"Toward the preservation of your government, it is requisite that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious [or benevolent] the pretexts.  One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine [from within] what cannot be directly overthrown." - George Washington, quote circa 1796.

The socialist-progressives who want this country dead, buried, and converted into a totalitarian state ruled by an oligarchic elite, are well aware of the overwhelming strengths of the sophisticated system of integrated checks-and-balances set up by the Founding Fathers.  They also know that the American public will not willingly give up their liberties; instead, they have to be deceived into ignoring them long enough for the tyrants to consolidate their power beyond reach.  Therefore, what they have to do is to engage in a multi-generational assault on liberty itself, using the exact same four-phase process outlined by Yuri Bezmenov.

Active ideological subversion is the method by which the KGB would soften up an enemy nation, essentially disconnecting it from its moral foundation.  Bezmenov referred to this as de-moralizing the nation.  How long such a process takes is determined by how long it takes to indoctrinate three successive generations of students into Marxist ideology.  In "The Naked Communist," Cleon Skousen identified 45 goals that the communists knew they needed to achieve in order to ripen America for Soviet takeover.  We should note that, "Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States," is but one item on the checklist.  If we're to believe Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair, that's already a done deal, and yet America still remains effectively a free people . . . for now.

"You Americans are so gullible.  No, you won't accept communism outright, but we'll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you'll finally wake up and find you already have communism.  We won't have to fight you.  We'll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.  We do not have to invade the United States; we will destroy you from within.  We will take America without firing a shot.  We will bury you!" - attributed to Nikita Khrushchev in a speech circa 1959

The socialist-progressives' strategy of choice is incrementalism.  They want us to believe that communism is dead as a political ideology, while at the same time continuing to quietly focus on accomplishing the next step toward demoralizing and destabilizing the United States.  As someone else has observed, they'll even subtly bastardize language in order to shift the public discussion in the direction they want it to go.  Of course, should any one or any organization dare to speak out and raise the alarm, a standard counterargument is that we should look at how far this "change" has already come; it's too big, and with too much momentum, to stop now.  So, lest we appear "politically incorrect" (or perhaps in the illusion that a true conservative is going to get any fair press at all), we the sheeple quietly knuckle under and play along.

Every now and then, someone or another will apparently go "off the reservation" and overreach in the pursuit of one of the heretofore-unaccomplished communist goals, only to be smacked down by an outraged public.  Almost every time, that's not by accident.  See, the "revolutionary demagogues" are deliberately using the door in the face technique to initiate the public conversation about something, the very something that the socialist-progressives will use creeping normalcy to achieve . . . eventually.

Consider, because of its ubiquitousness, the current raging national debate over gay marriage.  Two decades ago, when the topic of gay marriage first appeared on the public ballot, in Oregon, the question was only whether or not the government must assist in setting the educational standard that homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, and masochism are abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse, and that they are to be discouraged and avoided.  The defeat of the Oregon measure prompted ultimately 40 states and territories to take at least statutory action to protect the traditional definition of marriage, including 31 states that have done so via amending their state constitutions (including both Oregon and California).

Yet now we have a pair of cases before the Supreme Court of the United States with the apparent intent of overturning the wishes of the people (or their duly elected representation) of 3/4 of the several states in one fell swoop (which, in my opinion, is a blatant violation of state sovereignty).  Don't think for one second that's the actual goal of the socialist-progressives.  Sure, that'd be really nice, but ultimately all they really need is a limited ruling that "advances the ball" enough to shift the baseline and provide a new reference point for future public "debate" on the matter.  As long as SCOTUS doesn't uphold intact the California Supreme Court ruling (recognizing Prop 8 as a duly-ratified amendment to the California Constitution), the subversives get what they want.

I could go into a similar overview of legislative encroachment on the Second Amendment, except that I doubt I could keep it to two paragraphs.

The socialist-progressives are masters of salami tactics, foot in the door technique, and every other variant of the "camel's nose metaphor."  They don't care if they reach their ultimate objective now, only that the objective becomes incrementally more socially acceptable and politically achievable.  And if we are going to become serious about reclaiming America on behalf of liberty itself, then we need to abandon all pretense of playing nice, start thinking the way these bastards think, and become patient enough to beat them at their own game.

"Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.  Public opinion, on any subject, always has a "central idea," from which all its minor thoughts radiate." - Abraham Lincoln, in a speech at a Republican Banquet in Chicago, Illinois, on December 10, 1856.

This Lincoln quote is the source of the maxim that changing public policy requires changing public opinion, which requires changing public perception (which is why those seeking to subvert our country will use the "Delphi technique" to actively manipulate public opinion).  This is why the typical politician or elected official doesn't vary too much from whatever his constituency considers politically popular, and even then will stay within what's politically sensible.  Joseph P. Overton, late senior vice-president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, observed this phenomenon and developed the concept we now call the Overton Window of Political Possibility.

Within the entire range of options on any public policy topic -- education, energy, environment, government operations, healthcare, labor law, marriage & family, privatization, property rights, taxation, weapons, welfare . . . literally any topic -- there's a relatively narrow range of policy options that the public will find acceptable in the current climate of public opinion.  Politicians, for whom reelection is typically the most important concern, will confine their policy and voting behavior to what their constituency will let them get away with without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.  The range of acceptability of any particular policy option runs from "unthinkable" to "existing policy," and only a true leader (which I'll generously ballpark at one out of any given hundred) will dare to honestly campaign, let alone actually govern, on a truly radical idea, regardless of whether the idea expands or restricts freedom and liberty.

Keep in mind that campaign rhetoric doesn't necessarily reflect actual behavior while in office, and that legislators have been known to introduce bills that they know will go nowhere . . . just to keep their constituent base happy.

As an example of how this concept works, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy recently published a timeline (graphic here) of how Michigan went from being the cradle of the modern American labor movement to being America's twenty-fourth right-to-work state (twenty-fifth if you include Guam).  The effort to implement that change started in 1990, didn't pay off until nearly 23 years later, and didn't even enter the Overton Window (defined as when an idea becomes politically sensible generally) until just under three years before the Workplace Fairness and Equity Act was signed into law.  It should be noted that, completely contrary to the current Michigan Republican Party narrative, there were precious few elected officials or party officers who supported the right-to-work concept, either overtly or covertly, before the concept entered the Overton Window . . . and that's the honest historical truth.

You see, the secret of the Overton Window (likely the benchmark of what's politically achievable) is that it's not static; it can be either moved or expanded.  The catch is that, with the exception of genuine leaders like Ronald Reagan, the window is manipulated by external social forces, rather than from "inside the beltway."  Perception moves opinion moves policy, remember that.

This, by the way, is the true evil genius of Barack Obama.  Nothing that he's actually accomplished (whether that be votes that he's cast while in the legislature or executive action he's taken while this nation's chief executive) was outside the Overton Window when he did it.  The reason that BHO seems in perpetual campaign mode is because all of his lofty rhetoric, all of his teleprompter-guided speeches, aren't doing much more than to manipulate public perception . . . which then changes public opinion, which he can then use to enact long-term changes to public policy.  That's right; the prez is using every single perq of the Oval Office, including an all-too-willing media entourage, to move the Overton Window in the direction he wants it to go.

That the Republican Party establishment, both party officers and elected officials, didn't figure this out is the reason that BHO got reelected, even though by all rights he should have had his butt handed to him in the Electoral College.

The beauty of this is that the grassroots conservatives, the liberty movement, the tea party movement, the Republican Liberty Caucus, the Michigan Conservative Union, and all the rest of the groups that are legitimately part of the Michigan CPAC can do the exact same thing.  Throwing the scoundrels out (whether in the legislature, the executive offices, or the party establishment) isn't much good if the socially and politically acceptable range of policy options that they have to work with hasn't changed any.  Rather, what we must do is to shift public policy options to a range more acceptable to the Founding Fathers' legacy.

Doing this right (perception moves opinion moves policy) will almost by necessity involve taking over the Republican precinct delegate pool, which will by extension position us to leverage constitutional, fiscal, and social conservatives into key seats both within the party apparatus as well as within the various legislative delegations, executive offices, and judicial seats.  But the first priority is to shift the public debate on the Principles of Liberty.  The most effective way to do this, I think, is to educate neighborhood-by-neighborhood (which makes taking over the precinct delegate pool really handy), persistently write letters to the editor, peaceably engage on social media (on pages that aren't necessarily "friendly turf" to founding ideology), and whatever else qualifies as the modern equivalent of pamphleteering . . . whatever it takes, within the reasonable bounds of "peaceably" (the only restriction that the First Amendment places on free speech), to move the debate in the direction of liberty and freedom.

