Obama's "Audacity of Hope" slogan goes back to the French Revolution, now mainly remembered for its bloodthirsty guillotine executions of the French aristocracy. As Edmund Burke wrote in his classic work Reflections on the Revolution in France, the French Revolution was all about destroying the Old Regime in pursuit of a utopian dream, while the American Revolution was about constructing a new, practical style of government.  The American Constitution survives two centuries later. The French Revolution collapsed into anarchy, and was transformed by Napoleon into the first European imperial conquest since the Romans.  Napoleon went on to kill tens of millions of people before driving his armies into the hell of the Russian winter. 

The phrase "we need audacity, audacity, always audacity!" was coined by George-Jacques Danton, described as a  "gigantic revolutionary with extravagant passions, a high level of intelligence, and a willingness to use violence as means to an end."

Obama's version of this is "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."  None of Obama's early opponents even made it to the election; they were knocked out by scandals revealed to the public before they ever got there.  Hillary Clinton lost to Obama because the Clintons were tarred with the racism libel.  John McCain was the weakest Republican candidate since Bob Dole, and was largely appointed by the Leftist media. Since 2008 Obama has tried to knock out Sarah Palin; today, every Republican candidate has already been smeared by the media. And it's still early.

Scapegoating is the biggest tactic of the Left. Alinsky put it as "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize, it and polarize it." It's how mob aggression has always worked. "Kill the witch!" is a perfect example: You know the target, you freeze its public image, everybody knows it's that old crone living alone outside the village, and now she's to blame for your cow dying last week.  That's all Alinsky comes down to.

Alinsky picked you and me as "the enemy." That is crucial for us to understand. "One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other side."  That is practically a definition of fanaticism. We think of the Left as democratic opponents.  They think of us as "the enemy."  Therefore they have the advantage in ruthlessness and fanaticism.  Their whole purpose in life is to defeat us.

Alinsky's tactics do not include open, rational debate.  Wrote Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals, " Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. (You and me). Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat."

The Left therefore constantly violates the basic rules of rational debate.  Alinsky on the Book of Job: "The life of man upon earth is a warfare."  And from Lenin:"When we have the guns (we will rule) through the bullet."  Alinsky denies any role for ethics.  

We may not want to believe that, but we face opponents who passionately deny ethical behavior in politics.

Audacity is a war strategy. This is a crucial point. Hitler's Blitzkrieg was an "audacity" strategy because Panzer divisions struck deep into enemy territory, a huge gamble, because the tanks far out-ran their own logistics.  That was considered impossible, because losing one's supply train was a sure way to lose.  Before the Blitzkrieg, tanks were used as slow-moving artillery bunkers.  Blitzkrieg worked because it knocked out the nerve centers of Poland and the France so fast that the tanks could refuel and resupply in Paris and Warsaw.

The Germans learned audacity warfare from Napoleon, who used it to conquer Prussia around 1800.  Napoleon's victory triggered off a dynamic of revenge (revanchisme) between French and German nations.  The Prussians struck back in 1878 by invading Paris; in World War I, the Western Allies won.  World War II used Blitzkrieg as Hitler's revenge for the first World War.  And finally Patton and the Third Army used the audacity strategy  to knock out Hitler.

Audacity works when one side is willing to escalate fast to a very high level of aggression against a more civilized opponent.  That's why today's politics is driven by the Left.  Bobby Fischer's had the audacity mind-set: "Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent's mind.... I like the moment when I break a man's ego."

Conservatives play civilized politics. The Left aims to destroy the other side.  That is why the Left has made huge strides in the last two decades. If you doubt that, look at how many inconvenient people were destroyed by the media in the Clinton impeachment fight.

Twenty years ago the Soviet Union crumbled. In Eastern Europe the  Marxist power class lost control. China switched to crony capitalism. Everywhere in the world it looked as if free and democratic societies were winning against Marxist tyrannies.

But only two decades later, in 2011, the Left is the biggest cultural, academic and media power in America and Europe.  Conservatives have nothing comparable to the power dominance of the Left.  What's worse, the radical Left has made common cause with reactionary Muslims, throwbacks to 7th century Arabia, regardless of their treatment of women, children, Jews, Christians, and Marxist atheists.

Today we see the second Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an alliance between fanatical ideologies to knock out the West.  The "Arab Spring" in the Middle East will bring to power more radical Muslims in Sunni Arab nations, just as Jimmy Carter's appeasement of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 brought to power an Islamofascist regime of the Shiite variety in Iran.  A million people died in the resulting Iran-Iraq War.

Today, Israel, Europe and America are the top targets for Left-Islamist campaign of sabotage and conquest. Judge these people by their results.

The resurgence of the radical Left has caught conservatives  by surprise.  We barely have an organized resistance.  In Britain the Conservative Party is a copy cat party.  In the United States the radical Left has conquered the medical sector of the economy, and it will soon turn the best medical system in the world into an engine of more and more Left power.  Republicans will be forced to join the vote-buying war. We can no longer defend our long border with Mexico because the Left has sabotaged our very reason for national existence. Our citizens no longer understand it.

In fact, totalitarian utopianism has now penetrated the blockheads of the media and the pop culture. In his latest book Mark Steyn has a useful summary of the Left's audacity strategy: "Never underestimate the totalitarian temptations of the smart set."

We have a lot of catching up to do.