JACK SHAFER: How the Right Learned to Love Saul Alinsky.

The only idea gaining bipartisan traction these days is the strategy of storming and occupying some power center.

In Canada, thousands of vaccine-mandate protesting truckers, supported by many of the country’s conservatives, have turned the streets of Ottawa into a monster truck rally, defacing the capital’s monuments, flying the Nazi flag, and bullying soup kitchen operators. The Ottawa showdown, titled “Freedom Convoy,” follows the Jan. 6 blitz on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s “patriots,” and what now is called that event’s dress rehearsal, the armed storming of Michigan’s state capitol in 2020.

Such turf takeovers have traditionally been the province of the left, not the right. In the 1930s, leftist union organizers took over auto and rubber factories to gain recognition. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights and anti-war movements staged sit-down protests of their own, with the peaceniks famously occupying the office of Columbia University’s president. (Taking over a college president’s office remains a protester favorite.) In 2011 and 2012, anti-capitalist activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement commandeered Manhattan’s streets (“Whose streets? Our streets!”) in their campaign against income inequality. Their methods and message spread across the country and around the world. Following the George Floyd murder, Portland anarchists set fire to a police precinct and essentially took possession of the city’s downtown streets, holding them for months.

What took the right so long to discover the politics of occupation? Do they not get cable television or something? Perhaps they’ve been too hung up on good manners and property rights to knock down the door of power and hijack it? And what does it mean that some righties have now decided that rushing the barricades, breaking windows, and intimidating the state is a fruitful political technique?

I’ll take “Headlines from 2009” for $500, Alex.