five righties — maybe you start off with two or three or four people. Getting together is the important thing. Once you’ve got your group together, go do stuff. Simple stuff, to start. Leaflets and fliers promoting a simple, broadly appealing Righty message. I’m tired of going to coffeeshops and Ys and bakeries and looking at a bulletin board and seeing a bunch of fliers about Lefty things and no Righty ones. If you want to do more for visibility, pull some fun, silly stunts that don’t do any harm but draw attention to your message.

Do research on your town — since there are a bunch of you, divide up the work. Remember when you were a kid and wrote out your whole address: The Universe, The Solar System, Earth, America, State, and like that? Do that, but for the politicians who rule you. And their donors. And their allies. And their enemies. Learn who the movers and shakers are in your town. Same thing with your local press: who are the owners, publishers, editors, reporters? What are their interests, beats, vulnerabilities? Get contact information for all of them.

The most basic pressure tactic is just being a force multiplier: when you call your politicians, there’s five of you, so now instead of one call you’re making five. As you get more practice, and make more friends, you can build up lots of people to call your politicians.

Learn what other groups exist in your town: churches, clubs, business associations, that kind of thing. Go make friends. Get these friends doing stuff too, making their own groups. That’s how Lefties get numbers: they don’t have one group that tries to turn people out; they get a whole bunch of groups turning people out. The more groups you get, and the more people those groups have, the more visible your numbers are when it comes time for protests and actions.

Do capacity-building. Don’t just count on my recaps; give the Lefty authors some sales and read everything covered in the radical book club columns on the and the :

Jonathan Smucker,
LA Kauffman, DIRECT ACTION
Becky Bond and Zack Exley, RULES FOR REVOLUTIONARIES: HOW BIG ORGANIZING CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING (just skim this one)
Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE
Saul Alinsky, RULES FOR RADICALS (again, just skim this one)
Jane McAlevey, NO SHORTCUTS: ORGANIZING FOR POWER IN THE NEW GILDED AGE
Eric Mann, PLAYBOOK FOR PROGRESSIVES: 16 QUALITIES OF THE SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZER
Lee Staples,

Not covered in detail in the radical book club columns, but mentioned in them, two bonus books:

William Z. Foster, ORGANIZING METHODS IN THE STEEL INDUSTRY
William Domhoff, WHO RULES AMERICA

And don’t stop there. Read other books, too: how-to manuals, activist memoirs. Get your Five Righties group together to discuss your readings. Try some of the stuff you read about. See what works. See what fails. Identify things that you can do, plan them out, and do them. You’ll fail. Really a lot. You’ll feel stupid and ineffective at times. But that’s the learning process. Write up after-action reports to document your learning.

(continued in comment)

Note: the above article is not my own, but taken from https://status451.com/2017/11/11/radical-book-club-what-righties-can-do/. I personally found it insightful and hope you think the same. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

