STRATEGY OF THE LEFT

The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America

April 29, 2019Deep State, Domestic Threat, Report, Rich Higgins, Stephen Coughlin, The Left, Threat Doctrine

NEW REPORT: Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America©

By Stephen Coughlin and Richard Higgins
February 2019
UPDATED: July 2019

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Report is 8.5″x11″, 253 pages in full-color

“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” — John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961

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“We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.” — Mao Zedong

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“The abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies, has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.” —Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power, 1974

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“The American people have got to stop fooling around with just fighting communism in the abstract. They have got to know what the thing means, why they are against it, and how to fight it.” —Bella Dodd, Testimony to the HCUA, 1953

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“And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” —Machiavelli, The Prince, 1552

Executive Summary

When associated with rising factional discord, the increased hostility from the Left resonates a violence that is becoming a clear and present danger.
This paper will provide an estimate of the current situation that transcends well-travelled two-party political narratives. The objective is to provide a strategic understanding of the Left that baselines the current situation to enable directionality, predictability, and actionability. To that end, the estimate will use a political warfare analysis to reframe the political environment in order to provide timely anticipatory situational awareness in support of decision-making.
National policy has come under the influence of constructed narratives that mainstream and conservative leaders neither understand nor control. Lacking situational awareness to recognize the operational nature of information campaigns directed against national policy, responses tend to be tactically limited and predictably reactive along scripted action-reaction cycles built into the operational sequencing of information campaigns controlled by the Left. These powerful but misunderstood narratives drive policy.
At their core, these narratives are not American. Rather, they are dialectically driven Neo-Marxist memes that infuse mass line efforts operating at the cultural level intent on powering down into the political space.
This furthers the Left’s political warfare effort to impose conformance resulting in the non-enforcement of laws by those tasked with their oversight and enforcement. As these narratives transition into prevailing cultural memes, non-enforcement becomes institutionalized and enforced by an opposition that increasingly comes under the control of those narratives.
As such, for the Left, political organizations like Congress become vehicles to execute lines of effort in an execution matrix along which information campaigns are executed from outside and above.

Key Findings & Observations:

• The political rhetoric driving American politics runs along well-trodden paths sustaining a political framework from a by-gone era incapable of coming to terms with the political movements threatening our constitutional system today.

• Constrained by this archaic rhetoric, mainstream and conservative players are outmaneuvered in an information battle-space they hardly perceive; responding to current threats in under-inclusive manners.

• The “otherism” strategy developed by Marxists to destroy America focuses on the systematic destruction of identity leading to the systematic disenfranchisement of Americans from America. It manipulates the issues of the “other”, yet it has nothing to do with the “other”. Rather, it forces a classic dialectical negation along Hegelian lines. This activity presents a clear and present danger that will succeed if not countered. As such, this analysis does not suggest that this is a way to understand the left, it argues that it is the only way to understand it; recognizing that it is 1) Marxist, and 2) dialectically driven.

• The dominant cultural narratives of our time can best be summarized by the saying; “Political correctness is the enforcement mechanism of the multicultural narrative that implements Neo-Marxist objectives.” It is through these narratives that the left drives policy.

• Narratives that conservative leaders neither control nor understand drive national policy. When Republican leaders shrink from Constitutional principles for fear of being accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., they are subordinating those principles to neo-Marxist narratives designed for that purpose. Though these narratives may have been initially imposed, Republicans will adopt them over time through usage. Subjective awareness of the role one plays in such a process is neither necessary nor require.
  • By submitting to these narratives, establishment Republicans first become pliant, and then obedient to the Left, accommodating it through “words that work” that create the illusion of opposition while actually signaling surrender in the information battle space. In that role, regardless of the mandates that got them elected, establishment Republicans will defend the issues that got them elected in deliberately under-inclusive manners that conditions those issues for dialectical negation while demoralizing their base. What Republicans demoralize, the Left then disenfranchises. In this role, establishment Republicans become the defeat mechanism of the Left. (“Defeat Mechanism: The method of defeating the opponent.”  Joint Publication 5-00.1, Joint Doctrine for Campaign Planning, January 25, 2002).

