Saul Alinsky Political Strategy. Don’t laugh. It works, unbelievably well!
“Rules for Radicals” – 1971, and forever.
1. Power isn’t just what you have, but what your opponent thinks you have. Make them believe you’re stronger than you are.
2. Stay within your supporters’ experience. Don’t use ideas or language they don’t understand.
3. Go outside your opponents’ experience when possible. This can confuse and unsettle them.
4. Make your opponents follow their own rules strictly. They often can’t live up to their own standards.
5. Use ridicule as a weapon. It’s hard for opponents to counter and can make them angry, causing mistakes. Blame your opponent for things you have done or about to do. This makes it sound like an excuse when they defend themselves. If they are explaining, they are losing.
6. Use tactics your people enjoy. This keeps them motivated and involved.
7. Don’t let a tactic drag on too long. It gets boring and less effective.
8. Keep constant pressure on your opponents. Don’t let up.
9. The threat of something is often scarier than the thing itself. Use this to your advantage.
10. Develop operations that keep constant pressure on the opposition.
11. If you push a negative idea hard enough, it can turn into a positive.
12. When you win, have a plan ready for what to do next.
13. Pick a specific target, focus on it, and make it personal. Personal character attacks remove the focus from performance or ideas. Use grand and large unprovable descriptions of how dangerous they are. “Debunked” and “discredited” are almost magic words when the opponent attacks with statistics or facts, or even video or photographs. Destroying your opponent is often easier than proving a point by performance or logic.
Since opponents are each likely to use these strategies, those who ask “WWSA Do” most shrewdly, and “print the most handbills,” push the most advertisement and “name recognition” dollars around, will generally “win”.
A different strategy entirely, that you would hear from Christopher Voss and Brandon Voss, would be “a person is six times more likely to buy from someone they actually LIKE — than someone they dislike.“ WOW! Wouldn’t it be fun if politicians took that seriously sometime.
