Rules For Right-Wing Radicals

[Kamaji]

Rules For Right-Wing Radicals

Rules for Anti-Radicals is a detailed and useful guide to parts of organizing that the right side of the aisle needs to be using a lot more.

JUNE 24, 2022
DAVID HINES

Rules for Anti-Radicals: A Practical Handbook for Defeating Leftism, by F. Paul Valone, (Bacchus USA Publications: March 2022), 383 pages.

One organizing problem Righties have is that our institutional knowledge isn’t shared. Our major conferences tend to be more about saying how right we are rather than sharing effective methods, and our most effective organizers are siloed. The strongest grassroots groups we have are in the pro-life and gun-rights movements, and those activists don’t talk to each other. Most of our organizers don’t write about their experiences, and the books we do produce too often prefer polemic to procedure.

Despite his background as a state legislator, H.L. Richardson’s classic Confrontational Politics emphasizes attitude and angle-of-approach more than nuts-and-bolts details. The 2009 history Home School Heroes: The Struggle and Triumph of Home Schooling in America, by Christopher Klicka and Josh Harris, is quite an interesting book, but its authors’ tendency to ascribe all credit for key moments to God skates over the mechanics of how exactly God’s mortal agents worked for His will. Any number of books by pugnacious professional conservatives who make a living spreading their ideas through words emphasize the importance of…well, pugnacity and spreading one’s ideas through words.

Which means we should take note when somebody tries a different approach. Case in point: the recently released Rules for Anti-Radicals, by F. Paul Valone, founder of Gun Rights North Carolina, a no-compromise grassroots state-level rights group focused on legislation. (Disclosure: A former North Carolina resident, I was once a member of GRNC and found its newsletter useful; this is the extent of my experience with Valone, with whom I have had neither personal nor professional interaction.) A departure from most books from people on the right side of the aisle, it offers not just a rant on how terrible Lefties are, but practical advice on how to achieve political goals based on things Valone and his organization have actually done. It’s detailed, thorough, and organized, which one would expect considering that Valone spent a couple of decades as a commercial airline pilot, and he’s frank about his desire for his book to become The Organizing Manual for the right-of-center.

The book has some notable flaws that should be discussed up front. Some are familiar weak spots, particularly among naturally pugnacious Righties of Valone’s generation: an overemphasis on Saul Alinsky; cracks about leftists being the real fascists; a view of leftism as a top-down hierarchy with powerful puppet-masters; a historical myopia on the history of leftist movements, in which American leftism began in the 1960s; disdain for opponents leading to credulousness (notably, citing an obvious internet forgery as an example of an actual antifa text). Other flaws come hand-in-hand with the book’s strengths. Paul Valone is a guy who has achieved successes with an uncompromising grassroots group focused on making a difference via the legislative process. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he feels the solution to [your columnist waves his hands at everything] is establishing lots and lots of no-compromise grassroots groups focused on making a difference via the legislative process. The result is that the book is strongest on that front and weaker on activism outside that process.

Valone divides activist action into economic, political, legal, and non-legislative. He is comfortably at home in the political and legal: passing or scuttling laws, getting politicians elected or defeated, and issuing stern legal letters or filing lawsuits. These are the best and most thorough sections of the book. He is less comfortable and less detailed on corporate campaigns, boycotts, and the like, but still much better than the stuff Righties usually get. Valone’s analysis of what makes a target susceptible to a boycott (“Will your supporters boycott the target? Does the target make money from your supporters? Is the target vulnerable to negative media? Will other groups pile on? Is the company otherwise vulnerable?”) is less sophisticated than the methods used by leftist groups to consider such things, but it’s likely to be eye-opening to people who haven’t considered what, other than a desire for revenge, actually goes into making boycotts possible.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rules-for-right-wing-radicals/