Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

8) Have any conservatives used Alinsky's strategies?

Alinsky's politics obviously don't align with those of the modern conservative movement, but he's always been admired by conservatives as an exceptionally talented organizer.

William F. Buckley wrote in 1966 that Alinsky was "very close to being an organizational genius," and conducted a largely respectful interview on his show Firing Line:

More recently, Alinsky's writing, in particular Rules for Radicals, helped shape the Tea Party movement. Dave Weigel reported that the "town hall strategy" of summer 2009, in which anti-Obamacare activists forced confrontations with legislators over the plan, was influenced by the book.

Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey was an open admirer of Alinsky during his time running FreedomWorks, a lobbying group with ties to the Tea Party Movement. "What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good," Armey told the Financial Times. In 2009, Adam Brandon, then a press secretary for FreedomWorks, told Politico he was given a copy of Rules for Radicals upon joining the group.

James O'Keefe, the stunt journalist who helped destroy the community organizing group ACORN, ironically drew inspiration for his tactics from Alinsky. At the height of his influence, Glenn Beck both developed elaborate conspiracy theories about Alinsky's supposed influence and encouraged conservatives to learn from his tactics.

This is somewhat akin to the way that Vladimir Lenin's tactical genius is admired by some on the right; Grover Norquist reportedly keeps a statue of Lenin in his home, and Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, then of the nascent Heritage Foundation, wrote a "Leninist strategy" for achieving Social Security privatization in 1983. But admiration of Alinsky, or at least adoption of his tactics, appears to be significantly more common.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ9Si5pkAqg&feature=emb_logo