You don’t hear much about it anymore, but about a decade ago the US right was absolutely obsessed with the book Rules for Radicals and its author, Saul Alinsky. If, like most people, you haven’t bothered to read Rules, it’s mostly just a guy giving some general advice to people involved with local activism. A lot of it is hilariously banal and intuitive — stuff like “keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions.” Some of it is the sort of meaningless mysticism you find in books like The Art of War for the Modern Retail Manager: for example, “if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”

There is also some good but pretty innocuous advice here as well, like Alinsky’s point that you should find ways to make activism fun so that people don’t get burned out. In general, however, I don’t think there’s much here that you wouldn’t learn from a year of working in a leadership role in any small political organization.

Hilariously, this is not how the Right understood Rules at all.