The Alinsky Model
“We are five days away from fundamentally
transforming the United States of America.”
– Barack Obama, election eve, 2008
Barack Obama is an enigma. He won the 2008
presidential election claiming to be a moderate and
wanting to bring Americans together and govern
from the center. But since he took office, his actions
have been far from moderate. He has apologized to
foreign dictators abroad for sins he alleges his own
country committed and appointed a self-described
communist (Van Jones) and an admirer of Mao
Zedong to top White House posts. He has used the
economic crisis to take over whole industries and has
attempted to nationalize the health care system. In his
first nine months in office, these actions had already
made his presidency one of the most polarizing in
history.
Many Americans have gone from hopefulness,
through unease, to a state of alarm as the President
shows a radical side that was only partially visible
during his campaign. To understand Obama’s
presidency, Americans need to know more about the
man and the nature of his political ideas. In particular,
they need to become familiar with a Chicago organizer
named Saul Alinsky and the strategy of deception he
devised to promote social change.
Of no other occupant of the White House can it
be said that he owed his understanding of the political
process to a man and a philosophy so outside the
American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to
opposing it. The pages that follow provide an analysis
of the political manual that Saul Alinsky wrote, which
outlines his method for advancing radical agendas. The
manual was originally titled “Rules for Revolution”
which is an accurate description of its content. Later,
Alinsky changed the title to Rules for Radicals. After
familiarizing themselves with its ideas, readers may
want to reconsider what Obama may have meant on
election eve 2008 when he told his followers: “We
are five days away from fundamentally transforming
the United States of America.”
Alinsky and Obama
Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909
and died in California in 1972. His preferred selfdescription
was “rebel” and his entire life was devoted
to organizing a revolution in America to destroy a
system he regarded as oppressive and unjust. By
profession he was a “community organizer,” the
same term employed by his most famous disciple,
Barack Obama, to describe himself.
Alinsky came of age in the 1930s and was drawn
to the world of Chicago gangsters, whom he had
encountered professionally as a sociologist. He
sought out and became a social intimate of the Al
Capone mob and of Capone enforcer Frank Nitti
who took the reins when Capone was sent to prison
for tax evasion in 1931. Later Alinsky said, “[Nitti]
took me under his wing. I called him the Professor
and I became his student.” While Alinsky was not
oblivious to the fact that criminals were dangerous,
like a good leftist he held “society” – and capitalist
society in particular – responsible for creating them.
In his view, criminality was not a character problem
but a result of the social environment, in particular
the system of private property and individual rights,
which radicals like him were determined to change.
Alinsky’s career as an organizer spanned the period
in which the Communist Party was the major political
force on the American left. Although he was never
formally a Communist and did not share their tactical
views on how to organize a revolution, his attitude
towards the Communists was fraternal, and he saw
them as political allies. In the 1969 “Afterword” to his
book Reveille for Radicals he explained his attitude
in these words: “Communism itself is irrelevant. The
issue is whether they are on our side….” Alinsky’s
unwillingness to condemn Communists extended to
the Soviet empire – a regime which murdered more
leftists than all their political opponents put together.
This failure to condemn communism (his biographer
describes him as an “anti-anti communist”) contrasts
dramatically with the extreme terms in which he
was willing to condemn his own country as a system
worth “burning.”
Communists played a formative role in the
creation of the CIO – the “progressive” coalition of
industrial unions – led by John L. Lewis and then
Walter Reuther. In the late 1940s, Reuther purged the
Communists from the CIO. Reuther was a socialist
but, unlike Alinsky, an anti-Communist and an
American patriot. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky,
a deracinated Jew, refers to the ferreting out of
Communists who were in practice Soviet agents as a
“holocaust,” even though in the McCarthy era only a
handful of Communists ever went to jail.
By his own account, Alinsky was too independent
to join the Communist Party but instead became a
forerunner of the left that emerged in the wake of the
Communist fall. Like leftists who came of age after
the Soviet collapse, Alinsky understood that there was
something flawed in the Communist outlook. But,
also like them, he never really examined what those
flaws might be. In particular he never questioned the
Marxist view of society and human nature, or its goal
of a utopian future, and never examined its connection
to the epic crimes that Marxists had committed. He
never asked himself whether the vision of a society
which would be socially equal was itself the source
of the totalitarian state.
Instead, Alinsky identified the problem posed
by Communism as inflexibility and “dogmatism”
and proposed as a solution that radicals should
be “political relativists,” that they should take an
agnostic view of means and ends. For Alinsky, the
revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system
and then see what happens. The Alinsky radical has
a single principle – to take power from the Haves
and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts
to in practice is a political nihilism – a destructive
assault on the established order in the name of the
“people” (who, in the fashion common to dictators,
are designated as such by the revolutionary elite).
This is the classic revolutionary formula in which the
goal is power for the political vanguard who get to
feel good about themselves in the process.
Alinsky created several organizations, and
inspired others, including his training institute for
organizers, which he called the Industrial Areas
Foundation. But his real influence was as the
Lenin of the post-Communist left. Alinsky was
the practical theorist for progressives who had
supported the Communist cause to regroup after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and mount a new assault on
the capitalist system. It was Alinsky who wove the
inchoate relativism of the post-Communist left into a
coherent whole, and helped to form the coalition of
communists, anarchists, liberals, Democrats, black
racialists, and social justice activists who spearheaded
the anti-globalization movement just before
9/11, and then created the anti-Iraq War movement,
and finally positioned one of their own to enter the
White House. As Barack Obama summarized these
developments at the height of his campaign: “We are
the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Infiltrating the institutions of American society
and government – something the “counter-cultural”
radicals of the 1960s were reluctant to do – was
Alinsky’s modus operandi. While Tom Hayden and
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were confronting
Lyndon Johnson’s Pentagon and creating riots at
the Democratic convention, Alinsky’s organizers
were insinuating themselves into Johnson’s War on
Poverty program and directing federal funds into
their own organizations and causes.