As a personal example, last week I had some time to kill between my crack-of-dawn workout and an early-morning business meeting, so I stopped off at the Burger King across the street from the downtown Y for breakfast.  The television in the dining room was tuned in to one of the morning talk shows (the "Today Show" on NBC, if my memory serves me correctly), and the topic at the moment was gun control legislation.  With a simple comment such as, "All this stuff does is provide criminals with unarmed targets," I wound up starting an impromptu round-table discussion right there in the dining area.  By the time I was ready to leave about 45 minutes later, I had nearly everyone in that room lining up with the concept that the proper response to gun crimes is to punish the criminal, not to outlaw the tool.  (That the BK in question is on the downtown campus of GVSU, and within walking distance of at least one homeless shelter, should give you an idea of the philosophical disposition I was working with.)

Keep in mind that our ultimate objective, to reclaim America in the name of liberty and freedom, will necessarily involve preventing the socialist-progressives from completely accomplishing the 45 communist goals needed to completely prepare the United States for takeover.  (There are a few that aren't yet fait accompli.)  The larger task, of course, will be to undo in detail those goals that are reasonably considered accomplished facts.  Using Bezemenov's illustration, this will necessarily involve successfully interrupting the three-successive-generations indoctrination pipeline in the public school system.  This is the reason that Bezmenov said that it would take between 15 and 30 years to undo the subversion that's already happened.

In the meantime, we also need to make a point of paper training our sitting politicians, so that we can prevent any further erosion of liberty while we marshal our efforts.  That's why the high-volume grassroots outrage over 2013 House Bill 4111 (which is still sitting on the Senate calendar) was so effective; putting 29 legislators on notice that their actions may cost them reelection next year (as well as flooding the state party phone lines) sent a message:  Your constituency considers your actions politically and socially unacceptable.  Boom, the southward trek of the Overton Window is at least stalled . . . on one political topic (maybe two) . . . for now.  Openly recruiting 42 credible primary challengers (remember that 13 senators also need to be on the receiving end of this message) to these legislators, or their hand-picked replacements, will reinforce the point.

The fun part of the primary challenges is that they don't have to actually be successful; they just have to be credible.  It's been a bit mishandled on follow-up, but the same ought to be true of the Michigan Republican Party right now.  As close as the election for state chairmanship was, you'd think that party leadership would have got the hint.  Evidently, that message still needs to be driven home a bit more yet, but the mechanism to do so is in place; we just need to leverage it (which is a detailed discussion for another time).

Bezmenov also mentioned that revolutions throughout history are never truly the result of a grassroots movement, but of small, dedicated, and highly-organized groups who seize power, whether for good or bad.  As an illustration of this point, the height of the American military strength during the War for Independence numbered 84,500 soldiers, sailors, marines, and militia (84,500 ÷ 3,893,635 ≈ 2.17% of the total colonial population at the time), and had the support of no more than 45% of the civilian population.  Yet they were sufficient to cast off the chains of arguably the most powerful nation on earth at the time, an empire which already in 1773 could rightly boast being "the Empire on which the sun never sets."

Applying that lesson to the current situation, we can reference a quote misattributed to Samuel Adams:  "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."  The grassroots shock troops of the tea party and liberty movements are useful for holding elected officials' feet to the fire and otherwise starting considerable commotion when necessary, but if we're actually going to get anything useful accomplished, then we're going to need a highly-organized, professional approach (such as used by Phyllis Schlafly to defeat the proposed Equal Rights Amendment).

In doing so, we need to keep in mind that our ultimate goal isn't to simply take over the state party, or to put constitutional (or fiscal, or social) conservatives in at least 40 percent of the available legislative, executive, educational, and judicial seats in every election.  Those two objectives are just means toward the larger end, which is to reclaim our land in the name of Liberty itself.  Using the communists' strategies against them is what will accomplish the necessary long-term changes needed to do that.