Of course its a lefty book aimed at vilifying the President and Stephen Miller, but there is some important advice in it (according to this excerpt at Politico) that the Republicans generally have failed to heed—you must fight like the Left fights!
And, that comes from none other than David Horowitz who was about as far left as you can get, but woke up one day (after a friend was murdered!).
In December 2012, with the Republican Party reeling from a brutal election that left Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, the conservative activist David Horowitz emailed a strategy paper to the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
Former Senator Jeff Sessions and David Horowitz. There is nothing the Left hates more than one of their own, as Horowitz once was, exposing their strategies.
Horowitz, now 81, was a longtime opponent of immigration and the founder of a think tank and a campus freedom-of-speech advocacy group. He saw in Sessions a kindred spirit—a senator who could reawaken a more nationalist fire in the Republican party. The person he emailed it to was a Sessions aide: Stephen Miller. Horowitz, who recalled the episode in an interview and shared the emails with me, had known Miller since the aide was in high school.
Sessions with aide Miller
Horowitz encouraged Miller to not only give the paper to Sessions but to circulate it in the Senate.
Miller expressed eagerness to share it and asked for instructions. “Leave the Confidential note on it. It gives it an aura that will make people pay more attention to it,” Horowitz wrote. The paper, “Playing to the Head Instead of the Heart: Why Republicans Lost and How They Can Win,” included a section on the political utility of hostile feelings.
Horowitz wrote that Democrats know how to “hate their opponents,” how to “incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct those volatile emotions.” He urged Republicans to “return their fire.”
“Behind the failures of Republican campaigns lies an attitude that is administrative rather than combative. It focuses on policies rather than politics. It is more comfortable with budgets and pie charts than with the flesh and blood victims of their opponents’ policies,” Horowitz wrote, adding that Democrats have the moral high ground.
“They are secular missionaries who want to ‘change society.’ Their goal is a new order of society—‘social justice.’” He argued that the only way to beat them is with “an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”
Horowitz wrote that hope and fear are the two strongest weapons in politics. Barack Obama had used hope to become president. “Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,” Horowitz argued, adding that Republicans should appeal to voters’ base instincts.
It is perhaps the most compact crystallization of the relationship that propelled Miller, now a senior policy adviser and speechwriter in the Donald Trump administration, to the White House and of the importance that relationship has had in the administration.
This is long, but an important read. I’ve been arguing against spending a lot of time reading and thus feeling like something has been accomplished, but this article is extremely valuable because it helps reconfirm what I suspect you already know—Republicans have been fighting (if you can call it that!) all wrong for most of our lives.
There are, however, still a few months left to get it right!
Of course its a lefty book aimed at vilifying the President and Stephen Miller, but there is some important advice in it (according to this excerpt at Politico) that the Republicans generally have failed to heed—you must fight like the Left fights!
