The Lenin Maneuver

 

The Lenin Maneuver

Lenin was a brilliant strategist.  Anyone who wants to be a successful politician should study his example and the clever tactics he used.  One of these many tactics is a particular tactic that Lenin used so often and so effectively that I think it ought to be called "the Lenin maneuver," although I don't mean to imply that he was the only politician, or the first to use it.  

The Lenin maneuver is useful when one is competing against rivals for leadership within a political movement.  The Lenin maneuver is a two-part move, a move in two, seemingly opposite directions, sometimes one after the other, but quite often both at once.  To pull off a Lenin maneuver, one must:

1. ruthlessly attack and criticize one's opponents, AND

2. substantially adopt their positions. 

The way to make oneself stand out as a leader is to simultaneously humiliate and eliminate one's competition, and to present oneself as the next best thing, so that you can take advantage of their supporters.

Superficially, this may sound (and look) the same as being a moderate, and to be sure it does resemble political "triangulation" in some ways, but in other ways, it is almost the opposite of moderation.  

In the case of Lenin, for instance, yes, it was a crucial part of his strategy to present his rivals as delusional, idealistic fools, and himself as a sensible pragmatist.  But pure milquetoast moderation is a formula for becoming a bland, unmemorable, faceless non-entity.

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