The sixties left had no connection to the labor
movement. But Alinsky did. The most important
radical labor organizer of the time, Cesar Chavez,
who was the leader of the United Farmworkers
Union, was trained by Alinsky, and worked for him
for ten years. Alinsky also shaped the future of the
civil rights movement after the death of Martin Luther
King. When racial unrest erupted in Rochester, New
York, Alinsky was called in by activists to pressure
Eastman-Kodak to hire more blacks, a form of racial
extortion that became a standard of the civil rights
movement under the leadership of Jesse Jackson and
Al Sharpton.
Alinsky also pioneered the alliance of radicals
with the Democratic Party, which ended two decades
of confrontation climaxing in the convention riot
of 1968. Through Chavez, Alinsky had met Robert
Kennedy who supported his muscling of Kodak
executives. But the Kennedys were only one of the
avenues through which Alinsky organizers now made
their way into the inner circles of the Democratic Party.
In 1969, the year that publishers reissued
Alinsky’s first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley
undergraduate named Hillary Rodham submitted
her 92-page senior thesis on Alinsky’s theories (she
interviewed him personally for the project). In her
conclusion Hillary compared Alinsky to Eugene
Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King.
The title of Hillary’s thesis was “There Is Only
the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In this
title she had singled out the single most important
Alinsky contribution to the radical cause – his
embrace of political nihilism. An SDS radical once
wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is
always the revolution.” In other words the cause –
whether inner city blacks or women – is never the
real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real
cause which is the accumulation of power to make
the revolution. That was the all consuming focus of
Alinsky and his radicals.
Guided by Alinsky principles, post-Communist
radicals are not idealists but Machiavellians. Their
focus is on means rather than ends, and therefore
they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies in
the way their admired Marxist forebears were. Within
the framework of their revolutionary agenda, they are
flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and
pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which
is resources and power.
The following anecdote about Alinsky’s teachings
as recounted by The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza nicely
illustrates the focus of Alinsky radicalism: “When
Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to
organize, they would invariably respond with selfless
bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would
then scream back at them that there was a one-word
answer: ‘You want to organize for power!’
In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the
moment an organizer enters a community, he lives,
dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and
that is to build the mass power base of what he calls
the army.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is
always the revolution.
Unlike the Communists who identified their goal
as a Soviet state – and thereby generated opposition
to their schemes – Alinsky and his followers organize
their power bases without naming the end game,
without declaring a specific future they want to
achieve – socialism, communism, a dictatorship
of the proletariat, or anarchy. Without committing
themselves to concrete principles or a specific future,
they organize exclusively to build a power base
which they can use to destroy the existing society
and its economic system. By refusing to commit to
principles or to identify their goal, they have been
able to organize a coalition of all the elements of the
left who were previously divided by disagreements
over means and ends.
The demagogic standard of the revolution is
“democracy” – a democracy which upends all social
hierarchies, including those based on merit. This is
why Alinsky built his initial power base among the
underclass and the urban poor. The call to make the
last ones first is a powerful religious imperative.
But in politics it functions as a lever to upset every
social structure and foundation. For Alinsky radicals,
policies are not important in themselves; they are
instrumental – means to expanding the political base.
To Alinsky radicals, “democracy” means getting
those who are in, out. Their goal is to mobilize the
poor and “oppressed” as a battering ram to bring
down the system. Hillary concludes her thesis with
these words: “Alinsky is regarded by many as the
proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy.
As such, he has been feared – just as Eugene Debs or
Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared,
because each embraced the most radical of political
faiths – democracy.” But democracy as understood
by the American founders is not “the most radical
of all political faiths” or, if it is, they regarded it as
dangerous enough to put checks and balances in its
way to restrain it.
When Hillary graduated from Wellesley in 1969,
she was offered a job with Alinsky’s new training
institute in Chicago. She opted instead to enroll at
Yale Law School, where she met her husband, and
future president, Bill Clinton. In March 2007, the
Washington Post reported that she had kept her
connections even in the White House and gave
Alinsky’s army support: “As first lady, Clinton
occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by
the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky
group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised
money and attended two events organized by the
Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.”
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama never
personally met Saul Alinsky. But as a young man,
he became an adept practitioner of Alinsky’s methods.
In 1986, at the age of 23 and only three years out
of Columbia University, Obama was hired by the
Alinsky team to organize residents on the South Side
[of Chicago] “while learning and applying Alinsky’s
philosophy of street-level democracy.” The group
that Obama joined was part of a network that
included the Gamaliel Foundation, a religious group
that operated on Alinsky principles. Obama became
director of the Developing Communities Project,
an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, where
he worked for the next three years on initiatives
that ranged from job training to school reform to
hazardous waste cleanup. A reporter who researched the projects sums them in these words: “the proposed solution to every problem on the South Side was a distribution of government funds …”
Three of Obama’s mentors in Chicago were trained
at the Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation, and
for several years Obama himself taught workshops
on the Alinsky method. One of the three, Gregory
Galluzo, shared with Ryan Lizza the actual manual
for training new organizers, which he said was little
different from the version he used to train Obama
in the 1980s. According to Lizza, “It is filled with
workshops and chapter headings on understanding
power: ‘power analysis,’ ‘elements of a power
organization,’ ‘the path to power.’ Galluzzo told me
that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s
gritty approach because they come to organizing as
idealists rather than realists. The Alinsky manual
instructs them to get over these hang-ups. ‘We are
not virtuous by not wanting power,’ it says. ‘We
are really cowards for not wanting power,’ because
‘power is good’ and ‘powerlessness is evil.’”
