Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Plan for BHO

[James Brody]

Alinsky, Saul D (1971) Rules for Radicals. NY: Vintage. About $10.

Alinsky was a hub, a star, an organizer who taught the “Have-Nots” to take from the “Haves.” Alinksy often charged fees to the Have-Nots, made profits from apathy, and wore the costume of a good guy. Now that BHO is a Have instead of a Have-Not, BHO himself becomes a target.

Themes
Alinsky plays not to the 90% of Have-Nots that won’t read his book but to the 10% that will. That 10% forms corporations, plans ahead, and collects, arranges, builds, and schemes. Thus, no matter where you look, chiefs, capitalists, community organizers, and Bolsheviks will find opportunities in the Have-Nots.

Alinsky needs several chapters to rant before he can actually start his book. His enemies—framed in the seventies—include corporations, crummy Chicago housing and crummy Chicago schools, and, of course, the Viet Nam War. His rebellion aimed at capitalists although he functioned exactly as most capitalists do.

Alinsky’s Methods
The trick of community organizers is to refine, define, and amplify existing social networks in Have-Not communities. “Communities…are as complex as life itself” (120) and resemble the emergent networks studied by today’s computer scientists and statistical physicists. Alinsky’s chapters entitled “Communication,” “In the Beginning,” and “Tactics” have particular relevance to network formation and, therefore, make us a link to science as well as to politics.

“Communication”
“It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You’re just not there.” 81.
“I have used analogies of sex or the toilet. I do not do this because I want to shock, particularly, but because there are certain experiences common to all.” 83–84.
“…people react strictly on the basis of their own experience.” 87. For example, John Smith’s dying in a plane crash would have different effects on you depending on whether you know him from the newspaper or from a seminar. Ronald Reagan also used individual citizens to make his points and regardless of party or speaker, this ritual continues.
And “It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen—in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication.” 89.
Sound familiar?
“In the Beginning”
Organizers are seeds that find their own places to grow.
“The organizer’s job is to inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and change, and identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose.” 103. Did that sound familiar? If not, where the H were you for the past year?
“The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people don’t have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it.” 105.
“From the time the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breaths, sleeps only one thing and that is to build the base of what he calls his army.” 113.
Tactics
“Tactics is the art of…how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with…how the Have-Nots can take away from the Haves.” 127. Further, power is what the enemy thinks you have. Finally, stay within the experience of your army but outside the experience of your opposition. And from p. 134: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils are on the other.”

General Motors: An Example
Principle: “…a major job of the organizer is to instantly develop the rationale for actions which have taken place by accident or impulsive anger. Lacking the rationale, the action quickly becomes inexplicable to the participants and rapidly disintegrates into defeat.” Alinsky, 1971, 164.

The organizer must be a story-teller. An example from BHO: It’s “a sacrifice you may not have chose to make, but a sacrifice you are nevertheless called to make so that your children and all of our children can grow up in an America that still makes things….”
http://www.freep.com/article/2009060.../1002/BUSINESS

Wrap Up
As network scientists observe, even slight advantages in competitiveness will lead to dominance and a winner-take-all outcome. Thus, as Jesus remarked, we will always have a redistribution problem because the poor will always be with us. The opportunity for, yes, hope and change, is that of 1) keeping doors open for talented individuals to find their way from the bottom to the top and 2) ensuring that offspring, rarely as talented as their parents, don’t move into their husband’s, daddy’s, or mommy’s seat. Fortunately, American society has extraordinarily high rates of turnover between social classes.

Radicals was published in 1971, Alinsky died in 1972, and we now see what happened to his causes. We won Viet Nam in Viet Nam: we lost it in America as Cronkite’s, Fonda’s and Alinsky’s audiences indirectly caused two million of our friends to be murdered. According to General Giap’s memoirs: “What we don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender!”

Despite Alinsky’s organizations and LBJ’s programs, blacks still live in ghettos, Chicago’s schools and housing projects are still crummy, and the UAW (and the NEA!) is like a monkey that can’t get its paw from a jar because it won’t turn loose the food inside. That monkey closed GM this past Monday morning.

Organizer Candy Man BHO lives in defiant luxury despite the poverty of those whom he represents and the poverty to come for those whom he taxes. Thus, expensive campaigns, inaugurals, European trips with 500 staff, and NY dates are things he does, things excused by his fans…after all, he is the story-teller.

An Idea: Use Alinsky’s Methods Against BHO
“Obviously, any program that opposes people because of race, religion creed, or economic status, is the antithesis of the fundamental dignity of the individual.” 122.

Alinsky sounds here like a Republican!

Conservatism may be suppressed but it will not go away. Rebellion against rules is a part of the nature of every living creature, whether coral, earthworms, spiders, oldsters in nursing homes, or members of Obama’s swarms who ordinarily, when their metronome is silent, do their own thing.

Use Alinsky’s methods to impeach Obama…such would be outside BHO’s experience!