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Re: fuagf post# 314074

Friday, 04/03/2020 1:54:10 AM

Friday, April 03, 2020 1:54:10 AM

Post# of 468431
Right loves to hate, imitate Alinsky

"A select few of many Ayn Rand mention posts of years past to now."


The book ''Rules for Radicals' by Saul Alinsky (center) has been touted by Dick Armey (left) and James O’Keefe as a way to beat the left at its own game.
| AP photo composite by POLITICO

By KENNETH P. VOGEL

03/22/2010 05:28 AM EDT

With many more links

Conservatives just can’t seem to make up their mind about Saul Alinsky.

Was he a tactical genius to be imitated, an agitator whose teachings will undercut the right’s goals, a devil-worshiper leading young conservatives down the path to damnation, or some combination of all three?

The modern right harbors an “almost schizophrenic view of what they can use and learn from Alinsky, and yet he is this totally evil guy,” said Sanford D. Horwitt, author of “Let Them Call Me Rebel,” a biography of Alinsky.

And the debate among conservatives, most of whom had never heard of Alinsky until recently, is only picking up steam nearly four decades after his death in 1972.

Often described as the father of modern community organizing, Alinsky helped poor and working class urban communities around the country push for improved living and working conditions by confronting, satirizing or negotiating with the establishment, as well as by building diverse coalitions including small businesses, labor unions and religious groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church.

He’s long been a hero on the left, but the right’s fascination with him dates to the 2008 presidential campaign, when lots of attention was paid to Alinsky’s impact on leading Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton, who wrote her college thesis about him, and Barack Obama, who trained in — and utilized — his community organizing techniques.

Alinsky strictly resisted political labels and affiliations, once explaining “if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.” But conservatives began invoking his name as something of an epithet to sully the left’s tactics as sneaky, underhanded, unethical — or Marxist.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Alinsky taking a place alongside top contemporary conservative bogeymen like Michael Moore, George Soros and Jane Fonda. His seminal 1971 guide to organizing, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals,” became a must-read for a new wave of conservative activists who mobilized — many for the first time — in opposition to the ambitious, big-government agenda pushed by President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

In the opening lines of “Rules,” Alinsky described its mission — and his approach — thus: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. '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."

Suddenly, the book was being touted as a way to beat the left at its own game by everyone from 69-year-old former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose nonprofit group FreedomWorks has emerged as a leading Washington bulwark .. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27558.html .. for the tea party movement, to 25-year-old James O’Keefe, the self-styled activist investigative journalist who last year became a conservative hero for secretly recording employees of the liberal community-organizing group ACORN apparently offering advice on how to set up a brothel, to tea party leaders seeking to disrupt congressional town halls.

But in the last couple months, there’s been something of a backlash on the right, both as a result of the arrest of O’Keefe and three colleagues during a botched plot to embarrass Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, and because some conservatives are questioning whether Alinsky’s ideas and tactics — and, to some extent, the tea party movement as a whole — are intellectually consistent with American conservatism.

David Brooks, The New York Times’s leading conservative columnist, this month cited the tea party crowd’s embrace of Alinksy in blasting the movement’s “self-righteousness and naïve radicalism” and declaring it “radically anticonservative.”

Veteran Republican operative John Feehery then declared that when conservatives adopt Alinsky’s tactics, “they help further the cause of the left, which is social instability.”

And Dawn Eden, a conservative Roman Catholic author and blogger, last month observed disapprovingly that in the course of “exposing the alleged Alinsky-like tactics of the modern Left[,] some conservatives became Alinskyites themselves.”

Noting that the original version of “Rules” included an “acknowledgement to the very first radical ... Lucifer,” Eden and a co-author argued that Alinsky “served ... Lucifer” and deemed his tactics anathema to “St. Paul’s dictum that we cannot do evil that good may come.”