According to Lizza, who interviewed both
Galluzo and Obama, “the other fundamental lesson
Obama was taught was Alinsky’s maxim that self-
interest is the only principle around which to organize
people. (Galluzzo’s manual goes so far as to advise
trainees in block letters: ‘Get rid of do-gooders in
your church and your organization.’) Obama was a
fan of Alinsky’s realistic streak. ‘The key to creating
successful organizations was making sure people’s
self-interest was met,’ he told me, ‘and not just
basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were
some basic principles that remained powerful then,
and in fact I still believe in.’” On Barack Obama’s
presidential campaign website, one could see a photo
of Obama in a classroom “teaching students Alinskyan
methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which
he has written, ‘Power Analysis’ and ‘Relationships
Built on Self Interest,…’”
Until he became a full-time elected legislator in
1996, the focus of Obama’s political activities was
the largest radical organization in the United States,
Acorn, which was built on the Alinksy model of
community organizing. A summary of his Acorn
activities was compiled by the Wall Street Journal:
In 1991, he took time off from his law firm
to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote,
an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed
under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered
135,000 voters and was considered a major factor
in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley
Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan
Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity
on the community organizing circuit. He became
a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In
1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating
in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois
to implement the federal Motor Voter Law.
That law’s loose voter registration requirements
would later be exploited by Acorn employees
in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire
listing key supporters for his campaign for the
Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an
alphabetical list).
After Obama became a U.S. Senator, his wife,
Michelle, told a reporter, “Barack is not a politician
first and foremost. He’s a community activist
exploring the viability of politics to make change.”
Her husband commented: “I take that observation as
a compliment.”
Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals
Alinsky is the Sun-Tzu for today’s radicals,
his book a manual for their political war. As early
as its dedicatory page, Alinsky provides revealing
insight into the radical mind by praising Lucifer as
the first rebel: “Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder
acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all
our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to
know where mythology leaves off and history begins
– or which is which), the first radical known to man
who rebelled against the establishment and did it so
effectively that he at least won his own kingdom –
Lucifer.”
Thus Alinsky begins his text by telling readers
exactly what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the
system but its would-be destroyer. In his own mind
the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him
is a kingdom of heaven on earth. Since a kingdom
of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy – an
impossible dream – the radical’s only real world
efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the
society he lives in. He is a nihilist.
This is something that conservatives generally
have a hard time understanding. As a former radical, I
am constantly asked how radicals could hate America
and why they would want to destroy a society that
compared to others is tolerant, inclusive and open,
and treats all people with a dignity and respect that is
the envy of the world. The answer to this question is
that radicals are not comparing America to other real
world societies. They are comparing America to the
heaven on earth – the kingdom of social justice and
freedom – they think they are building. And compared
to this heaven even America is hell.
In my experience conservatives are generally
too decent and too civilized to match up adequately
with their radical adversaries, at least in the initial
stages of the battle. They are too prone to give them
the benefit of the doubt, to believe there is goodness
and good sense in them which will outweigh their
determination to change the world. Radicals talk
of justice and democracy and equality. They can’t
really want to destroy a society that is democratic
and liberal, and more equal than others, and that has
brought wealth and prosperity to so many people. Oh
yes they can. There is no goodness that trumps the
dream of a heaven on earth. And because America is
a real world society, managed by real and problematic
human beings, it will never be equal, or liberal, or
democratic enough to satisfy radical fantasies – to
compensate them for their longing for a perfect
world, and for their unhappiness in this one.
In The 18th Brumaire, Marx himself summed
up the radical’s passion by invoking a comment of
Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “Everything that exists
deserves to perish.” The essence of what it means to
be a radical is thus summed up in Alinsky’s praise for
Satan: to be willing to destroy the values, structures
and institutions that sustain the society in which we
live.
The many names of Satan are also a model
for the way radicals camouflage their agendas by
calling themselves at different times Communists,
socialists, new leftists, liberals, social justice
activists and most consistently progressives. My
parents, who were card-carrying Communists, never
referred to themselves as Communists but always
as “progressives,” as did their friends and political
comrades. The “Progressive Party” was created by
the Communist Party to challenge Harry Truman in
the 1948 election because he opposed the spread of
Stalin’s empire. The Progressive Party was led by
Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, and was
the vehicle chosen by the Communists to lead their
followers out of the Democratic Party, which they
had joined during the “popular front” of the 1930s.
The progressives rejoined the Democrats during the
McGovern campaign of 1972 and with the formation
of a hundred-plus member Progressive Caucus in
the congressional party and the ascension of Barack
Obama to the presidency have become its most
important political force.
Alinsky’s tribute to Satan as the first radical is
further instructive because it reminds us that the
radical illusion is an ancient one and has not changed
though the millennia. Recall how Satan tempted
Adam and Eve to destroy their paradise: If you will
rebel against God’s command then “You shall be as
gods.” This is the radical hubris: We can create a new
world. Through our political power we can make a
new race of men and women who will live in harmony
and peace and according to the principles of social
justice. We can be as gods.
And let us not forget that the kingdom the first
radical “won,” as Alinsky so thoughtlessly puts it,
was hell. Typical of radicals not to notice the ruin
they leave behind.
This, in a nutshell, is why conservatives are
conservative and why radicals are dangerous. Because
conservatives pay attention to the consequences of
actions, including their own, and radicals don’t.
One kind of hell or another is what radicalism has
in fact achieved since the beginning of the modern
age when it conducted the first modern genocide
during the French Revolution. The Jacobins who led
the revolution changed the name of the cathedral of
Notre Dame to the “Temple of Reason” and then, in
the name of Reason, proceeded to slaughter every
Catholic man, woman and child in the Vendee region
to purge religious “superstition” from the planet.