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• A strategic understanding of the Left recognizes that it is dialectically driven. As such, the Left is a teleologically informed movement that executes through history and thought, along an arc, with a trajectory. It is Hegelian. It defines everything that “is” as fuel for “becoming” in a dialectical process that compels it to negate. — “Change” “Perpetual Revolution” — Analysis of the Left that does not account for the dialectic will fail.

• The critical theory of the Frankfurt School is classical Marxism dedicated to penetration and subversion that relies on Hegelian processes to achieve its objectives:
  • It seeks the destruction of Western culture;
  • It is focused on an “aufheben der Kultur” strategy based on “otherisms” (and is nothing more than the targeted application of the dialectical principle of negation to a people)
  • It is fully integrated into larger political warfare efforts

• Frankfurt School leader Herbert Marcuse concurred with the Gramsci Marxist plan to adopt a “long march through the institutions” strategy based on Mao’s “long march” political warfare strategy.

• Political Warfare is a Maoist Insurgency concept that recognizes the role narratives play in overwhelming rule of law societies. It includes the formation of mass line movements and counter-state activities. It also uses cultural level narratives to power down into the political space where fidelity to the narrative will result in non-enforcement of law that, over time, becomes institutionalized.

• In Mass Line strategies, political engagements meet the people where they are. Through gentle nudges over time, passive participants become active. At first, a target may only be asked to sign a petition or provide an email or mailing address. From that point, the subject becomes the recipient of sustained communications related to the issues of the originating petition. While an individual may not be politically active, that person—through the supporting consumption of mass market media—will become more susceptible to activist messaging and discontent. The overarching goal of this line of effort is the development and reinforcement of a mass line as it builds the counter-state within the state; complete with its own bundle of replacement legal, cultural, and social norms that operate in parallel with that of the host culture’s.

• The reason America’s current toolbox of responses is perilous is because it accepts mass line concepts of America as the terms of engagement. When, for example, mainstream Americans are manipulated into responding to mass line narratives from within those narratives, a (dialectical) paradox sets in where the highly ideological thrust of the Left’s ambitions are made to sound normal while mainstream defenses of America sound shrill, rigid, and even ideological.

• The Left focuses on cultural and institutional power by communicating its ideological initiatives in terms of “values” while targeting the placement of cadre throughout the mass line so they can enable those “values” by converting them first to norms, then to policy, and finally to law.

• What is popularly called “fake news” and the “deep-state” are better understood as propaganda and the counter-state. Transitioning to a political warfare analysis, one begins to discern methods, processes and directionality that terms like “fake news” and “deep-state” do not capture. By their nature, media terms like “fake news” and “deep-state” ensure that analysis remains fixed on the surface of events.

• Our national aversion to recognizing threats beyond the strictly military, especially ideological threats in the political warfare arena, has long been recognized by America’s foes as an exploitable strategic level vulnerability.

• The Left uses dialectically determined political warfare concepts to drive a core set of narratives that inter-operate at the tactical level while integrating at the strategic. Narratives are associated with the pseudorealities (or second realities) they seek to establish and enforce. They are called narratives because they are stories—fictions—that seek to supplant the real with the unreal. These narratives are directional, they have velocity, and are always oriented on a target.

Saying that “the Left moves dialectically, through time, on a trajectory” simply recognizes that the Left is a movement in history defined by its movement through history; that its backward trajectory defines its forward movement; and that failure to recognize this arc leads to error. It is for this reason that this assessment emphasizes historical events, conditions and movements that have defined the Left from the Hegelian dialectic, to Marx, to Wilson’s progressivism, to the early Frankfurt School, to Mao’s Long March, to Marcuse’s thoughts on tolerance, to political correctness.
This is how the Left should be understood. Hence, it would be a mistake to treat the historical elements of this assessment as little more than background material. Assessing the Left as if Hegel and Marx simply provide interesting historical context to today’s events is the failure to recognize that for the Left, Marx was yesterday and Hegel the day before. Between the two, they are the source code of today’s Left. To emphasize this point, a recent Daily Caller article is included as Appendix E to demonstrate just how relevant historical awareness of the Left is to understanding today’s Left.
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