Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. He attended the University of Chicago, where he got a degree in archaeology. During the Great Depression, however, he saw that “archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies.” He studied criminology in graduate school and then became a labor organizer, working in the slums of Chicago. He created the Industrial Areas Foundation and a network of activist organizations that soon expanded to other cities. Eventually he shifted his emphasis from labor organizing to organizing poor people and teaching them how to extract political and economic benefits from the government. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Alinsky developed a comprehensive strategy for social transformation. He did this partly in response to Richard Nixon’s attempts to woo the middle class—the “silent majority,” as Nixon called it. While he championed the poor and the underdogs, Alinsky himself enjoyed the good life. He liked good food, good wine, good cigars, and golf. One of his favorite places was Carmel, California, where he died of a heart attack in 1972.
Alinsky was a paradoxical figure. A labor organizer, he also hung out with clergymen, mafia leaders, and corporate tycoons. Jewish by birth, and atheist by conviction, he worked closely with Catholic bishops and Protestant pastors. A reflexive patriot, he nevertheless hated much about America and sought to replace the country he lived in with a different kind of country that he could unreservedly love. Modest in style, Alinsky was arrogant about what he could achieve. “I feel confident,” he once said, “that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution on Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.”3 Alinsky was an architect of revolution, a revolution that sought to undo the Reagan revolution, and even the American Revolution.
To do that he needed leaders, and over the years he inspired and tutored many influential writers and activists. One was Cesar Chavez, head of the United Farm Workers; another was the scholar and activist Armando Navarro, one of the champions of a separate homeland for Mexican Americans. A third was the former student-activist Tom Hayden, who along with his then-wife Jane Fonda organized anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Hayden want to Hanoi in 1965 to meet with North Vietnamese leaders. So did Staughton Lynd, another Alinsky acolyte who was active in socialist agitation and demonstrations against U.S. foreign policy. This roster is impressive enough, but it leaves out Alinsky’s two most influential disciples. Rarely has a man been more fortunate in his students. Alinsky found two individuals, a man and a woman, who more than three decades after his death, might actually realize his goal of replacing the America that is with the America that Alinsky believed ought to be.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Barack Obama, a native of Hawaii, with his roots in Kenya and Indonesia, kept going to Chicago to find jobs as an activist and community organizer. Although Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, and courted by high-paying law firms, he chose to take a low-paid job in Chicago. There he built his political career, first as a community agitator, then as a state representative, then as a senator from Illinois, before he ran for president. In an interview for my America film, I asked the social scientist Stanley Kurtz, who has studied Obama closely, why Obama, who had no roots in Chicago, kept returning there. Kurtz responded that Obama made Chicago his new home because he became an Alinskyite, and he wanted to master the techniques of Alinsky. I knew of course that Obama’s first job in Chicago was working for the Alinsky network; there is a picture on the web of Obama teaching Alinsky’s techniques to fellow community activists. Kurtz, however, has documented a deeper connection between Obama and Alinsky. He discovered that Obama during the mid-1990s even joined a radical political party called the New Party that had been founded by the Alinsky spinoff organization Acorn.4 Yet this has received very little press coverage, in the manner that all information damaging to Obama receives very little press coverage. Obama himself suppresses his debt to Alinsky, saying nothing about it in his autobiography Dreams from My Father.
As I have argued earlier—and as Obama’s own autobiography confirms—Obama got his dreams from his father, but the story doesn’t end there. While Obama’s anti-colonialist dreams may have originated in Barack Obama Sr.’s experience in Kenya, they were reinforced in young Obama’s life through his experiences in Hawaii and the years he spent growing up in Indonesia. Then, young Obama learned chapter and verse of the anti-colonial ideology in New York at Columbia, in Boston at Harvard, and in Chicago through various Alinsky organizations. Obama learned from Alinsky how to convert radical ideology into political power, in other words, how to win and retain high office. Obama was such a good student that he became a teacher of Alinsky techniques, and ultimately he used those techniques to carry himself to the White House, and to win a second term. Describing Alinsky’s influence on Obama, Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt said in an NPR interview, “Barack Obama is in the White House because he really learned a lesson on the streets of Chicago.”5
Now, by a kind of arrangement, Obama intends to hand over the baton of leadership to his fellow Alinskyite, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was a Goldwater girl in the early 1960s. She became radicalized in high school by a teacher who introduced her to a Methodist magazine that promoted leftist causes from economic redistribution to gay rights. By the time Hillary entered Wellesley College in 1965, she was a committed leftist. Yet she was smart enough to realize that the tactics of the 1960s were juvenile. They were the tactics of people outside the tent, peering in. Hillary wanted to be inside the tent, peering out. She had met Saul Alinsky in high school, but she renewed her association with him in college, inviting him to speak at Wellesley, and writing her undergraduate thesis on him. Hillary viewed Alinsky as a theorist of power—able to take radical ideas mainstream. Interestingly when Hillary became first lady, Wellesley removed her thesis from public circulation. One of her professors got a call from the White House, requesting this, and Wellesley responded by adopting a rule that the senior thesis of any president or first lady should not be publicly available. The rule of course applied to a single case, that of Hillary.
