So You Want to be a Radical?

After thinking about reading this book several times, and then losing interest, the last couple of weeks have seen the indoctrination, complete with motives, techniques, and advice, spew forth from the pages of Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals.  The basic premise of the book is that the poor and lower middle class have a right to the riches of the wealthy, and therefore any means necessary to leverage that wealth so it can be redistributed to the poor, is fair game.  Alinsky claims there are parts of society which lack the opportunity to participate in the democratic process and are prevented access to any means of self-determination.  He argues that anyone who has gotten ahead in life has done so at the expense of others and could care less about the poor who have been left in their wake of greed.  According to Alinsky, today’s generation, who are now adoring their grandchildren given this book was written in 1971, rejects the way of life of their parents and their ideas and measures of success in favor of redistribution of wealth.  They will not be satisfied with a middle class existence and are more concerned with finding themselves and seeking a greater purpose.  Alinsky looks at the middle class as a group of ignorant and dissatisfied citizens who are resigned to the fact that they will never advance beyond their current lot in life and are powerless to do anything about it.  They are suspicious of other ethnic groups, their own government, and have a disdain for the poor who take their money in the form of welfare payments.  They are content to enjoy the simple things in their unfulfilled lives.  Thus, they are ripe for the picking and must be won over by the organizer to move society toward a reformation, unknown it may be.  Alinsky believes dogma is the enemy of human freedom and indicates that truths are relative.  This allows the organizer to shift his values when need be in the name of advancing an agenda.  All of this boils down to ensuring equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity.  Alinsky gives the example of people boarding a bus.  If there are too few seats people will push and shove to get their seat.  But if there are many seats, everyone will calmly seek their seat because there is plenty for everyone.  The former is equal opportunity, the later equal outcome.  Alinsky believes equal outcomes, not opportunity, is the hallmark of a just society.     

So what are Alinsky’s means of redistributing wealth and achieving this “just society”?  Basically whatever it takes to make people’s lives so miserable they succumb to his pressure and grant his demands.  This includes corporate shakedowns, boycotts, personal ridicule and attacks, polarizing issues and people groups, and being a bully in general.  The situation determines the tactic, but once the target is chosen, there is no middle ground.  The target, whether a corporation or person, is considered to be 100% devil, regardless of any good they possess.  This achieves complete polarization of any person or issue.  Alinsky argues “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”  Some tactics are quite creative, although childish and crude.  Alinsky describes a situation in Rochester, New York where he came up with an idea to buy a hundred tickets to the symphony for his protesters and give them a pre-concert dinner of baked beans.  Once they arrived at the symphony they would no doubt be flatulent ensuring there was more than music in the air.  The hope was this would be such an outrage to the elite that they would pay any ransom and meet any demand to not to have to deal with those people and their unsophisticated behavior again.  But all tactics have one thing in common; they detour around any exchange of ideas relying instead on the brute force of intimidation.    

While Alinsky’s tactics are suspect and his ends idealistic, he does make some surprising comments regarding the pitfalls of dependence, whether on government or the community organizer.  Here are some interesting quotes:

 

“There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.”

“Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services.  To give people help, while denying them a significant part in the action, contributes nothing to the development of the individual.  In the deepest sense it is not giving but taking – taking their dignity.  Denial of the opportunity for participation is the denial of human dignity and democracy.  It will not work.”

“Without the learning process, the building of an organization becomes simply the substitution of one power group for another.”

“People must be ‘reformed’ – so they cannot be deformed into dependency and driven through desperation to dictatorship and the death of freedom.

“In the end he (the organizer) has one conviction – a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions.  The alternative to this would be rule by the elite – either a dictatorship or some form of a political aristocracy.”

Given these statements, it is logical to assume that while Alinsky was all to willing to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, it was not to become a lifelong crutch.  There was still an expectation people would use this process as a stepping stone to become active in the political and economic arenas where they could then determine the outcome of their own futures.  Redistribution was not the end, but only the beginning on the way to self-determination.

So has this process of organizing and redistribution been successful as a way to give people a hand up in determining their own fate?  Has it enhanced their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?  Has it pulled them out of poverty and improved their quality of life?  No, no, and no.  Instead, it has been exploited by a few charismatic organizers and used as a tool to maintain their power and standing at the expense of those they claim to represent.  Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the like have done an excellent job of organizing the masses and convincing people they lack an ability to participate in the political process, as Alinsky contends.  But beyond that, these so-called leaders have conditioned their followers to the false reality that the system is rigged against them and they have no hope but that which the organizer gives them.  The organizer has become the substitute power group Alinsky refers to in the quote above.  In the end, no one’s life is improved, large sectors of the population become dependant on the redistribution of other people’s wealth, and are denied the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Not of any legal requirement, but by their leaders who condition them to believe that they can not make it, so why bother.

Sadly, this now translates to a national level as our president is using these tactics against the United States.  Think about the tactics he regularly uses to foist his agenda on the American people.  He polarizes every issue, ridicules his opponents, and often uses his rhetoric to fan the flames and make matters worse so that everyone is operating out of a sense of desperation.  All text book Alinsky tactics.  He has polarized every group in the country politically, racially, and religiously, pitting one group against another.  He rarely uses his position to sooth tensions choosing instead to stoke the fires of discontent.  Interestingly though, Obama’s disdain for compromise and thirst for power has made him into the very beast Alinsky intended to slay – the power hungry leader that maintains his power at the expense of the people.  Alinsky says it this way – “This is the basic difference between the leader and the organizer.  The leader goes on to build power to fulfill his desires, to hold and wield power for purposes both social and personal.  He wants power himself.  The organizer finds his goal in creation of power for others to use.”   He further states, “A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.” Obama is certainly not interested in empowering anyone, especially at the expense of his own power or at the risk of compromise.

In the end, Alinsky’s dreams of the utopia of equal outcomes paid for by the wealthy were never completely realized.  While there has been a significant redistribution of wealth, it certainly has not benefited the poor or improved their lot in life.  So, not only was Alinsky’s dream unfulfilled, but the same  techniques he developed to achieve his objective were usurped by those that now represent what he intended to eliminate – a power class that got rich off the backs of the poor and is content to maintain them as an underclass to preserve their own influence, power, and prestige.