The late Andrew Breitbart knew that in order to defeat the left, Americans had to first take back the cultural institutions used by the left to advance liberalism.
In their new book, Waking The Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals At Their Own Game, authors Timothy Daughtry and Gary Casselman offer everyday “mainstream” Americans a valuable and important playbook for taking back the broader culture.
“We cannot count on politicians to put America back on a sound course,” the authors write. “Unless mainstream citizens, the sleeping giant of American politics, wake up and take the helm of this country soon, the current generation will be the last to live in freedom.”
Although a plurality of mainstream Americans are conservative and “vastly outnumber the far left” the authors ask, “why do they allow themselves to be outflanked in the cultural institutions and even bullied by the left-wing fringe?”
Daughtry and Casselman write that a bully “cannot terrorize an entire playground, and 20 percent of the population cannot impose their views and policies on the rest of us–unless the majority allows them to do so.”
The book describes how shrewdly — and viciously — liberals have used the government, schools, universities, news media, entertainment, medicine and science to advance their agenda to the unsuspecting masses.
Waking The Sleeping Giant does a good job describing the “power players” who use liberal institutions for their ends.
The authors write that liberal power players “learn ways of manipulating others into those provider and comforter roles” and, “because of their dependency on others, Power Players tend to see others as objects to be manipulated rather than as fellow human beings with needs and rights of their own.”
Thus, when power players are threatened they “experience visceral fears of weakness, inadequacy, and being unimportant.”
“The air of moral and intellectual superiority of liberalism soothes the inner fears and frustrations of the Power Players,” they write. “And the denial of the Judeo-Christian worldview offers an even more tempting benefit in that it allows them to justify their behavior with an appeal to moral relativism. Power Players are desperately struggling to become the center of a universe that stubbornly refuses to revolve around them.”
And yet, the authors argue, mainstream Americans allow these liberal power players to manipulate them and fall into what they call the appeasement cycle.
In order to break the appeasement cycle, the authors argue that “mainstream America will have to confront our fear of conflict and disapproval.”
Two points Daughtry and Casselman make are particularly relevant for conservatives.
They urge Americans not to be on the defensive when there is nothing against which to defend. For example, when arguing for sensible immigration policies, do not start off by saying, “I don’t have anything against Mexicans.” By saying this, conservatives fall into the trap of playing into “conservatives are racist” stereotype the left uses to advance their agenda and discredit conservatives.
The authors also point out the difference between anger and righteous indignation.
“There is a difference between righteous indignation and anger as a manipulative tool,” they note. “When taxpayers are trying to address a $15 trillion debt and they hear liberals referring to the Tea Party as “terrorists,” those taxpayers feel righteous indignation. Leftists, on the other hand, use anger to manipulate their followers for the purpose of giving liberals the power that they so desperately crave.”
This is a message conservatives must heed.
Waking The Sleeping Giant also makes the important point that “much of the political narrative occurs in casual conversations in the office, at work, at church, around the dinner table, and at other informal gatherings” and “it will take much longer for our strategy to affect the formal cultural institutions such as schools and news media, but we can begin to change the direction and tone of the political narrative outside of those institutions.” The authors give good solutions for how to inoculate children from liberal indoctrination and build up local institutions and government.
This fight is worth it, the authors note, and they ask readers to imagine this scenario in the future:
Dream with us just a little longer. Imagine motion pictures in which the villains were multibillionaires pushing the global warm- ing scam as a cover for a worldwide power grab, and the hero was a maverick scientist who exposed them. Or the villain was a thuggish union organizer in a factory and the hero a woman who stood up to the union. Or the villain was a corrupt left-wing president and the heroes two mainstream reporters whose work forced that president to resign.
This is the culture for which the late Andrew Breitbart fought.
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