[lbo-talk] right appropriates Alinsky for town halls

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Tue Aug 11 08:23:43 PDT 2009


I think Alinsky is getting a bit of a bad rap, these days, although I understand the acitivistism problem and can see how Alinsky could have contributed to that. When I read Rules for Radicals -- a long time ago, now -- I didn't have any trouble getting through it (on the contrary, it was a very quick read). I thought he had some useful stuff, but I remember being struck by how deeply Catholic the book is. Again, it's been years, now, but that impression of the book was stronger than anything else I took away from it. Which may, at the end of the day, be the point.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> [Hey, and Ralph Reed is a student of Gramsci. I tried reading Rules for
> Radicals once, in order to write a critique of Alinskyism, but couldn't get
> past about 15 pages. The project could be worth another visit - as the quote
> about Daley at the end shows.]
>
> <
> http://washingtonindependent.com/54554/conservatives-find-town-hall-strategy-in-leftist-text
> >
>
> Conservatives Find Town Hall Strategy in Leftist Text
> Organizers See 'Rules for Radicals' as Blueprint for Taking Down
> 'Obamacare'
> By DAVID WEIGEL 8/11/09 6:00 AM
>
> Protesters outside a health care town hall meeting held by Rep. Kathy
> Castor (D-Fla.) in Tampa last Thursday (YouTube)
>
> Michael Patrick Leahy's self-published conservative manifesto is coming off
> the presses this week, and not a moment too soon.
>
> "The timing is crucial," said Leahy, the Knoxville, Tenn., activist who
> founded the Top Conservatives on Twitter hashtag and played another founding
> role in the anti-tax "Tea Party" movement. "I'm trying to get these
> principles out there for conservatives this month, as people attend these
> town hall meetings with their members of Congress. These are principles that
> conservatives need to know."
>
> Those principles are the ones that the late left-wing activist Saul Alinsky
> outlined in his 1971 book "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for
> Realistic Radicals." Leahy's book, "Rules for Conservative Radicals," boils
> them down and scraps Alinsky's more "amoral" suggestions. "The problem that
> conservatives have with Alinsky is that, for him, the ends justified the
> means," explained Leahy. "I'm suggesting that we take the successful Alinsky
> rules, we update them and apply them to new social networking technology,
> and we execute them in the Judeo-Christian tradition."
>
> Thirty-eight years since the publication of his handbook and 37 years since
> he died, Alinsky has found a thriving and surprising fan club in the modern
> conservative movement. Leahy is one of many "Tea Party" activists who have
> latched onto "Rules for Radicals" as a blueprint for a counter-revolution, a
> campaign of robust challenges to President Barack Obama and the Democratic
> Congress that is playing out nearly every day of the August recess in noisy
> town hall meetings. "Alinsky-cons" have taken the union organizer's "13
> rules for power tactics" and "11 rules to test whether power tactics are
> ethical" and found a strategy that, they believe, is chipping away at the
> momentum for national health care reform. When they flummox representatives
> with chants, or laugh out loud at their attempts to explain their votes,
> many "Tea Party" activists say they're cribbing from Alinsky.
>
> The most obvious beneficiary of the surge of interest in Alinsky has been
> Random House, which publishes the book through its Vintage imprint.
> According to Nielsen BookScan, "Rules for Radicals" has sold 15,000 copies
> since the start of this year — it only sold 35,000 copies from 2000 through
> 2008. Since the start of August, it has sold 1,000 copies. At Amazon.com,
> "Rules" is safely nestled in the Top 75 on the retailer's bestseller list,
> and it's No. 1 in the "radical thought," "civics," and "sociology/history"
> categories. Most tellingly, the people who snatch up copies of Alinsky's
> book at Amazon don't go on to buy more liberal texts. Instead, according to
> the online bookseller, they purchase Michelle Malkin's "Culture of
> Corruption," Glenn Beck's "Common Sense," and Mark Levin's "Liberty and
> Tyranny."
>
> "I picked up the book after the [November 2008] election," said John
> O'Hara, a staffer at the conservative Heartland Institute who helped plan
> anti-tax "Tea Parties" in February and April. "There really is no equivalent
> book for conservatives. There's no 'Rules for Counter-Radicals.'"