The Jacobin attempt to liquidate Catholics and
their faith was the precursor of Lenin’s destruction
of 100,000 churches in the Soviet Union to purge
Russia of reactionary ideas. The “Temple of Reason”
was replicated by the Bolsheviks’ creation of a
“People’s Church” whose mission was to usher in the
“worker’s paradise.” This mission led to the murder
not of 40,000 as in the Vendee, but 40 million before
its merciful collapse – with progressives cheering its
progress and mourning its demise.
The radical fantasy of an earthly redemption
takes many forms, with similar results:
• The chimera of “sexual liberation” caused
leftists to condemn and ban the proven public
health methods for combating AIDS – testing
and contact tracing – as “homophobic,”
leading directly to the preventable deaths of
more than 300,000 gay men in the prime of
life.
• The crusade to rid mankind of the scourge of
DDT, which was launched in the 1960s by the
American environmentalist Rachel Carson,
led to a global ban on the use of DDT and
the return of malaria. This has resulted in the
deaths of 100 million children, mainly black
Africans under the age of five.
• The left’s campaign to build a welfare utopia
under the umbrella of the “Great Society”
destroyed the inner city black family,
spawned millions of fatherless black children,
and created intractable poverty and a violent
underclass which is still with us today.
The Alinsky Strategy: Boring
From Within
Conservatives think of war as a metaphor
when applied to politics. For radicals, the war
is real. That is why when partisans of the left
go into battle, they set out to destroy their
opponents by stigmatizing them as “racists,”
“sexists,” “homophobes” and “Islamophobes.” It is
also why they so often pretend to be what they are
not (“liberals” for example) and rarely say what they
mean. Deception for them is a military tactic in a war
that is designed to eliminate the enemy.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is first of all a
comradely critique of the sixties’ New Left. What
bothers Alinsky about these radicals is their honesty
– which may have been their only redeeming
feature. While the Communist Left pretended to
be Jeffersonian Democrats and “progressives” and
formed “popular fronts” with liberals, the New Left
radicals disdained these deceptions, regarding them
as a display of weakness. To distinguish themselves
from such popular front politics, sixties radicals said
they were revolutionaries and proud of it.
New Left radicals despised and attacked liberals
and created riots at Democratic Party conventions.
Their typical slogans were “Up against the wall
motherf-ker” and “Off the pig”, telegraphing exactly
how they felt about those who opposed them. The
most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals
is to lie to their opponents and disarm them by
pretending to be moderates and liberals.
Deception is the radical’s most important weapon,
and it has been a prominent one since the end of the
sixties. Racial arsonists such as Al Sharpton and
Jeremiah Wright pose as civil rights activists; anti-
American radicals such as Bill Ayers pose as patriotic
progressives; socialists pose as liberals. The mark of
their success is reflected in the fact that conservatives
collude in the deception and call them liberals as
well.
Alinsky writes of the “revolutionary force”
of the 1960s that its activists were “one moment
reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians yet they
also urge violence and cry ‘Burn the system down.!’
They have no illusions about the system, but plenty
of illusions about the way to change our world. It is
to this point that I have written this book.”
I once had a Trotskyist mentor named Isaac
Deutscher who was critical of the New Left in the
same way Alinsky is. He said that American radicals
such as Stokely Carmichael were “radical” in form
and “moderate” in content; they spoke loudly but
carried a small stick. Instead, he said, they should
be moderate in form and radical in content. In the
same vein, Alinsky chides New Leftists for being
“rhetorical radicals” rather than “realistic.” New
Leftists scared people but didn’t have the power to
back up their threats. The most important thing for
radicals, according to Alinsky, is to deal with the
world as it is, and not as they might want it to be.
As an organizer I start from the world as it is,
as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept
the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our
desire to change it into what we believe it should
be – it is necessary to begin where the world is
if we are going to change it to what we think it
should be. That means working in the system.
This is the passage from which Michelle Obama
selected lines to sum up her husband’s vision at
the Democratic convention that nominated him
for president in August 2008. Referring to a visit
he made to Chicago neighborhoods, she said, “And
Barack stood up that day, and he spoke words that
have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the
world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’ And he
said that, all too often, we accept the distance between
the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when
it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.” She
concluded: “All of us are driven by a simple belief
that the world as it is just won’t do – that we have an
obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”
When he became president, Barack Obama
named an Alinsky disciple named Van Jones to be his
“special assistant” for “green jobs,” a key position
in the administration’s plans for America’s future.
According to his own account, Van Jones became
a “communist” during a prison term he served after
being arrested during the 1992 Los Angeles race
riots. For the next ten years, Jones was an activist
in the Maoist organization STORM, whose acronym
means “Stand Together to Organize a Revolutionary
Movement.” When STORM disintegrated, Jones
joined the Apollo Alliance, an environmental
coalition organized by Alinsky radicals. He also
joined the Center for American Progress, run by
John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff in
the Clinton Administration and co-chair of Obama’s
transition team.
In a 2005 interview, Van Jones explained
to the East Bay Express that he still considered
himself a “revolutionary, but just a more effective
one.” “Before,” he told the Express, “we would
fight anybody, any time. No concession was good
enough;… Now, I put the issues and constituencies
first. I’ll work with anybody, I’ll fight anybody if it
will push our issues forward…. I’m willing to forgo
the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep
satisfaction of radical ends.” The issue is never the
issue; the issue is always the revolution. It was the
Alinsky doctrine perfectly expressed.
“These rules,” writes Alinsky, “make the
difference between being a realistic radical and being
a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and
slogans, calls the police ‘pig’ or ‘white fascist racist’
or ‘motherf-ker and has so stereotyped himself that
others react by saying, ‘Oh, he’s one of those, and
then promptly turn off.’” Instead, advance your
radical goals by camouflaging them; change your
style to appear to be working within the system.
