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.  For instance, I think Hillary Clinton is an example of a politician who might have been more successful had she learned a few things from his playbook.  (Steve Bannon, the Chief Executive of the Trump campaign in 2016, was unabashed about his being influenced by Lenin in political strategy.)

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, nor even the first to use it.  Lenin used it so successfully that, in my opinion, it was his defining characteristic.

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, more important ways, it is almost the opposite of moderation.  

In the case of Lenin, for instance, yes, it was 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.  There is nothing inspiring or romantic about this kind of positioning.  What is more politically advantageous is to eliminate all rivals to one's left, and then present oneself as the furthest left option of what remains.  Humans tend to think in symbols, and crucially, a well-orchestrated Lenin maneuver can allow you to make yourself into a symbol of the most extreme side of a political debate.  (In the case of Lenin, this would sometimes refer to the extreme left; in the case of Trump, the extreme right.  But in other cases, it may not be left or right but some other political direction.  There are many possible variations, perhaps infinitely many.)  

If you perform this move adeptly enough, you can redefine all the players and the very political terrain you are fighting over.  You can, as Lenin sometimes did, rearrange things in the imagination of the public such that you redefine yourself as the extreme left, and those who have substantive political positions to your left are reinterpreted as somehow being the moderates, somewhere to your right.

In a certain sense, the Lenin maneuver is a simultaneous double motte and bailey.  You focus on a few individuals - or, if there are no individuals to attack, you invent some -  belittling them and discrediting them.  With some deft rhetorical finessing, you allow this small group of people (the first motte) to metonymically stand for an entire movement (the first bailey) - or at least you allow people in that movement to get nervous that you are attacking them.  This gives you plausible deniability - if someone asks, you can say, oh no, I wasn't criticizing you, I was merely criticizing them.  But then, at the same time, with the potential rival leadership neutralized, you swoop in, blur all distinctions, and allow your own position (the second motte) to absorb this potentially leaderless group into your own movement.  At the same time, by knowing enough about these rivals to effectively criticize them, you advertise that you are "in with the in crowd," so to speak - that you are an elite who deserves their respect.  When executed professionally, this is a total victory, and you will have brought people into your power with them scarcely even being aware of it.

Lenin pulled off this maneuver successfully many times in his ascent to the top of Russian politics.  Characteristic among these is his maneuver in 1894, in which he used it against the Narodniks, as can be seen in his well-known essay, "What the 'Friends of the People' Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats."  As he would do again and again in his later political career, Lenin simultaneously focused on a small group of people - the writers and publishers of the Russkoye Bogatstvo, a relatively obscure gazette, which later became the organ of the Popular Socialist Party - and allowed this small group to stand in for the "Friends of the People" - the Narodniks.  Lenin also allowed the Russkoye Bogatstvo to fire the opening shots - a risky strategy, but one that often pays off and is generally to be recommended.  Lenin ruthlessly attacks the writers of the Russkoye Bogatstvo, and does a very convincing job of it, worthy of a prosecuting attorney.  Reading the essay now, one would be utterly persuaded that the Narodniks are utterly defeated, unless one knows the reality of the situation, which was that, for all intents and purposes, Lenin was a Narodnik.