When Hillary graduated, she was offered a job by Alinsky. She refused, and decided instead to go to law school. In her book Living History, Clinton portrays her decision as arising out of a “fundamental disagreement” with Alinsky. In Clinton’s words, “He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t.”6 Hillary wanted to complete her education and get the best credentials she could to get into the mainstream institutions of power.
Initially, Hillary’s trail was not one of feminist trail-blazing. She did a brief stint as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the Watergate investigation, but that seems to have ended when her over-zealous tactics resulted in her ouster. She then married Bill and followed him to Arkansas, where he was later elected governor. When Bill was elected president in 1992, she accompanied him to the White House. She endured Bill’s lecheries and backed him, with admirable stoicism, through the impeachment attempt. Since Bill’s presidency, she has forged an independent identity, first as senator and then as secretary of state, qualifying her to become a formidable candidate for the White House in 2016. If that happens, Hillary the Alinskyite will have succeeded Obama the Alinskyite, and Alinsky will be, at least in part, responsible for the election of two American presidents in a row.
The Alinsky train really got rolling in 2008 when the Democratic nomination was contested by two Alinskyites, the man who wanted to be the first African American president and the presidential wife who wanted to be the first woman president. Ultimately the black Alinskyite beat the female Alinskyite, in part because in America the politics of race trumps the politics of sex.
Some Americans think that if they elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 they are also going to get Bill. We occasionally hear of how nice it would be to get back “Billary.” Even some conservatives relish the prospect, because, they say, Obama doesn’t have a clue and Bill is smart. Yet
here is the case where Obama and Hillary—not Bill—may get the last laugh. Bill of course is a White House addict and he desperately wants to hang around the Oval Office, hobnob with foreign leaders at State Dinners, and issue White House pontifications. The only way for him to do this is to help get his wife elected.
To this end, Bill put aside his reservations about Obama. Bill has long regarded Obama as a lightweight unworthy of the Democratic presidential mantle. In 2008, he told Senator Ted Kennedy that Obama’s only credential was that he was black and that “a few years ago this guy would be getting us coffee.”7 There is no evidence that Clinton has fundamentally changed his perspective. Even so, he campaigned assiduously for Obama’s reelection. Why? To ensure that Obama would repay the favor, and four years later, when he could not run again, permit Hillary (rather than Joe Biden or someone else) to be his replacement. What Bill doesn’t seem to realize is that Hillary has her own agenda. While Bill wants the fun of being back in the White House, and being listened to again, Barack and Hillary want to implement the plan that Alinsky devised for progressives to retain power and change America.
As a young man Alinsky saw the hardships of the Great Depression. He saw what he regarded as the failure of capitalism, and even more the injustice of capitalism. Many Americans saw their savings evaporate and their jobs disappear. As a labor organizer, he set up “people’s organizations” in industrial slums, mostly in immigrant communities in Chicago. Alinsky became a socialist. He confessed his socialist convictions in his 1946 book Reveille for Radicals. Alinsky wrote that radicals like himself “want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism… . They hope for a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people.”8
Alinsky’s real influence, however, has less to do with his ideology than with his tactics. He developed what he called a “science of revolution,” which is fully articulated in his second book, Rules for Radicals. This book was not published until 1971, a year before Alinsky’s death, although Alinsky had been putting its teachings into effect much earlier. By the time the 1960s came along, Alinsky was a middle-aged man. He was not exactly a creature of the 1960s. He supported the Civil Rights movement, but he was not closely involved with it. He opposed the Vietnam War, but that wasn’t the cause that drove him. He was sympathetic to the attempts of the 1960s radicals to break down traditional codes of morality, but at the same time he regarded the radicals as soft, ignorant, undisciplined, and ineffective—a “herd of independent thinkers” desperately in need of a better plan of action. The 1960s activists regarded themselves, not Alinsky, as the vanguard of revolutionary thinking, but as their organizations fell apart and their tactics failed, many of them turned to him for guidance.
Rules for Radicals was informed by Alinsky’s close engagement with student radicalism, including the activists of Students for a Democratic Society and Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground. Alinsky scorned the Weather Underground as representing “comic book leftism” which achieved nothing and then turned to violence. Alinsky argued that violent revolution was a chimera, and that what could be achieved in America was “orderly revolution.” Orderly revolution requires getting the consent of organized groups and the power brokers of society. Alinsky was not impressed by the SDS either, regarding it as a group of naive middle-class students playing at being revolutionaries. He spurned their foot-stomping political “tantrums,” dubbing them practitioners of “Rumpelstiltskin politics.”9 Bottom line: all these people were ineffective and didn’t know how to bring about real change.