Alinsky’s agenda is the same as that of the
radicals who called for “Revolution Now” in the
1960s. He just has a more clever way of achieving
it. There’s nothing new about radicals camouflaging
their agendas as moderate in order to disarm their
opposition. That was exactly what the 1930s “popular
front” was designed to accomplish. It was devised
by Communists, who pretended to be democrats in
order to form alliances with liberals which would
help them to acquire the power to shut the democracy
down. It was Lenin’s idea too, from whom Alinsky
appropriated it in the first place.
Lenin is one of Alinsky’s heroes (Castro is
another). Alinsky invokes Lenin in the course
of chiding the rhetorical radicals over a famous
sixties slogan, which originated with the Chinese
Communist dictator Mao Zedong. The slogan was
“political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,”
and during the 1960s it was a favorite cry of the
Black Panthers and other radical groups. Regarding
this, Alinsky comments: “‘Power comes out of the
barrel of a gun’ is an absurd rallying cry when the
other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist;
when he returned to what was then Petrograd from
exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting
power through the ballot but would reconsider after
they got the guns.”
In other words, vote for us now, but when we
become the government it will be a different story.
One man, one vote, one time. This is the political
credo of all modern totalitarians, including Hitler,
who was elected Chancellor and then made himself
Fuhrer and shut down the voting booths forever.
Despite Alinsky’s description, Lenin was a
pragmatist only within the revolutionary framework.
As a revolutionary, he was a dogmatist in theory and
a Machiavellian monster in practice. He was engaged
in a total war which he used to justify every means
he thought necessary to achieve his goals – including
summary executions, concentration camps (which
provided the model for Hitler) and the physical
“liquidation” of entire social classes.
“[The] failure of many of our younger activists
to understand the art of communication has been
disastrous,” writes Alinsky. What he really means
is their honesty is disastrous, their failure to understand
the art of mis-communication. This is the precise
art that he teaches radicals who are trying impose
socialism on a country whose people understand that
socialism destroys freedom: Don’t sell it as socialism;
sell it as as “progressivism,” “economic democracy”
and “social justice.”
The strategy of working within the system until
you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was
what sixties radicals called “boring from within.” It
was a strategy that the New Left despised even as
Alinsky and his followers practiced it. Alinsky and
his followers infiltrated the War on Poverty, made
alliances with the Kennedys and the Democratic Party,
and secured funds from the federal government. Like
termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations
of the building in expectation that one day they could
cause it to collapse.
Alinsky’s advice can be summed up in the
following way. Even though you are at war with the
system, don’t confront it as an opposing army; join
it and undermine it as a fifth column from within.
To achieve this infiltration you must work inside the
system for the time being. Alinsky spells out exactly
what this means: “Any revolutionary change must be
preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging
attitude toward change among the mass of our
people.” In other words, it is first necessary to sell
the people on change itself, the “audacity of hope,”
and “yes we can.” You do this by proposing moderate
changes which open the door to your radical agendas:
“Remember: once you organize people around
something as commonly agreed upon as pollution,
then an organized people is on the move. From there
it’s a short and natural step to political pollution, to
Pentagon pollution.”
It is not an accident that the Green Czar appointed
by President Obama to jump-start the anti-pollution
revolution was an Alinsky disciple and a selfdescribed
communist.
Revolutionary War
The first chapter of Alinsky’s manual is called
“The Purpose” and is designed to lay out the radical
goal. Its epigraph is taken from the Book of Job: “The
life of man upon earth is a warfare…”
This is not an invitation to democratic politics,
as understood by the American Founders. The
American system is about tolerance and compromise,
and bringing disparate factions into a working
partnership. The Founders devised a system of checks
and balances to temper the passions of the people and
prevent factions from going to war. It is because this is
the reality of American democracy that revolutionary
warfare, which is not about compromise, must be
conducted through deception. Thus the rules for the
organizers of revolutions, laid down by Alinsky, are
rules for deception.
Alinsky’s book could easily be called
Machiavellian Rules for Radicals, after the man
who devised principles of statehood and advice for
rulers in his book The Prince. In Alinsky’s view, the
difference between the unethical behavior counseled
by Machiavelli and the unethical behavior he would
like to see practiced by radicals lies solely in the fact
that their political enemies are different. “The Prince
was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to
hold power,” Alinsky writes, “Rules for Radicals is
written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
For Alinsky, politics is a zero sum exercise,
because it is war. No matter what Alinsky radicals say
publicly or how moderate they appear, they are at war.
This provides them with a great tactical advantage
since other actors in the political arena are not at
war. The other actors actually embrace the system,
which commits all parties to compromise and to the
peaceful resolution of conflicts. It commits them to a
pragmatism of ends as well as means. Not every wish
can be satisfied. By contrast, Alinsky radicals have
an unwavering end, which is to attack the so-called
Haves until they are finally defeated. In other words,
possess more than others. Such a system, according
to the radicals, is one of “social injustice,” and what
they want is “social justice.” The unwavering end of
such radicals is a communism of results.
For tactical reasons radicals will make many
compromises along the way; but their unfailing
purpose – the vision that guides them – is to conduct
a war against the system that in their view that makes
social injustice possible.
When you are in a war – when you think of yourself
as in a war – there is no middle ground. Radicals
perceive opponents of their causes as enemies on
a battlefield, and they set out to destroy them by
demonizing and discrediting them. Personally. The
politics of personal destruction is an inevitable
weapon of choice for radicals. If your goal is a just
world, then the moral code you live by requires you
to wage war without quarter.
