I think there are a lot of things the Left can learn from the Right — which has been doing most of the political innovation and best organizing in the U.S. over the last quarter century.

One place the Left can look to for some lessons is The Leadership Institute. Founded by conservative movement activist Morton Blackwell, it has been teaching young conservatives how to be campus activists, journalists, and provocateurs for a generation. Progressives have never bothered to even try to match the Institute — leaving the field of well organized campus activism largely to the Right. Its not that there are not some good organizations of the center and the left that do some training, its just that they are not so focused, funded, and effective.

Anyway, there is an excellent and important article on Salon.com based on reporter Jeff Horowitz’s experience attending a Leadership Institute training. The article is so full of valuable insights, I think it is one of the most important articles anyone will read or write about politics this year.

The Leadership Institute, Horowitz reports, is “a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required ‘neutrality,’ the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students — hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute’s Broadcast Journalism School.”

“Over the last 25 years,” Horowitz continues, “more than 40,000 young conservatives have been trained at the institute’s Arlington, Va., headquarters in everything from TV makeup for aspiring right-wing talking heads to prep courses for the State Department’s Foreign Service exam. Classes are taught by volunteers recruited from the ranks of the conservative movement’s most talented organizers, operatives and communicators.”

“The Leadership Institute has succeeded,” Horowitz concludes, “in part, because it’s had little to no competition from the left.” That has started to change. The Center for Progressive Leadership has recently been launched as an answer to The Leadership Institute. The Center’s web site says it is “the first national political training institute dedicated to building the next generation of progressive political leaders. Through intensive training programs for youth, activists, and candidates, CPL provides individuals with the skills and resources needed to become effective political leaders.”

Meanwhile, Horowitz raises many interesting questions about the efficacy of the Left’s political and electoral organizing on many fronts, for example: “Chris Stio, an institute staffer who directed the Bush-Cheney field operations in northeast Michigan, warns his students not to buy into second-term crowing about America’s irrevocable slide into conservatism. ‘Enough people were yelling and screaming about the president that if they’d actually picked up the phone book and started calling, they might have won,’ he says. ‘They went to concerts, they bashed the president, but they didn’t work. If enough people had, maybe we’d have a different president. The election was not inevitable. And too many think it was.’”

There is much to learn from The Leadership Institute — not that other sectors of society should ape their style and their tactics. First, we should understand what their tactics are — such as deliberate provocations intended to upset and throw liberals off balance; rigging student referenda; and so on. Second, we should be planning to create training institutes of our own, although the Center seems to be a good start. But more importantly, we need to develop a culture of learning about politics and citizenship instead of reusing the same old ineffective tactics in the same old ways year after year.

It is long past time to talk about these things. Fortunately there is a diary on The Daily Kos summarizing the article and leading to discussion. When Talk to Action’s phase II goes live in a few weeks, it will be the place for exactly the kinds of focused and thoughtful conversations and debatees we need to have about tactics and strategy, the lessons we can learn from the Right, and what works and does not work in response.