But according to Horwitt, many of Alinsky’s devotees and critics on the right — including O’Keefe, Brooks and Eden — misunderstand Alinsky’s teachings and legacy.

The Lucifer dedication, for instance, was “clearly meant as a joke — a normal person chuckles,” Horwitt said, adding Alinsky’s discourse on mean and ends was meant to provoke its practitioners to ask "does this particular end justify this particular means?"

Horwitt called out Brooks for branding Alinsky “the leading tactician of the New Left” — the wave of young activists who mobilized on college campuses against the Vietnam War and for civil rights.

“No! Totally wrong!” Horwitt said. “Alinsky didn’t connect with the young people in the New Left crowd, because he thought that, while their hearts were in the right place, they didn’t know how to organize and they were often committing the cardinal sin — they were organizing the opposition in his view by stupid tactics like burning the American flag and basically pissing on middle class symbols and values.”

Horwitt, who participated in a 10-day training session led by Alinsky and remained in touch with him until his death, called Alinsky “a great pragmatist” who “knew that your own little band was never enough to get things done. You had to reach a broader constituency and the New Left was simply turning off people that they needed to win over.”

Horwitt thinks Alinsky would have “sympathy for the kind of working and middle class folks who are at the tea parties, who the economy is hurting a lot and who are angry and kind of confused.”

But, he added, “If Alinsky sat down with the tea party people, one of the first things he would say is ‘you have got to stop calling Obama a socialist.’” Alinsky would see the socialism charge, as well as racially tinged criticism of Obama and questions about whether he was born in the United States and is eligible to be president ( the “birther” argument
.. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19450.html ) as “goofy” and limiting the appeal of the tea party’s underlying push for limited government and taxation, which Horwitt said “has pretty broad reach.”

On the other hand, Horwitt said, some in the tea party movement have at times faithfully applied Alinsky’s dictum to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.”


In fact, a conservative leader .. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/documents/2009/08/memo-details-co-ordinated-anti-reform-harrassment-strategy.php?page=1 .. quoted the rule in a memo that circulated widely last summer that calmly detailed techniques for tea party activists seeking to disrupt congressional town halls. They could “rattle” and “set back on their heels” lawmakers and their staffs, the memo asserted, partly “us[ing] the Alinsky playbook of which the left is so fond: Freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

O’Keefe, who had received — and later led — training on using .. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32138.html .. Alinsky’s Rules against the left, said his videos were based on the book, and Horwitt said Alinsky “would have appreciated O’Keefe for his balls and his humor.” But he asserted Alinsky would never have endorsed “pretending you’re someone else in a public place.”

Firebrand talk show host Glenn Beck also has suggested his viewers use Alinsky’s tactics against the Obama administration. And he praised the artist behind the posters depicting Obama as the Joker from Batman over the word ‘socialism’ — which Beck contended utilized Alinsky’s rule declaring ridicule “man's most potent weapon.”

But Beck is among the most vocal Alinsky conspiracy theorists, calling him a “Marxist” and a “morally bankrupt individual who would use any means to achieve his ends” and suggesting Alinsky’s fingerprints can be found on what Beck describes as an elaborate Obama administration plot .. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31882.html .. to hurtle the U.S. headlong into socialism — a plot that Beck believes includes the administration’s push to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

“While these community organizers appear to be agitating for a seemingly noble goal, or one or another, their underlying mission is — as Alinsky said — how the have-knots can take power from the haves,” Beck said on his Fox News television show last year. “If you know what Saul Alinsky was about, everything — everything that Obama does is going to start to make a little more sense.”

At various times, Beck also has accused the White House of using Alinsky’s tactics against him and fellow conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, as well as tea party activists, birthers, critics who falsely alleged the health overhaul contained so-called death panels, and AIG executives, among others.

Armey, on the other hand, has a more nuanced view of Alinsky, telling the Financial Times last year: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2010/03/right-loves-to-hate-imitate-alinsky-034751


It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”

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