Because conservatives embrace the system they
believe in its rules of fairness and inclusion. But
these rules can also be used by its cynical enemies
to destroy it. As Alinsky’s hero Lenin put it, “The
capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them.” Or as
Alinsky’s own “fourth rule of power tactics” puts it:
“Make the enemy live up to their own rules.”
There is no real parallelism in the war which
radicals have declared. One side is fighting with a noholds-
barred, take-no-prisoners battle plan against
the system, while the other is trying to enforce its
rules of fairness and pluralism. This is the Achilles’
heel of democracies and all radical spears are aimed
in its direction.
At first it might seem paradoxical that an
American president who has been the beneficiary of
an electoral process second to none in its openness
and inclusion should have been a veteran advocate
and functionary of an organization like Acorn, which
has been convicted of the most extensive election
fraud in American history. But this is perfectly
intelligible once the Alinsky method is understood.
Acorn activists have contempt for the election process
because they don’t believe in the electoral system as
it is constituted in a capitalist democracy. To them,
elections are already a fraud – an instrument of the
rich, or as Alinsky prefers to call them, the Haves. If
the electoral system doesn’t serve “the people,” but is
only an instrument of the Haves, then election fraud
is justified as the path to a future that will serve the
Have-Nots. Only when a true representative of “the
people” is elected can someone like Michelle Obama
express pride in her country.
Until conservatives begin to understand exactly
how dishonest radicals are – and why – it will be hard to
defend the system under attack. For radicals the noble
end – creating a new world – justifies any means. And
if one actually believed, as they do, that it is possible
to create heaven on earth, what institution would one
not be justified in destroying to realize that future?
The Radicals’ Enemy
What makes radical politics a war is the existence
of an enemy who must be eliminated. For Alinsky
radicals, that enemy is the “Haves,” who “oppress”
and rule the “Have-Nots.”
The Haves sit on the top of “hierarchies” of
class, race and gender. From the radicals’ viewpoint,
although America is called a democracy, it is really
a “Have society.” Alinsky explains: “The setting
for the drama of change has never varied. Mankind
has been and is divided into the Haves, the Have-
Nots, and Have-a-Little, Want Mores.”This
maxim is just another Alinsky theft, in this case from
Karl Marx whose Communist Manifesto famously
begins: “The history of all hitherto existing society
is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave,
patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another, carried
on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a
fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common
ruin of the contending classes.”
This was rubbish when Marx wrote it – deadly
rubbish considering the tens of millions of individuals
slaughtered by those who believed it – and it is still
rubbish. But it remains the bedrock of radical belief,
the foundation of all its destructive agendas. The idea
that the world is divided into the Haves and the Have
Nots, the exploiters and the exploited, the oppressors
and the oppressed, leads directly to the idea that
liberation lies in the elimination of the former and
the dissolution of the conflict. This, according to
radicals, will lead to the liberation of mankind. In
fact, it led directly to the deaths of 100 million people
in the last century murdered by radicals in power on
the way to their dream.
“In this book,” Alinsky explains, “we are
concerned with how to create mass organizations to
seize power and give it to the people.” Power is to be
“seized” – the word is revealing. The present system
will not allow justice to be realized, so sooner or later
immoral, illegal, even violent means are required to
achieve it.
In the myth created by Marx, which all radicals
continue to believe, the market system is a zero
sum game where one man’s gain is another’s loss.
Because the Haves will defend what they have and
thus deprive the Have-Nots of what they want, they
must be destroyed before justice can be achieved. That
is why radicals are organized for war – a deceptive
guerilla war to begin, and a total war to end.
Take another look at the opening of the Communist
Manifesto. The history of all previous societies, Marx
claims, is the history of “class struggle,” of war between
the Haves and the Have Nots. Marx names them through
time: freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord
and serf, guild-master and journeyman, oppressor
and oppressed. In Marx’s schema the capitalists in
our era are the new oppressors, and wage-workers the
new oppressed. Post-communist radicals have added
women, racial minorities and even sexual minorities
to the list. But to compare women and minorities in a
democracy to slaves and serfs, or capitalists to slaveowners
and feudal lords, as Marx and his disciples do,
is delusional.
There are tens of millions of capitalists in America
and they rise and fall with every economic wave.
Where are the Enrons of yesteryear and where are
their bosses? If proletarians can become capitalists
and capitalists can be ruined, there is no class struggle
in the sense that Marx and his disciples claim, no
system of oppression, no Haves and Have-Nots and
no need for revolution. The same is truer and even
more obvious where racial minorities and women are
concerned. In the last decade America has had a black
president, two black secretaries of state, three women
secretaries of state, a chief law enforcement officer
who is black and so forth, and so on. No slave or serf
ever held such positions, or could. The radical creed
is a religious myth – the most destructive religious
myth in the history of mankind.
In a democracy like ours the notion that there
are Haves and Have-Nots is akin to the particular
religious myth advanced by Manicheans who viewed
the world as ruled by the devil and who saw history
as a struggle between the ruling forces of evil and
the liberating forces of light. In the radicals’ religion,
the “Haves” are also a category identical to that of
“witches” in the Puritan faith – agents of the devil
– and they serve the same purpose. The purpose is
to identify one’s political enemies as instruments of
evil to justify the war against them.
It is true that there are some Haves – that is
individuals who have inherited wealth and merely have
it. In other words, there are individuals who are not
active investors creating more wealth for themselves
and others. There are also some have-nots – people
who were born to nothing and because of character
or social dysfunction have no way of changing their
circumstances. But it is false to describe our social
and economic divisions in these terms, or to imply
that there are immovable barriers to individuals
that prevent them from bettering themselves and
increasing their wealth. If there is social mobility, if
a person can move from one rung of the economic
or social ladder to the next, there is no hierarchy and
there is no justification for the radical war.