Alinsky argued that there are two kinds of radicals. He contrasted what he termed the “rhetorical radical” from the “radical realist.” Rhetorical radicals like to talk. Anger is their touchstone of virtue. They are bombastic with their Marxist or Leninist slogans. Yet they don’t get much done. Alinsky wrote, “I have learned to freeze my hot anger into cool anger.” Cool anger is based on deliberation and experience, both of which “have made my actions far more calculated, deliberate, directive and effective.” Alinsky realized that changing social systems is hard, and that radicals need patience and discipline—a kind of Puritan sensibility.
Alinsky began by recognizing who the radicals were. Despite their histrionic self-descriptions as victims, these were not underprivileged working people or downtrodden minorities—they were educated members of the middle class. “With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society.” Alinsky agreed with the goals of the radicals—to destroy middle-class values. “All rebels must attack the power states in their society. Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, warmongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right.” At the same time, Alinsky disagreed with the strategy of the 1960s radicals. They habitually called the cops “pigs” and working people “racist” and traditional values “square.” Alinsky pointed out, “We must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change. The power and the people are in the big middle-class majority. Therefore, it is useless self-indulgence for an activist to put his past behind him. Instead he should use the priceless value of his middle-class experience… . Instead of the infantile dramatics of rejection, he will now begin to dissect and examine the way of life as he never has before. He will know that a ‘square’ is no longer to be dismissed as such—instead, his own approach must be ‘square’ enough to get the action started… . Instead of hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of communication and unity… . He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.”10
The central problem is that middle-class people typically don’t want to be radicalized. They don’t want to undermine their country. They are patriots who would rather win wars than lose them. They don’t consider the people fighting on the other side to be the good guys. They like capitalism, and just want to succeed within the system. They believe in law and order, and support the police to maintain it. They are not fans of public sex or public defecation, in the manner of the most exhibitionistic hippies. They espouse traditional values, even though they don’t always live up to them. Alinsky realized that the task of the radical is to turn middle-class people against themselves, to make them instruments of their own destruction. This would not be easy.
So how did Alinsky figure out a winning strategy? He says he got it from the philosopher Machiavelli, author of The Prince. Alinsky wrote, “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” Yet I was startled to see that, with the exception of a few maxims of realpolitik, Rules for Radicals actually draws very little from Machiavelli. I began to wonder if Alinsky’s invocation of Machiavelli was a diversion. If so that would be a very Machiavellian thing to do. I began to flip randomly through Alinsky’s book in frustration when I came upon the dedication page. There I read perhaps the most unusual dedication in the history of American publishing.
Most books are dedicated to loved ones—family and friends—or to influential mentors. Alinsky, interestingly enough, dedicates his book to the devil. This is not a joke: Rules for Radicals is actually dedicated to Lucifer. Alinsky calls him “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” Now this is remarkable in itself, and yet it has attracted very little attention. Progressives who learn about it are initially surprised, and then tend to dismiss the dedication with a roll of the eyes and a weary “Oh brother.” This, however, is intellectually uncurious. Alinsky was serious about his choice. In fact, he returned to the same theme in a Playboy interview he did in 1972. In it he said, “If there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreserv
edly choose to go to hell.” When the interviewer asked why, Alinsky said, “Hell would be heaven for me. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there. They’re my kind of people.”11
Back to the Lucifer dedication: Now why would Alinsky do this? The man was an atheist, so he didn’t believe in an actual Satan. Yet Alinsky calls him the “first radical.” Clearly a radical writing books called Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals would have a lot to learn from the original radical. I turned for inspiration to Stanley Fish, one of the world’s leading Milton scholars, whom I interviewed on the subject of Lucifer as he is portrayed in Paradise Lost and, more broadly, in the Western tradition. I asked Fish to elaborate on Lucifer’s strategy against God.
Fish outlined a four-part strategy. First, polarization. Satan is deeply alienated from God. He doesn’t seek to mend fences; he polarizes. He issues a declaration of war against God. As Milton’s Satan puts it, “War then, war open or understood, must be resolved.” Second—and this is rather ironic, coming from Lucifer—demonization. Incredible though it seems, Satan demonizes God. How? By making God into a tyrant, the symbol of “the establishment.” This makes Satan into a champion of resistance, of counterculture. He claims to be combating what he terms “the tyranny of heaven.” Third, organization. Satan is a mobilizer of envy; he draws on the very quality that motivated the bad angels to rebel in the first place. For Satan, envy against God is a great motivator, and he appeals to that envy among the other discontented angels. What’s Satan’s strategy for doing that? Satan is a community organizer. We see him in the early books of Paradise Lost building coalitions among the rebel angels, and motivating them to join him in a nefarious campaign against God and God’s special creation man. It is a project undertaken, as he puts it, “to spite the great creator.”
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 8
