Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
That’s the 13th rule of confrontation tactics from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” the 1971 classic that’s winning present-day shout-outs from folks who have obviously never read the book.
Alinsky said that a campaign can’t effectively run against City Hall—a concrete, inhuman thing—but should instead target a caricature of the mayor. This prevents scapegoating and buck-passing, he argued, and creates a “with us or against us” polarization. Effective tactics require a cartoon as an opponent, because acknowledging the nuance and complexities of the other side “becomes political idiocy.”
Straddling ad hominem and straw man arguments, the 13th rule has a long history in politics from both the left and the right. Former GOP Rep. Dick Armey is one famous student of the Rules, particularly the 13th. As a member of the Health, Education and Labor Committee in 1993, he introduced the “death panels” trope against “Hillarycare” (Sarah Palin cribbed it). He was majority leader during the Clinton impeachment and, after his resignation, founded tea-party wellspring FreedomWorks, where he preached the Gospel according to Saul.
So it was hardly surprising to hear this echo of Alinsky from Bill Clinton last night as he contrasted the Hillary he has known for 45 years with the caricature crafted by the GOP over the past two decades to attack her, and through her, him:
So your only option is to create a cartoon, a cartoon alternative, then run against the cartoon. Cartoons are two-dimensional, they’re easy to absorb. Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard. And a lot of people even think it’s boring.
Forty-four years after “Rules” was published and Alinsky’s death, it’s now the right wielding his tactics against the highly nuanced, complex “new left” of the Clintons and Obamas.