In the real world of American democracy,
social and economic divisions are between the
Cans and the Can-Nots, the Dos and the Do-Nots,
the Wills and the Will-Nots. The vast majority of
wealthy Americans, as a matter of empirical fact,
are first generation wealthy and have created what
they possess. In the process of creating wealth for
themselves, they have created wealth for hundreds
and sometimes thousands and sometimes hundreds
of thousands of others. But to describe the wealthy
as wealth earners and wealth creators – that is, to
describe them accurately – is to explode the whole
religious fantasy that gives meaning to radical lives,
inspires the radicals’ war, and has been the source of
the most repressive regimes and the greatest social
disasters in the history of mankind.
Because the radical agenda is based on a religious
myth, a reader of any radical text, including Alinsky’s,
will constantly come across statements which are so
absurd that only a co-religionist could read them
without laughing. Thus, according to Alinsky, “All
societies discourage and penalize ideas and writings
that threaten the status quo.” The statement, of
course, is again lifted directly from Marx, this time
from his German Ideology, which claims that “the
ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.” From this
false claim, Alinsky proceeds to the following howler:
“It is understandable therefore, that the literature of a
Have society is a veritable desert whenever we look
for writings on social change.” According to Alinsky
this is particularly true of American society which
“has given us few words of advice, few suggestions
on how to fertilize social change.”
On what planet did this man live and do his
disciples now agitate that they could miss the
narratives of “resistance” and “change” which have
been familiar themes of our culture and dominant
themes of our school curriculums, our media and
our political discourse since the 1960s? But Alinsky
presses on: “From the Haves, on the other hand,
there has come an unceasing flood of literature
justifying the status quo.”
Really? Curricula in virtually every liberal arts
college are dedicated precisely to social change.
The explicit goal of our most prestigious schools
of education is promoting “social change,” and
even more specifically “social justice.” The mission
statements of entire universities express a devotion
to social change, which is also the routine subject
of commencement addresses, often given by
anti-capitalist radicals such as Angela Davis and
unrepentant terrorists such as Bernadine Dohrn. The
newest mass medium – the Internet – features heavily
trafficked websites such as Huffington Post and Daily
Kos and MoveOn.org dedicated to promoting the
Alinsky program of taking wealth and power from the
so-called Haves in the name of “Have-nots.” Finally
there is the inconvenient fact – for this particular myth
– that America’s first black president, a community
organizer and leader of an Alinsky organization
himself, and a lifelong associate of political radicals,
was able to run a successful campaign on a platform of
changing the status quo, not defending it.
Revolutionary Means and Ends
Sanford Horwitt prefaces his biography of
Alinsky, Let Them Call Me Rebel, with an anecdote
he felt illuminated Alinsky’s method. In this anecdote,
Alinsky shares his wisdom with students wishing to
protest the appearance on their campus of the first
George Bush, then America’s representative to the
UN during the Vietnam War:
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 [Note: the Nixon
Administration was then negotiating with the
North Vietnamese Communists to arrive at a peace
agreement- DH] 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.
[Not very likely-DH] 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.
This vignette tells you everything you really need
to know about Alinsky’s ethics and his attitude towards
means and ends. Lenin once said that the purpose of a
political argument is not to refute your opponent “but
to wipe him from the face of the earth.” The mission
of Alinsky radicals is a mission of destruction. It
didn’t matter to Alinsky that the Vietnam War was
not a race war, that millions of South Vietnamese
opposed the Communists. It didn’t matter to Alinsky
who George Bush actually was or what he believed
because in a war the objective is to kill the enemy
and destroy the system he represents. Therefore seize
on any weapon, in this case a symbol of one of the
greatest evil that any Americans were ever associated
with, and use it to obliterate everything good America
ever did. If America’s cause in Vietnam is the Ku
Klux Klan, then its cause is evil and America is evil.
If George Bush is the Ku Klux Klan, no more needs
to be said. He has been rendered by this tactic a nonperson.
These are the methods of political discourse
that Stalinists perfected and that radicals (often
described as liberals) continue to use to this day.
The most important chapter of Alinsky’s manual
is called “Means and Ends,” and is designed to
address Alinsky’s biggest problem: How to explain to
radicals who think of themselves as creating a world
of perfect justice and harmony, that the means they
must use to get there are Machiavellian – deceitful,
conniving, and ruthless?
The radical organizer, Alinsky explains, “does
not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and
changing; everything to him is relative and changing.
He is a political relativist.” And that will do it. Being
a radical in the service of the higher good is a license
to do anything that is required to achieve that good.
Liberals share radicals’ utopian agendas of a
just and peaceful world but are hampered because
they have scruples. They support radical ends but
because they are principled they don’t like the means
radicals use to get to their ends. As a result, Alinsky’s
contempt for them is boundless. In his first book,
Reveille for Radicals he wrote: “While liberals are
most adept at breaking their own necks with their
tongues, radicals are most adept at breaking the necks
of conservatives.”
In contrast to liberals, who in Alinsky’s eyes are
constantly tripping over their principles, the rule for
radicals is that the ends justify the means. This was
true for the Jacobins, for the Communists, for the
fascists and now for the post-Communist left. This is
not because radicals begin by being unethical people.
On the contrary, their passion for a future that is
ethically perfect is what drives their political agendas
and causes many to mistake them for idealists. But the
very nature of this future – a world without poverty,
without war, without racism, and without “sexism”
– is so desirable, so noble, so perfect in contrast to
everything that exists as to justify any and every
means to achieve it.
If the radicals’ utopia were actually possible, it
would be criminal not to deceive, lie, and murder
to advance the radical cause which is, in effect, a
redemption of mankind. If it were possible to provide
every man, woman and child on the planet with food,
shelter and clothing as a right, if it were possible to
end bigotry and human conflict, what sacrifice would
not be worth it?
