Wednesday, September 12, 2012

An Opportunity For Reaction To Use The Left Against Itself

From our old reactionary friend Sun Tzu
To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.

Show him there is a road to safety, and so create in his mind the idea that there is an alternative to death.

It is essential to reduce the financial and cultural power of our adversaries.  One way of doing this, of course, is through boycott and buycott.  But presently, we lack even enough buycott targets (no Chick Fil A within a couple of hundred miles of Portland, for instance).  So perhaps we need to create buycott targets.
How do we do this?
By creating a safe avenue of retreat from the Cultural War for lots of small businesses and maybe a few corporations.  How do we create this avenue? 
We subvert the Left into creating it for us.  The Left largely has this entirely mistaken idea that corporations are on OUR side rather than theirs.  We can use that.  What we push for and support the creation of is something akin to the old League of NonAligned Nations.  Basically, this is a group of companies, mostly small, that are certified as being totally neutral in any cultural conflict and which do not seek to involve themselves in politics at all.  They only give charitable contributions to totally noncontroversial (which we'd define by the 2 sigma rule, if it's non-controversial to the 98%, that'll do).  Examples would be local kids sports or academic teams and food banks.  They'd be certified by some trusted independent arbiter, like with early organic foods and could display the insignia of the nonaligned league at their places of business
The contingent that hates the Citizens United decision should be all over this as a way to help take the influence of corporations out of politics.  Reactionaries and our unwitting allies could patronize these companies disproportionately.  Truth be known, the whole attempt at localization of consumption is almost halfway to this, since local companies are generally FAR less instruments of the Cathedral than nationals and multinationals, even in places like Portland. 

2 comments:

Roberto Masioni said...

Would you care you talk more about this? New and clever ideas like this are very rare in the blogosphere and need a lot of nurturing.

Jehu said...

Rusty,
Not sure if there's much more to say on it. What would remain is mostly in the realm of action. If you've got any influence, for instance, in your employer's charitable activities, channeling them towards non-aligned activities---like food banks, is progress. I'll think on it and see if there's anything more I can say though.