>
> There's a reason why "Rules for Radicals" became the go-to book for
> would-be Tea Party and town hall activists. Alinsky-cons can trace their
> inspiration back to 2008, when it became clear that Obama would win the
> nomination and Republicans looked deeper into his past for clues about his
> hidden, not-so-centrist beliefs. Attacking Alinsky was easy; Secretary of
> State Hillary Rodham Clinton had been pilloried for writing her senior
> thesis on the organizer, and in his influential 2008 book "Liberal Fascism,"
> Jonah Goldberg placed him firmly in the totalitarian tradition: "substitute
> the word 'fascist' for 'radical' in many of Alinsky's statements and it's
> sometimes difficult to tell the difference." In the conservative muckraker
> Jerome Corsi's "Obama Nation," published one year ago this week, Alinsky
> (whom Obama never met) was singled out as a malign influence in the
> candidate's education. Alinsky had "extreme socialist objectives," explained
> Corsi in an August 2008 Fox News appearance, as "a radical leftist organizer
> who said that his goal was redistribution of wealth from the haves to the
> have-nots."
>
> The attack traveled slowly from Corsi's bestseller and conservative
> Websites into Republican talking points. In the final month of the
> presidential race, when Sen. John McCain's campaign attacked Obama for
> befriending reformed Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and receiving
> campaign help from the community organizing group ACORN, Alinsky became the
> hidden influence in Obama's career, in the eyes of many Republicans. In an
> Oct. 7, 2008 interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," former New York Mayor Rudy
> Giuliani noted, darkly, that the Democratic presidential candidate had been
> "educated in the Saul Alinsky methods." In her infamous Oct. 17, 2008
> interview on "Hardball," which generated a backlash that nearly cost her a
> seat in Congress, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) accused Obama of
> hobnobbing with "radical leftists" and called Alinsky "one of his teachers,
> you might say, out of the Chicago area."
>
> Obama hadn't exactly covered his tracks. The candidate had written and
> spoken extensively about his past as a community organizer; Obama's old
> allies had spoken about it in a sympathetic profile piece by Ryan Lizza,
> published in The New Republic. Still, the idea of Alinsky and "Rules for
> Radicals" as a skeleton key explaining how Obama rose to power, or why
> Organizing for America was created after the campaign ended, has proven
> incredibly powerful. On his Fox News show, Glenn Beck has put up charts that
> connect Alinsky to ACORN and Obama's allies. When Rush Limbaugh came under
> fire for hoping the president would "fail," he told Mark Levin that he was
> being "Alinksyed."
>
> The growth of the "Tea Party" movement has seen Alinky morph from a
> bogeyman to a possible inspiration to conservative activists. In April,
> Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks, the conservative group that has
> provided guidance to many "Tea Party" organizers and town hall rowdies, told
> TWI that the group was "applying Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'" in its
> approach to anti-tax "Tea Parties." In June, he told Eric Kleefeld of TPMDC
> that "Rules" was the first book handed to new employees of the group.
>
> "That first rule, 'power is not only what you have, but what an opponent
> thinks you have' — that argument is happening right now," said Steinhauser,
> "with both sides arguing about which side represents the majority on health
> care." The mockery and laughter at town halls struck Steinhauser as an
> adoption of the fifth rule, which posits that "Ridicule is a man's most
> potent weapon." The old deference to congressmen, out of respect for the
> office, has "broken down."
>
> Other "Tea Party" activists have gotten on board; a memo written by Bob
> MacGuffie of the conservative group Right Principles told conservatives to
> adopt some of the "Rules" at town hall meetings and hold their
> representatives to account. "Use the Alinsky playbook of which the left is
> so fond," wrote MacGuffie, quoting from the twelfth of Alinsky's original
> rules. "Freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it."
>
> Some conservative writers have latched onto "Rules for Radicals" to explain
> the extremist roots of a new Obama policy or explain why a new anti-Obama
> tactic will work. National Review's Andrew McCarthy has warned that the
> Obama administration might "cook the books" on the 2010 Census because it
> "apportions political count," and "anyone who has read Alinsky could have
> predicted that the census would be among Obama's top priorities." Joseph
> Farah, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Website WorldNetDaily, has
> theorized that the Obama administration mocks "birthers" who push conspiracy
> theories about the president's citizenship because it's following Alinsky's
> fifth rule on "ridicule."
>
> All of this has been quite confusing to Gregory Galluzzo. A veteran
> community organizer at the Gamaliel Foundation and a disciple of Alinsky
> (though they never met) who trained the young Obama, Galluzzo has watched
> with frustration as "over the top and rabid ideologues" on the right stormed
> town hall meetings, claiming to have flipped Alinsky's rulebook back onto
> liberals.
>
> "They polarize," said Galluzzo. "They've got that part down. They do direct
> action. But that's not the kind of organizing we do. We end up building
> relationships with the people we oppose. I'm not going to go up to Mayor
> [Richard] Daley and say 'you're just a Nazi.' I want to end up working with
> him."
>
> But according to Galluzzo, if Alinsky could take a look at the
> Alinsky-cons, he'd call them "petty protesters" who want to destroy the
> system without offering solutions. "If you just go around calling people
> assholes," Galluzzo said, "you're not going to get anything done."
>
>
>
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