The German philosopher Nietzsche had a phrase for
this: “Idealism kills.” And of course the great atrocities
of the modern era, whether Nazi or Communist, were
committed by people who believed in a future that
would save mankind. When you are overthrowing
the existing order, you must break the rules to do it.
The nobler the end the easier it is to justify breaking
the rules to get there. Thus to be really committed
to being a radical is to be committed to being an
outlaw. During the sixties, SDS leader Tom Hayden
once described the utility of the drug culture to me,
although he claimed he was not a part of it. Once you
get a middle class person to break the law, he said
(and he was thinking of students), they are on their
way to becoming revolutionaries.
In the sixties, radicals were generally proud of
the idea that they were linked to criminals. Gangsters
such as John Dillinger and films such as The Wild
Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde which celebrated
American outlaws were popular among them. Abbie
Hoffman’s Steal This Book was a manifesto of the
creed and Obama friend and Weatherman leader
Bernadine Dohrn’s tribute to the murderer Charles
Manson was its extreme expression. This romance
continues to be expressed in radicals’ affinity for
criminals and their causes at home and abroad, as it
was in Alinsky’s early attraction to Capone’s enforcer
Frank Nitti.
The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm gave the
radicals’ romance an academic veneer in a book about
Sicilian criminals, whom he described as “primitive
rebels,” in other words, revolutionaries avant la
lettre. Among the chapters of Primitive Rebels is one
titled “Social Bandits.” In Hobsbawm’s description
these criminals were avatars of “social justice,” their
activity “little more than endemic peasant protest
against oppression and poverty.” Hobsbawm
claimed that the activity of the “mob” was “always
directed against the rich” (in other words okay).
The French radical Pierre-Joseph Proudhon gave
license to radicals to steal and destroy in socialism’s
most famous epigraph: “Property is Theft.” In reality,
of course, it is socialism that is theft.
Another reason why radicals believe that their
goals justify criminal means and also why they can
be relied on to lie, steal votes and justify murder
when committed by their political friends, is because
they are engaged in a permanent war whose goal is
the salvation of mankind. In this context restraint of
means can easily seem finicky.
Alinsky’s entire argument is an effort to answer
liberals who refuse to join the radical cause, with
the objection “I agree with your ends but not
your means.” To this Alinsky replies that the very
question of whether “the end justifies the means?”
is “meaningless.” The real question according to
Alinsky is “Does this particular end justify this
particular means?” But this is disingenuous, since
radicals are in a permanent war and “The third rule
of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the end
justifies almost any means.”
Writes Alinsky: “The man of action views the issue
of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms.
He has no other problem.” In other words, Alinsky’s
radical is not going to worry about the legality or
morality of his actions, only their practical effects. If
they advance the cause they are justified. “He asks of
ends only whether they are achievable and worth the
cost; of means, only whether they will work.”
If one proceeds by criminal and immoral means,
one may ask, won’t that corrupt one’s cause and
determine its outcome? After all, Marxists killed 100
million of their own citizens, in peacetime, justifying
every step of the way by the end they were attempting
to achieve – a just world.
Here is how Alinsky answers the question about
immoral means: Everybody does it. “To say that
corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the
immaculate conception of ends and principles. The
real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting
process … he who fears corruption fears life.” Since
life is corrupt everyone is corrupt and corruption is
just business as usual – “Chicago style.” “In action”,
Alinsky writes, “one does not always enjoy the
luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s
individual conscience and the good of mankind. The
choice must always be for the latter.” But who is to
determine what is good for mankind?
Dostoevsky famously wrote that “if God does not
exist then everything is permitted.” What he meant
was that if human beings do not have a conception
of the good that is outside themselves, then they will
act as gods with nothing to restrain them. Alinsky
is already there: “Action is for mass salvation and
not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who
sacrifices the mass good for his personal salvation
has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation;’ he
doesn’t care enough for people to be ‘corrupted’ for
them.” In other words, the evil that radicals may do
is already justified by the fact that they do it for the
salvation of mankind.
Note the scare quotes Alinsky puts around the
verb “corrupted,” a signal that he does not believe
in moral corruption, because he does not believe in
morality. Or, more precisely, his morality begins and
ends with the radical cause. The sadistic dictator,
Fidel Castro, one of Alinsky’s radical heroes,
summarized this principle in a famous formulation:
“Within the revolution everything is possible; outside
the revolution nothing is possible.” The revolution –
the radical cause – is the way, the truth and the life.
The singer John Lennon understood that the
end was in fact the crucial missing element in these
calculations. “You say you want a revolution,” he
wrote, “well, you know, we’d all like to see your
plan.” The fact is that, going back to Rousseau and
Marx, revolutionaries have never had a plan. The ones
who did and who tried to build utopian communities
failed. But the really serious revolutionaries, the
ones prepared to burn down the system and put their
opponents up against the wall, have never had a plan.
What they had – and still have – is a vague idea
of the kingdom of heaven they propose to create, in
Marx’s case “the kingdom of freedom,” in Alinsky’s
“the open society” in the case of the current left,
“social justice.” These ideas are sentimental and
seductive enough to persuade their followers that it
is all right to commit fraud, mayhem and murder –
usually in epic doses – to enter the promised land.
But otherwise, revolutionaries never spend two
seconds thinking about how to make an actual society
work. How to keep people from committing crimes
against each other; how to get them to put their
shoulder to the wheel; how to provide incentives that
will motivate individuals to produce wealth.
But if there is no viable plan, then it is the means
used to get there that make the revolution what it
is. Each step of the way creates the revolutionary
world. What radicals like Saul Alinsky create is not
salvation but chaos. And presidential disciples of
Alinsky, what will they create?
The David Horowitz Freedom Center
thanks Doctor Bob for helping to
finance this publication
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