Rocketforge

Glenn Reynods linked to How David Beats Goliath and had this to say about it:

Is getting active in every Congressional district kind of like a full-court press? But don’t wait for elections: “Insurgents operate in real time.” Give ‘em something new to react to all the time. But it’s not easy: “Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.” And remember this, too: “When the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.”

This is part of what has bugged me about the Tea Parties I’ve been helping organize here in Atlanta and around the country. As we finished the first and started talking about the second one on April 15th, myself and others began asking what the protests were attempting to accomplish. The answer was exposure and getting fiscally conservative politicians elected. But both of those goals amounted to playing the game by Goliath’s rules. Modern protesting for media impact was invented by the left. And electing fiscally conservative representation assumes that the Tea Party movement reflects a majority of the electorate. Recent polls suggest it isn’t. Both amount to asking the other side’s permission to be relevant.

But whether or not you are a minority doesn’t matter. In today’s world its actually an advantage if played well. Taking Malcom Gladwell’s admonishment to play to your own strengths, lets do some analysis. What differentiates the people in the Tea Party movement from those in Goliath’s army?

1. We work. Hard.

One of the major complaints about the first tea party event was that it was on a week day which meant few people could come because of work. Most of the participants are between 30 and 60 and are in their prime working life. One of the reason’s Goliath’s Army can protest so well is that most have are young enough that taking time off from the Gap is relatively easy.

2. We pay taxes.

Because we work most of us earn enough to be above the “pay no income taxes due to deductions” line. That means the bulk of the income tax receipts to the IRS come from us. We may be the ones who are saddled with the burden but it also means we have a good bit of power if we decide to wield it.

3. We are geographically diverse.

We live in and have ties to “fly over country” that Goliath’s Army simply cannot relate to or easily access. Properly organized we can “flash mob” every middle of nowhere Congressman where ever he/she may be.

4. A good percentage of us are traditional single earner families.

That can mean that kids and mothers (or fathers) may have the time to do distributed activism kind of work. “Play dates” can be created where kids create the collateral that a subversive campaign needs.
Think about all of those can drives during World War II.

5. We are more patriotic.

While patriotism (”love of country”) does exist on the left, the majority of those waving flags, supporting troops, and going to July 4th celebrations are largely on the right.

6. We are more religious.

Self-identification as Christian and church attendance is higher among those on the right. Churches make a great community nucleus to build around.

7. We are more respectful of and comfortable with the military (and vice versa).

Former military people understand organization, motivation, duty and honor. By using their skills and motivating them to become involved we can create a very strong and reliable organizational background.

8. <insert something here>

What do you, as a Tea Party participant, think should be added?

In all of the cases Malcom Gladwell discussed, the guy at a disadvantage was also in the minority. The left has captured public education and turned it into an indoctrination system. Because of that we may not be in the majority. Even if we are, that doesn’t mean we can’t get what we want. If anything the past century has been about minority groups demanding and getting what they want. Its time for us to demand that and do what it takes to get it.

As some on twitter surmised, I was involved in organizing one of the America’s Tea Party protests last week here in Atlanta. Many of the people who attended (in the pouring rain!) had never done a protest like that. We had about 250 people come out with only 5 days notice and in some really bad weather. In my experience that’s a very significant turnout.

But I’m afraid its not going to be sufficient. Looking at vote totals from 2008 you are going to have to do something different in order to move the electroal needle. Protests only have meaning when they indiciate consequences to not paying attention to that groups desires. The left has also deadened the media to the newsworthiness of protests. Unless they are a proxy for some other action, a protest is very ignorable and can easily be spun badly by singling out your fringe elements (yes, I do mean “Birthers”).

So here are two thoughts in an attempt to spark a discussion:

Solutions – Those of us enamored of small government need to figure out private sector solutions to perceived problems, document them in detail, and market them as aggressively as possible. About 50% of our countries citizens have rejected self-reliance as being to hard. We need to show them how modernity has made it easy and the preferred method. They just need a little bit of training to get there.

Actions with impacts – making our voice heard by embracing social media and using that to organize protests may be necessary, but, IMHO, it is insufficient. We need something that has a measurable impact on the system. Here are some of the suggestions I’ve heard so far:

1) Strike/sick-out/day-off – Usually centered on April 15th, this is a Producer’s Strike. A time for those who pay taxes, pay their bills, and attempt to life a life of self-reliance take the day off in order to show the country who’s carrying the load.

2) W-4 restructuring – Can you change your W-4 deductions so that for 3 months you claim as many as possible in order to reduce your per-paycheck payments to the Federal Government to as near zero as you can. Then later in the year you jack it back down it again in order to avoid penalties. That way you can achive a tax protest without getting into trouble with the IRS. I Am Not A Tax Lawyer so I have no idea if this will work or if its legal. Can anyone help out here?

3) Camp out in front of the office of those who voted for the stimulus bills on a permanent basis. As legally as possible we should harras the tar out of our elected officials. Not sure what this would achieve though.

Anyone got any other ideas?

CPAC 2009 started today. Conservatives/Republicans from around the country are meeting to figure out what happened over the past 8 years and what to do about it. In many cases they are assuming that there is something “wrong” with conservatism and that it may need to be re-invented. “Conservatism” is a difficult thing to pin down. The Burke-ian view is the easiest one for this discussion. It is the view that Conservatism is the inclination to object to the capriciousness of Government and those who would use its power to constantly be attempting the “new”.  The result of that view is what informed Burke’s view of Liberty and made his view compatible with Hayek’s. “Small government” conservatives put more weight on the government action aspect of that formulation while “social” conservatives give more weight to the “new” part, regardless of whether its Government action or not.

