Alinsky describes the history of public housing — which replaced rat-infested tenements with modern apartment buildings. Now, he says, they are “jungles of horror.” “A beautiful positive dream has grown into a negative nightmare.” (p. 17)
And of course, the have-nots who were provided with a decent place to live are the victims once again. With Alinsky, there are no questions of “why?”, even though on page 11 he claimed it is the most important word — like an inverted plow, “breaking up the hard soil of old beliefs and preparing for the new growth.”
Alinsky’s personal hard soil seems to be his inability to perceive the existence of individual souls and his lack of acknowledgment of the role of individual responsibility in shaping outcomes. In the examples he cites, there is just the mass of have-nots liberated in some small way and then becoming victims again. It is as though they were merely chess pieces in a larger political drama.
This of course is the opposite of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which affirms the importance of each individual in the eyes of the Creator. It is this affirmation which gives meaning to millions of lives which Alinsky, caught up in the trap of political elitist, judges to have no meaning. For someone interested in moving chess pieces around a political stage, it seems crucial to be hanging out high above us all to get the right perspective. Kind of like God.
Are you getting a sense of how difficult it might be for Obama and his cronies to understand that there are indeed other perspectives and other ways of seeing the world?
Alinsky ends this chapter with a discussion of “Class Distinctions: the Trinity” (while we’re on the theme of a parallel political religion).
We have the haves, the have-nots, and the have-a-little, want mores. It is the latter, the middle class, which stand in the way of revolution and which Alinsky describes with loathing:
Torn between upholding the status quo to protect what little they have, yet wanting change so they can have more, they become split personalities. They could be described as social, economic and political schizoids. Generally, they seek the safe way where they can profit by change and yet not risk losing what they have. They insist on a minimum of three aces before playing a hand in the poker of revolution. Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia. Today in Western society and particularly in the United States, they comprise a majority of our population.
Does it seem peculiar: Alinsky’s lack of judgment on the have-nots — who in the instance of public housing destroy what they are given — and his contempt for the middle class who have risen of their own efforts and want to keep what they have?
This is indeed a defining perspective of the Obama administration, including Chicago/Alinsky bred politicos like Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel, and the czarist empire they have created. These disciples see themselves as far above the fray, manipulating groups of people to achieve their own ends and with contempt for anyone who stands in their way.
The only thing that separates them for their mentor is that they seem not to have developed the self-discipline he recommends to avoid becoming what you claimed to want to replace. One hopes that their self-indulgence and hypocrisy may become a wake-up call to those yet to awaken to the conservative revolution following fast on the heels of this one.
The current revolution is flawed by the solipsism of those like Alinsky, who — because of their denial of man’s spiritual nature — have a craven image of our world and see us all as orbiting around their political view:
[I]t was wrong to assume that man would pursue morality on a level higher than day-to-day living demanded. … The fact is that it is not man’s better nature but his self-interest that demands that he be his brother’s keeper, We now live in a world where no man can have a loaf of bread while his neighbor has none, If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him. To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if for seemingly the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother’s keeper. [Remember Obama’s "brother’s keeper" message to the carefully sifted leftist religious leaders? -- BC]
I believe that man is about to learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival. … This is the kind of argument that man’s actual experience equips him to understand and accept, This is the low road to morality, There is no other. [Alinsky's emphasis] (p. 23)
How do you feel about that last statement?
As someone who lived without God for 39 years and whose worldview and actions changed 180 degrees when I decided to devote the rest of my life to serving Him and my fellow man, I have to disagree. Things change when you stop living in your intellect and seeing yourself as the center of a random, soulless universe. (I feel free to interject this thought in an essay on Alinsky, because his remarks on page 11 indicate that he may be the father of the philosophy that “the personal is the political” — one of the most useful ideas to come out of the left.)
Alinsky claims to be an optimist (p. 21). I don’t see it. Optimism isn’t just based on the idea that you can take this horrible existence we are muddling through and build your dream culture — that’s utopianism. Optimism is seeing the good here and now and working humbly to make the world a better place. As Mother Teresa said, “One can do no great things, only small things with great love.”
The coming conservative revolution — because according to the Hegelian/Alinsky model, there will be another revolution to counteract this very imperfect one — will also be imperfect. But being rooted in Judeo-Christian values, it will be built not on cynical exploitation and enslavement of voting blocks, but on individual worth, freedom, and responsibility.
I for one am really looking forward to it.
~~~~~~
Blogging Alinsky leaves me in need of something. a shower? A milkshake? A hug? An episode of I Love Lucy?
Will blog chapter two on Friday. I only covered a third of the scrawls in the margins of my book. I’m sure you noticed things I missed.
An alarming revelation from Michelle Malkin:
On the National Education Association’s recommended reading list for teachers: Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American Organizer with — you guessed it — Rules for Radicals.
What did your kids learn in school today?
My dad gave me a copy of Rules for Radicals when I was college age. I remember NOT reading it. My dad the ACLU lawyer thought Alinsky was fun.
Toward the end of his life, my dad rejected ACLU and even voted for Republicans occasionally. He hated Nixon and Clinton both.
Stay with it, Barbara.
alinsky is what a person driven by envy and hate looks like.
like an angry spoiled brat getting back at all those who he could not compete with ..you’d think I was describing that narcissist obama.
“An alarming revelation from Michelle Malkin:
On the National Education Association’s recommended reading list for teachers: Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American Organizer with — you guessed it — Rules for Radicals.”
