Kahane - Rules for radical conservatives: beating the left at its own game to take back america

Copyright 2010 by David Kahane

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kahane, David.
Rules for radical conservatives : beating the left at its own game to take back America / David Kahane.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52187-3
1. ConservatismUnited States. 2. LiberalismUnited States. 3. ConservatismUnited StatesHumor. 4. LiberalismUnited StatesHumor. 5. Political satire, American. I. Title.
JC573.2.U6K34 2010
320.520973dc22 2010032944

www.ballantinebooks.com

v3.1

For Kathryn Jean Lopez

Whats the constitution among friends?

George Washington Plunkitt, Tammany Hall

PART ONE: THE PROBLEM
or The Beginning of Wisdom Is Understanding How You Got Here

INTERMISSION
In Which Che and I Discuss the Sleep of Reason

PART TWO: THE SOLUTION
or The Fight for Freedom Is Never Over

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I am the father of David Kahane, whose work you know from the Internet and from the pages of National Review Online, and whose Rules for Radical Conservatives you are now holding in your hand. Whether you have purchased this volume or stolen it, as my old friend and compadre in the Revolution, Abbie Hoffman, famously urged in the title of one of his own works, I already know one very important thing about you: in the great grim battle between Left and Right, between good and evil, between Satan and Saint Michael, between Wormwood and the Patient, you have already lost. Welcome to the Permanent Campaign, permanently to be waged against you until the end of time or our total victory, whichever comes first.

Look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see?

Dont tell meI already know. You see a coward, a weakling, a quivering mass of protoplasm, a spineless jellyfish, a neutered creature stripped of dignity and cowering in fear. With what seems like lightning suddenness, as the old sports clich goes, your world has been turned upside down, the old verities tossed onto the ash heap of history, and you are now face-to-face with

Us. In all our glory. Finally freed from the masks and the chains, able to reveal ourselves as we really are, cloaked for one brief moment not in the shade but by the sun, like something out of Blake. You owe me awe! as Mr. Dolarhyde says in Red Dragon, and see how neatly I tie up my pop cultural, literary, and artistic allusions. Who on your side can do that?

This is our time. This is our moment. Stop us if you can.

But you wont. Even as we draw the knife blade of nihilism across your throat, you will never muster the will to resist. You are the boiling frog, incrementally heated, accepting of every diminution and indignity, each hotter than the last, until at last you slip blissfully into that dark world to which we pay homage, but in which we ourselves at root fear to tread. Because this one thing we know:

You will never fight back against people like us.

We have done this to you, and we have done it by design. We have changed up to down, right to wrong, black to white, night to day. Via our silken garotte of political correctness, we have undermined and hamstrung your very ability to think with clarity, to judge with confidenceand to see us for what we really are.

We not only want resistance to be futile, we want it to be unthinkable.

After all, its exhausting, this constant fear and worry. Eternal vigilance is a price youre no longer willing to pay for your liberty. Let me whisper in your ear: Lay down your burden. Its easier this way. Come, lay down your heavy load. Go along. Get along. Join us.

Youll pardon, I trust, such candor from an ostensible stranger. But, in fact, you have met me before, many times over the course of the centuries. I was present when the Sodomites came for Lots guests and rejected his living daughters, and again when his wife turned toward the burning city, listening to the tempting voices in her ears before the Enemy transformed her into a pillar of salt for the simple crime of feminine curiosity. I was there at Belshazzars Feast, when the moving hand writ large upon the wall: mene, mene tekell upharsin. As the poet sings, I was there when Pilate washed his hands of the Christ, when the Czar and his family were murdered, when Oswalds bullet went through the back of Jack Kennedys head. And speaking of poets, the great Alighieri knew me well, and my allies, consigning us to the various lower circles of his imaginary hell, an amusing anticipatory revenge that we have now rendered moot.

Your poets have long warned you about the likes of me: O That Anthropomorphical Rag that has such demons int! You agree with Baudelaire that the Devils best deception is convincing you that he doesnt exista trick that I, dear reader, would never dream of attempting. For I am one with my hero, Satan, the true hero of Paradise Lost: Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell. And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep still threatning to devour me opens wide, to which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven. That Milton sure could write dialogue.

But I digress. What we offer here is a guided tour through the new circle of hell that we have laid out for you. Something that even Dante could not have envisioned: a hell of your own making, and in which you freely choose to dwell.

To that end, I now send you my only begotten son, David, in whom I am so well pleased. It is he who will explain to you what we have done to you, so carefully, so methodically, over the decades of my lifetime, he who will explain to you our tricks and wheedles, our seductive lies, our entirely reasonable exhortation to self-destruction. It is he who will give you the tools and the weapons with which to fight back, secure in the knowledge that you will never use them.