What I am proposing here is a new imagining of conservatism. My theory is that, while the Burke-ian notion of conservatism is still correct, there is a much more immediate and dangerous downside to Government attempting the “new” in an age where what is “new” happens at speeds beyond human comprehension. For background to this idea please consider Juan Enriquez’s recent TED talk below. The juxtaposition of current economic issues, government spending, and the rate of change in biology and robotics is hard to distill more concisely than this:

Juan makes several obvious points but also leaves many other’s unsaid. One of the ones that struck me was that, unlike previous transitions, the future Neanderthals will have access to significant weaponry. The other point is that these changes are coming and there is very little any Government can do to prevent it or indeed, even affect it. The concepts of identity, ability, retirement, work, wealth and lifespan are being made quaintly irrelevant. And no political system can hope to keep up with it. How can the American’s with Disabilities Act cope with prosthetics that are inherently better than the organic originals and when people begin voluntarily giving up “legacy” limbs, organs or senses in exchange for better ones? Imagine your hearing and vision being upgraded from an AppStore the way we do our telephones. Can any Governmental process hope to cope with that?

The idea is that Burke-ian Conservatism is a model helping the American people cope with these changes. The movement can help educate America about the changes and help progressively shrink the Government that can’t cope with what’s coming. The only system that can cope with such a high rate of change is unencumbered individuals freely interacting in an open, yes laissez-faire, marketplace. The economies that understand this will thrive. The ones that don’t (or won’t) are going to go the way of homo neanderthalensis.

Recent news of GOP gains in the presidential and congressional races post convention have gotten me thinking. Most of these gains have happened almost immediately after the convention and even then, only happened after Palin’s speeches. They also came after a previous week of the Democratic convention and weeks of pre-convention campaigning where the media acted as filter of each campaign’s message.

My theory for why the GOP has had these recent gains is that this is the first time in almost eight years that someone besides Bush is talking about Republican values and policies, that the media wasn’t able to filter what was being said, and that an almost unknown person is doing some of the talking. Its not that the American people have decided to turn any further left or right. They are simply tired of seeing a particular phraseology coming from a particular person.

Its the same phenomenon that causes a most perfectly good television show to start going downhill after the 4th year: viewers simply get tired of the same words coming from the same person. Campaigns understand this and that’s the reason why Bush had only a short teleconference at the convention. Its why Obama’s campaign attempts to minimize the exposure of the Clintons. It wasn’t that McCain was trying to distance himself from what Bush and the Republican Party stood for. It was the same reason that a new Star Trek series never uses a previous Captain. They make cameos but they’re never allowed to trump the new Captain.

I know this isn’t some glaring new insight, but it at least made me thing of some consequences. The first is that if television had been around at the time, FDR would have never even been nominated to a third term, much less win it. (Its not clear that we would have won WWII, either.) I also think it might make sense to change our system to have terms of 5 or maybe 6 years but limit them to one term. Yes, that means we’re letting television dictate our political system but I think its not really television itself, that is simply a reflection on how human beings deal with exposure to leaders. This also brings up another question: can “leaders for life” (dictator or monarch) survive in a wired world? Will they be deposed not because they are despotic or dictatorial but simply because their people are tired of their face and ready for a new Captain on next season’s show?

Same mission and same crew. Just a different Captain?

Just a thought…

UPDATE: I was thinking about this further while mowing the grass and it seemed to resonate with one of my issues with the GOP over the past decade. One of the first things I learned leading volunteer and political organizations was any leader’s #1 responsibility is to find his/her successor. Without continuity of competency at the top the organization dies. I saw this happening to the GOP over the past few years. The bench is just too weak. There are notable exceptions (Palin, Jindal) but they came up on their own. There seemed to be very little candidate development (not recruiting, development.

IMHO, political organizations should go visit Disney’s teen star machine. They understand their market, its life cycle, and how to exploit it. The GOP should be out recruiting at the highschool level, digging into Model UN and Debate teams, student government, etc and showing these kids the ropes, putting them on the fast track to leadership roles in Young Republicans/student government/corporate leadership. Why did the GOP fall down on such a simple concept?

A Skribit suggestion asks “How can McCain justify linking education to civil rights as a single issue?” so I thought I’d dig into this one since it was one of the more interesting bits of his convention speech.

So why is it a civil rights issue? Mainly because “separate but equal” doesn’t help if the school system itself sucks across the board. Brown vs Board of Education ruled that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. The result is that all public schools were integrated. But that did nothing to guarantee that those would be good schools or that they would stay that way. In many cases the children were bussed to already under-performing schools. What the parents wanted, and the reason Brown was brought, was to give minority children a good education. Instead what we have now may be legalistically called equality of access but it is access to an inferior service. And, as before, the parents of minority children are powerless to move their child to a school that does provide a good education. And, as before, it is the government preventing them from doing so. The only difference is that the government is using financial controls as opposed to dogs and clubs. The government is now aggressively prosecuting parents for trying to put their kids into a good school. What kind of insanity makes that a crime?

The only way to actually achieve the original intent and spirit of what Brown was trying to accomplish is to open up the system to allow the parents to make the choices about which school their child will attend. This removes the government from the position of deciding who is allowed to go to which school.

What is truly sad is that Brown was needed to overcome racism. What is holding back school choice? Nothing but simple greed and inertia on the part of an antiquated and non-competitive public school administration. You would think the education of a child would be above those petty concerns.