The first time I raised the idea of Righties learning from Lefties, a lot of people greeted it with derision. Plenty still do. That’s a terrible attitude, one that Righties need to overcome if we want to win. Some Righties argue that we don’t need to learn from Lefties, because Righties are just better. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: “Lefties are weak, Lefties are cowardly, Lefties are afraid of work.” But absolutely none of that is true. Lefties are tough. Lefties are brave. Lefties are smart. Lefties are the hardest workers you’ll ever see. Part of the issue here is cultural. Some of the ways Lefties get and use power are very culturally offensive to Righties. It’s hard to intellectually appreciate a difference in values when every fiber of your being is telling you that the other person is just being an asshole. And it’s hard to see the mechanics at work, because the press talks about Lefty movements and moments as if they magically just happen. But other parts of this attitude go back to high school civics class. Political movements are part of civics, too, but schoolbooks don’t talk about how they actually work. In high school civics we talk about bills, and we talk about laws, and we talk about the three branches of government, but we don’t ever talk about power. We talk about Rosa Parks, but not the [Highlander Folk School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center); we talk about Martin Luther King, Jr., but not [Ella Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker). Which means that we don’t address huge parts of how the world actually gets changed. The legendary biographer Robert Caro mentioned once that he had heard college professors talk very convincingly about how the paths for freeways in New York City were chosen. The professors listed variables, and considerations, and trade-offs, and they talked very knowledgeably and nothing they said was worth a damn because the paths for freeways in New York City were chosen for one reason and one reason only: a freeway was where it was because [Robert Moses wanted to build the freeway there](https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/0394720245/). Considerations meant nothing next to power. That’s what movements are about: gaining power. Movements don’t just happen. And they’re not the product of orders from on high, or rent-a-protestors paid out of somebody’s checkbook. They’re the product of a lot of people doing a lot of hard work over a very long time. Righties don’t want to believe that. Thus, the same old horseshit: “oh it’s all George Soros.” “Oh we don’t get turnout for protests because we all have jobs.” “Oh we’d win a Second Civil War in five minutes anyway because the Lefties are wusses and we’ve got all the guns.” It can’t possibly be that there’s work we need to do, work that we’ve been neglecting because we don’t understand how it works and we’re lazy. That’s unthinkable. Well, think it. Because it’s true. Some Righties talk about the idea of a post-political world — the idea that a system with less citizen input, on the continuum from Singapore to monarchy or neocameralism — would be more stable. But in a world without elections, there would still be shifts in power. It’s just that the mechanisms by which power shifts wouldn’t have occasional moments of relative transparency. And those circumstances, I hate to tell you, favor the Left: look at how often the Right wins elections but doesn’t get what it wants, while the Left doesn’t win as many elections and gets what it wants anyway. Leftist organizers are some of the most important political figures in the country. I didn’t vote for them, did you? I don’t know about you, but I like getting what I want, and I like the idea of having as much power to get it in as many ways as possible. I like the idea of having power to keep my politicians honest, power to exercise directly in my world, and power that can be used directly to make my country, the world, and people’s lives better. And let me be frank about where I’m coming from politically. I’m not coming at this from a hard righty perspective here. I’m not even a fringe type, not a reactionary or an ancap or anything. I’m a normie, and this is me screaming at normies that we have to get up off our asses. Listen up, normies: *if we don’t organize for power, other people will*. The good news is: there are a lot of us. So let’s organize for power. Here are some brief thoughts about how to get it. Briefly put, the organized Left has power because it has lots of organized groups that * employ different approaches * communicate, negotiate, and cooperate * serve their side’s goals * show value * provide service to their community The Right has groups focused on electoral power and getting out the vote, mainly. This divergence has led us to the position we’re in: the Lefties are better at winning the culture, the Righties are better at winning elections, and neither political party is what you’d call responsive to its base. The bases on Left and Right have had different approaches to this situation. On the Left, the base is focused less on pure electoral power than on capturing Institutions and pressuring for power directly. This has actually worked out quite well for them, and provides a foundation from which to press for electoral power. On the Right, the base is focused on evangelism: saying, repeatedly and without means for enforcement, what it believes people should do. This approach has worked out much less well. Righty action is mostly devoted to electioneering, meaning that a Righty base that wants change gets no practice in the mechanics of obtaining it, unless they serve on campaigns which are by definition mostly run by establishment types. This suits the Righty establishment just fine. The only area where grassroots Righties have had actual measurable success in the last couple of decades is gun rights. And there’s a reason for that: literally everything about guns mandates local activism and involvement. State and local firearm laws vary, so you have to know what’s lawful where you live. And unless you have a lot of acreage and are willing to put in the necessary work to build your own range, you need to go someplace to do your shooting, which means a gun club or a range. Which means you’ll be encountering, on a regular basis, people like you who share your self-interest when it comes to your ownership of firearms. You can’t buy guns on Amazon dot com, meaning that you have to go to a gun store or a gun show, which offers chances to meet people. And at a gun