I’ve been giving this queston a lot of thought over the years. At some point I’m going to put together a Website detailing how I think it needs to be done; but here are some of the points I think need to be borne in mind.
TACTICS
Forget about convincing people by means of trench warfare; that is, you won’t do it by straight argument. See the “anti-realism” issue you’ve been grappling with to see what I mean; people will take whatever smidgeon of Objectivism you communicate in the short time you have, put it into their terms of thought, and blame you for the resulting contradictions. Overhauling someone’s terms of thought is a huge process with a *willing* participant, let alone a hostile one. If you are lucky, you may be able to “manufacture” one Objectivist this way in your entire lifetime. Not a great rate of return. About all you’ll get out of this is practice.
Instead, fight using high-volume and guerilla tactics: “high-altitude bombing”, pinpoint sniper attacks, and limited engagements/skirmishing.
High altitude bombing of the Internet kind is when you lurk on a forum having a better-than-average likelihood of being anti-Left, and drop well-argued posts using Objectivist ideas aiming at the topic, and then disengage. The purpose is to “seed” ideas, to induce curiosity from others to inquire further. Find fora which seem to lend themselves to the sort of topics and discussions you want to work with, and go for it. The test bed for me was a firearms board, which has its share of nuts but is by nature of its topic well-filtered for leftish sheeple. I suggest picking fora by your own interests, as being a genuine member of the board can boost your impact.
Other types of HAB include letters-to-the-editor and other forms of writing and speech. The general principle is that you drop a “package” and keep flying on to the next target. The advantage of this method, is fresh targets and/or fresh issues on every drop.
Some key HAB tactics:
i) Try wherever possible to learn how to express the same ideas in fresh terms and different words every time. I cringe at people who use the same terms every time, and doubly so when they repeat the same verbal constructs Ayn Rand used. This is because someone who has integrated the ideas rather than merely parroting the dogma will learn to express them in various contexts, terms and analogies, because the philosophy is now present in all the different areas of their lives. They apply the principle in new situations all the time and consequently learn new, fresh and unique ways to communicate it. Someone who has merely latched onto the philosophy as a dogma or mantra – and they do exist, sadly – will show it in their tendency to repetition. People notice that.
ii) STAY OUT OF THE TRENCHES. Come back around to see how your post played, perhaps follow up if you see opportunity… but don’t get drawn in. Try to keep your replies compact and to the point. If you think that the only way to handle a rebuttal is with a long explanatory post, it’s time to move on. Don’t get sucked in. Reply to the genuine questions, and skip the rest. The “enemy” will smear you as dodging them etc. but there’s no reason to care.
Sniping means to fire small, pinpoint shots at the target. The purpose in the case of people with potential is to cause them to consider a new question or idea in the context of a familiar issue. That is where the main potential for sniping ROI is.
Sniping the enemy, however, is different; it only serves to keep them uncomfortable. On leftist boards, that will just get you banned, but on non-political boards, you can actually do some good this way, by emboldening dissent.
A friend of mine told me about this Leftist with a big, loud mouth, who had more or less established a hegemony-by-intimidation over an Internet cinema mailing list. He was constantly construing everything in Leftist terms, slamming dissenting ideas at every chance, but at a sneaky level which didn’t quite get him banned. If a dissenter engaged him, he would simply slime them right back, at which point a general hue and cry would come from the other members decrying political discussions as such *without naming a side*… which left the dissenter cut off and the Leftist, having scored his points, smirking.
One day my friend forwared to me one of his more asinine posts, which happened to have the perfect hole in it. I fired a short two-line post back to my friend and he forwarded it. KABOOM!!! The Leftist went positively ballistic, smearing my friend and me with piles of invective. The merest hint of principled and well-armed opposition just sent him right off. Three days later he apologized to the list, including my friend, for his huge rant. But the damage was done; the atmosphere in the list became less oppressive for a time as his heretofore silent opponents saw the opportunity to speak up. A very good shot, that was; I could tell I had wrecked his world for at least a week.
Limited engagement and skirmishing is when you do engage someone in an argument, but you keep it constrained to a certain range. As all issues are interconnected, the tendency is there for the issue to “balloon” on you, losing your focus and your audience. Don’t do that; keep it “bite-sized”. This doesn’t mean dropping the full context; it simply means that you endeavor to deliver your viewpoint in parcels they can process. Don’t overload them. This is best done with someone who you’ve already determined to be worth the effort. The idea is to determine how much they can handle and on what topics, and to “feed” them accordingly. Try to do this on a demand-driven basis; let them come to you.
On the question of actual protests and such things as Walk for Capitalism, I’d classify those as being advisable only for those who are quick on their mental feet (and their real feet!). Verbal argument requires fast-moving minds to be effective. Joining other protests on an ad-hoc, issue-by-issue basis can be fruitful, but by its nature will be almost entirely trench warfare. Keeping altitude and distance is tough in person.
STRATEGY
Our objective should be to buy the high-level intellectuals time to engineer the propagation of Objectivist ideas into the intellectual realm.
As Ayn Rand makes clear, the real battle is at the epistemological level, and that’s going to be fought in the rarified atmosphere of intellectual circles. Because of the extremely low rate of return on “trench warfare”, reaching students and young people while waiting for the older Kantians to die off and not be replaced is the only way to “manufacture” Objectivists wholesale. At best, that would take one generation if we ruled the universities right now. So, it’s going to take a while.
It’s also not a process that will happen in a Gulag.
So, rather than try to win the war by other means, we need to run interference, to buy as much time as possible for the long-range efforts to start paying off – and above all we must somehow preserve the United States in its semi-free form. Those are what I see as my proper strategic goals.
If you can influence someone in such a manner that they alter their viewpoint on an issue in a more rational direction, that is a victory. If you can force a leftist to backtrack and defend themselves on an issue that they’ve taken for granted as “won”, it’s a victory. If someone votes against a bad gun-control law instead of for it, because of a discussion he had with you about the right of self-defense, it’s a victory.
It isn’t a complete one, it may not last, it may only be on one issue, and at best it may just slow the Left down. But if we haven’t yet reached their totalitarian end-of-road by the time Objectivism becomes a force in the culture, we WILL win.
For, as Andrew Bernstein put it: “This time the good guys are armed. To the teeth.”