Why alarming? This is what education is all about.
Saul Alinsky did not hesitate to slime and lie about his perceived enemies. In the introduction of Sanford Horwitt’s Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky-His Life And Legacy, we find about the morally disgusting he gave to radical college students:
“College student activists in the 1960s and 1970s sought out Alinsky for advice about tactics and strategy. On one such occasion in the spring of 1972 at Tulane University’s annual week-long series of events featuring leading public figures, students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, a speech likely to be a defense of the Nixon Administration’s Vietnam War policies. The students told Alinsky that they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined — not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading ‘The K.K.K. supports Bush.’ And that is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results.”
It is useful to familiarize oneself with the tactics of one’s enemies.
These tactics have been so effective that the opposition must occasionally dive in to the same slime pit to get results.
Sad, but true.
Alinksy is not an optimist. He’s a cynic, contemptuous of men and their motives.
On page 10 in my copy, Alinsky quotes Abraham Lincoln: “Be not deceived. Revolutions do not got backward.” Much as I like Lincoln, this is simply false. One need look no further than places like Chad, Somalia, and rural Afganistan and Pakistan where an Islamic revolution has taken those cultures back to the 6th century, not forward.
I find it fascinating that Alinsky promotes dualism. This allows him to set up false dichotomies–either/or situations (Haves/Have Nots, Doers/Do-Nothings) which betrays a lazy or immature intellect unable or unwilling to admit that life is not just black or white.
Alinksy creates a duality between his own views and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Both Alinsky and Machiavelli develop an art of political manipulation with the operative word being “manipulation.” Knowing that Rules for Radicals will be read primarily by middle class college kids and guilt-ridden liberals who do not qualify as Have-Nots, Alinksy creates a special class for them: the “Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” Appealing to their idealism and egos, Alinsky tells them that the “greatest leaders of change in past centuries (Moses…Martin Luther…Thomas Jefferson… Nicolai Lenin…M. Gandhi…)” belonged to the Have-a-Little, Want More class. If you follow Alinsky’s radical rules and become a tool of the revolution, you too can be next great world leader! [sarc off] Never mind that you’ll more likely end up just being a pawn and a useful idiot.
Alinksy’s list of “great leaders” is also revealing. He juxtaposes leaders of more “peaceful” religious, social and political revolutions (e.g., Moses, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi) against people who have instigated and/or led some of the world’s bloodiest revolutions (e.g., Robespierre, Lenin, Fidel Castro and Mao). This is a cynical attempt to sanitize the roles of these murders and thugs. Obama’s radical friends like the Mao-worshipping Anita Dunn have obviously drunk the Kool-Aid.
Alinksy’s statement “If the young were writing our Declaration of Independence, they would begin ‘When in the course of inhuman events….” is nicely echoed in Jeremiah Wright’s recent rephrasing of the National Anthem ” … land of the greed and home of the slaves.
Great insights, Anneke! Yes, that list immediately brought to mind Anite Dunn, whose two favorite philosophers are Mao and Mother Teresa.
For anyone who missed his recent speech in praise of Marxism, the Jeremiah Wright quote can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ceJ-RYb39c
I want to say great essay. However, one thing:
“The coming conservative revolution — because according to the Hegelian/Alinsky model, there will be another revolution to counteract this very imperfect one — will also be imperfect. But being rooted in Judeo-Christian values, it will be built not on cynical exploitation and enslavement of voting blocks, but on individual worth, freedom, and responsibility.”
I don’t know if you meant this to poke fun at the political manicheans or not, but I think part of the toxic views of Alinsky and other Marxists is their acceptance of history as completely deterministic a la Hegel. Man is a ultimately a pawn. Victory is inevitable, see, because history and the angels are always on their side. Everyone else is expendable and a slave, kind of like humanity as portrayed in “The Matrix.” That is the source of their optimism, the inevitability of things. A fatalism that’s only dark for their enemies. I think it unwise for conservatives to fall into the same mental trap.
The political religionists have no understanding of a personal God, and therefore deify history. It is a convenient way to justify corruption and barbarism, and it should be noted that this view has its roots in the errors, that is heresies, of Judeo-Christian culture. For an excellent book on the topic see Norman Cohn’s “The Pursuit of the Millennium.”
I look forward to reading more.
This is exactly why worldview IS important. Alinsky’s foundational beliefs are obvious: there is no God – and even if there is a God, he is impotent and indifferent. This belief compels him to recommend this “political vigilanteism”. The futility of his belief is stark and, to be honest, quite sad.
Throughout the 2008 election, Obama constantly distanced himself from Jeremiah Wrights teaching and relationship. Obama would often state that the many years he spent in Wright’s church were unimportant or inconsequential to the Presidential election. He made the same disassociations from Bill Ayers. I think it patently ridiculous and even deceptive to suggest that your background and worldview have no bearing on your political views. On the contrary, a candidate’s worldview (especially presidential candidate) is probably THE most important thing for the voting public to understand.
I don’t think we are going to be done by Thanksgiving.
The next chapter attempts to justify the means used by radicals by pointing out that means/ends differ according to your perspective.
Of course the ends don’t always justify the means. If you want someones land and they will not sell, you could kill them and maybe have better luck with their heirs. But those means could never be justified.
Alinsky tries to confuse the issue to the point that unjustifiable means can be justified. They cannot.
Isn’t that what King Ahab did?