The common method that minorities use to shift public opinion is to adopt a radical position, and then to speak towards the political center. Radicals establish moral authority through their zeal combined with their usually superior intelligence and knowledge. Frequently, they’re able to access greater concentrations of funding for their pet causes than the political center can, because they can articulate a more specific program.
This is the way that the left operates, and one of the reasons for its enduring success during the era of popular government. When leftists sense a threat, they tend to project that the threat is shaped like they are, with a similar organizational structure. This is because the last rival class to the intellectual elite was mostly exterminated. Its rivals mostly live in memory and within fiction.
Maintaining this illusion is useful, because it keeps the guard dogs of the revolution barking at shadows who are, in fact, no threat whatsoever to them.
An alternate method for shifting public opinion is to pull at the center directly, from an unpredictable angle. The common assumption is that control of the fringes leads to control of the center. This is often the case, especially in a universal suffrage democracy with mass centralized media. When that centralization breaks down, it becomes more feasible to win over the center while bypassing the fringes.
Whereas before, you had to win over Johnny Radical to reach Dan Rather, who would preach a more moderate sermon on the evening news to Aunt Mabel, you can now bypass both Rather and Radical to speak directly to Mabel. Mabel may not be capable of understanding a sophisticated political program, but you can probably convince her to do enough damage on her own without a terribly sophisticated rationale.
When you look at the organized left, you see that they are all facing outward, often glancing from side to side at their fellows, to police any misbehavior. A few roaming dogs sniff out dangerous trends like Dixie revanchism. The behavior of the center is ignored, because they don’t expect a move on it to be possible, because they believe that they’re covering all the angles.
In fringe political circles, you’ll often see an obsessive focus on other fringe groups, because fringe groups tend to trade members with one another. This may be because the actual beliefs on the fringes are less important than the fact that they are all fringe groups with similar overall strategies.
The goal isn’t to chip away at the center, but to pull the center itself in the desired direction. The left does this by raiding and killing sufficient numbers of people to re-define the political center. The better path for the right is to create such a source of mass that the center itself is pulled towards it through strange means that the people themselves will have trouble understanding. Instead of fighting the left directly, it would be much better to change the climate so much that it no longer supports their political methods.
