Organizing on the right
So far the Republican Party is trying to figure out how to reform itself and begin to rebuild for the future. Most of what I’ve heard from rising stars like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona is good. They are on message when it comes to how the party should behave, and how it should communicate its message. Both of these leaders are pocketbook conservatives, and recognize the need for the party to clean house, behave as conservatives and offer a reform message for the economic issues that voters care about. Jindal in particular has been saying great things about the future of the GOP.
As for the conservative activists out there, they need to understand one thing in particular: we have got to organize better than we have in the past. We have to learn from Barack Obama’s community organizing, not jeer at it. One blog in particular that is focused on teaching activists and bloggers some useful tips about how we go about that is The Next Right. While they are focused more on grassroots fundraising and blogging, The Next Right bloggers also understand the importance of grassroots building and campaigning. Soren Dayton writes,
In the end, the Obama campaign’s various technologies for fundraising, GOTV, and communications were side shows. They all derived from a much more fundamental innovation. Rolling Stone described the most important insight of the Obama campaign from one of their trainers: “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers. We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.”…
You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.
Exactly. This one reason that I have been introducing my interns and field organizers to the ideas and tactics of radical organizer Saul Alinsky. His ideas were very influential in the organizing skills learned and employed by Barack Obama as a community organizer in Chicago, as well as a candidate for president. Now, Obama has institutionalized his revolution with the introduction of something we’ve never seen before: a committed grassroots force of 10 million Americans who he can count on to support his agenda with lobbying, fundraising and campaigning.
Until the right begins to think like revolutionaries, as the left does, we will be stuck in the wildnerness. But combine the support of our future leaders like Jindal and Flake with the community organizing that needs to happen, and we will be able to lead our own revolution in the future after 8 years of Obama/Reid/Pelosi socialism.