show somebody’s probably tabling for something political, or selling books you won’t find in your local Barnes & Noble, or… you know the drill. Gun shows are onramps to activism. That’s why gun nuts do so well. Righties need more onramps. The dichotomy between Lefty and Righty approaches persists on college campuses. Lefty students are trained to build capacity and power. Righty students are trained to listen to speakers (evangelism) or run a campus newspaper (evangelism). So we’re pretty good at talking, but not at actually accomplishing anything. So let’s be something more than evangelists. Calling for personal transformation is inefficient without mechanisms that back it up with pressure. Mechanisms aren’t as fun as just telling people what to do, I know. Everybody wants to be Malcolm X, nobody wants to be Third Brother From The Left X who stuffs envelopes in the mosque’s basement for ten hours. But we *need* Third Brother From The Left X. And we need somebody to tell him what to do, and somebody to buy the envelopes, and somebody to run the mailing list. That’s the stuff I’m going to focus on here: making a place for Third Brother From The Left X, and how we do it. I’m not claiming to be a leader of anything here, and I’m certainly not an expert. I’m just the guy who’s saying, “This is the workshop; the tools are over there.” Even if I were an expert, it wouldn’t do us much good: we don’t need An Organizer. We need tons of organizers. And lots of organizations. So that’s step one: *creating lots of organizations*. I don’t mean social clubs, either. Righties love to make social clubs: get together, hear a speaker, bitch about liberals, punch and pie. Well, screw punch and pie; we need to create effective organizations that have, as their focus, *actually doing stuff*. The first thing I’m going to recommend is a decentralized approach I’ve been talking about occasionally for a while. It’s called Five Righties, based on the affinity group structure. Basically, put yourself together with a group of (ideally, but not necessarily) four other Righties you know well who share your politics. Give your group a goofy name. Boom: Five Righties. We’re not doing anything fancy here; these are the principles (cheerfully ripped off in part from Food Not Bombs): * Five Righties is about people, not money; about making positive rightward change, not making a buck. * Five Righties has no formal leaders or headquarters. It’s a tactic, not a movement. Every group is autonomous and makes its own decisions. * **Five Righties is dedicated to nonviolent direct action and works for nonviolent social change. It is not a home for garbage people. If that doesn’t work for you, go somewhere else.** Again, it’s okay if you’re not *actually* five righties — maybe you start off with two or three or four people. Getting together is the important thing. Once you’ve got your group together, go do stuff. Simple stuff, to start. Leaflets and fliers promoting a simple, broadly appealing Righty message. I’m tired of going to coffeeshops and Ys and bakeries and looking at a bulletin board and seeing a bunch of fliers about Lefty things and no Righty ones. If you want to do more for visibility, pull some fun, silly stunts that don’t do any harm but draw attention to your message. Do research on your town — since there are a bunch of you, divide up the work. Remember when you were a kid and wrote out your whole address: The Universe, The Solar System, Earth, America, State, and like that? Do that, but for the politicians who rule you. And their donors. And their allies. And their enemies. Learn who the movers and shakers are in your town. Same thing with your local press: who are the owners, publishers, editors, reporters? What are their interests, beats, vulnerabilities? Get contact information for all of them. The most basic pressure tactic is just being a force multiplier: when you call your politicians, there’s five of you, so now instead of one call you’re making five. As you get more practice, and make more friends, you can build up lots of people to call your politicians. Learn what other groups exist in your town: churches, clubs, business associations, that kind of thing. Go make friends. Get these friends doing stuff too, making their own groups. That’s how Lefties get numbers: they don’t have one group that tries to turn people out; they get a whole bunch of groups turning people out. The more groups you get, and the more people those groups have, the more visible your numbers are when it comes time for protests and actions. Do capacity-building. Don’t just count on my recaps; give the Lefty authors some sales and read everything covered in the radical book club columns on the [decentralized](https://status451.com/2017/07/11/radical-book-club-the-decentralized-left/) and the [centralized Left](https://status451.com/2017/10/27/radical-book-club-the-centralized-left/): * Jonathan Smucker, [HEGEMONY HOW-TO](https://www.amazon.com/Hegemony-How-Radicals-Jonathan-Smucker-ebook/dp/B01NAOCERF/) * LA Kauffman, DIRECT ACTION * Becky Bond and Zack Exley, RULES FOR REVOLUTIONARIES: HOW BIG ORGANIZING CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING (just skim this one) * Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE * Saul Alinsky, RULES FOR RADICALS (again, just skim this one) * Jane McAlevey, NO SHORTCUTS: ORGANIZING FOR POWER IN THE NEW GILDED AGE * Eric Mann, PLAYBOOK FOR PROGRESSIVES: 16 QUALITIES OF THE SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZER * Lee Staples, [ROOTS TO POWER](https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Power-Manual-Grassroots-Organizing/dp/1440833710/) Not covered in detail in the radical book club columns, but mentioned in them, two bonus books: * William Z. Foster, ORGANIZING METHODS IN THE STEEL INDUSTRY * William Domhoff, WHO RULES AMERICA And don’t stop there. Read other books, too: how-to manuals, activist memoirs. Get your Five Righties group together to discuss your readings. Try some of the stuff you read about. See what works. See what fails. Identify things that you can do, plan them out, and do them. You’ll fail. Really a lot. You’ll feel stupid and ineffective at times. But that’s the learning process. Write up after-action reports to document your learning. (continued in comment) ----- **Note: the above article is not my own, but taken from https://status451.com/2017/11/11/radical-book-club-what-righties-can-do/. I personally found it insightful and hope you think the same. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.**

(post is archived)