SO ALINSKY FINAL


I conclude this mini-series on Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”* that – I believe – has exerted and continues to exert a substantial and deforming influence on national politics.

I am skipping a couple of smaller chapters and proceeding directly to his concluding chapter entitled: “The Way Ahead” . The original Post on my other site is here.

Bear in mind that he wrote this in 1971, capping off a long career of Old Left (labor and economic issues) activism that spanned the difficult 1920s and 1930s although he and his Approach were around in the Sixties when – as I have been saying – it became an early how-to book for budding identities of the New Left (culture and gender issues much more than bread-and-butter economics).

“Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class.” Purely on the basis of economic issues this would have meant a focus on getting a larger (and in his view a legitimate) slice of the pie, and I don’t disagree with him here.

And in view of the ominous developments in the world’s economic condition, especially as that would bear on American economic matters, this might have been a very worthwhile focus.

In the SO Mania Regime, so densely seeded in the anti-male and anti-‘patriarchy’ excitements of radical feminism and the further excitements of Victimology, the focus for the Alinsky war-politics assault Approach was ‘men’, and – neatly – their sexual activity.

It was, if you look at it from the point of view of tactics and strategy, a shrewd gambit: in the evolutionary scheme of things, where Nature’s prime objective is the continuation of the species, the male is set up from the get-go to do a lot of impregnating. I do NOT thereby conclude that ‘men’ have a ‘natural right’ to use the supply of females as a deer-park simply to have sex.

Indeed, it has been the ongoing efforts of civilization to somehow build a workable and sustainable society by Shaping and channeling those male proclivities, and to permit the stable nurture of the young that the female – whatever current Correct dogma insists – is so consistently concerned with.

But certainly since the Sixties – although there have been deep societal dynamics working toward it for quite a while before that – the whole trend of the times has been to remove ‘obstructions’ and weaken the Shaping boundaries civilization and culture had imposed on primal energies. One thoroughly predictable effect of this has been a monstrous surge in sexual-activity (male and female) as generations were now raised with the idea that ‘sex is natural and always good’ and that it is ‘fun’ and that it is, really, a fundamental ‘right’ by which a person can ‘creatively express’ him/herself.

So many males – and I’m not talking about males in the Age of Patriarchy but males raised, as it were, in the Age of Liberation – were raised without the ability to place sexual activity in any constructive and Larger context; hence the modern ‘hook-up culture’.

The great danger has been – I hope it is becoming clearer now – that if the Culture and Society were not going to help young males (and females) develop a context and a ground through which they could Master their all-too-easily-tapped primal energies, then Government and Law would have to expand (‘engorge’ is not too strong a verb here, I think) in order to impose boundaries that increasing numbers of people could not deploy on their own.

This is a recipe for a police state Leviathan, which I have called the National Nanny or National Regulatory State.

And THAT is hugely anti-Constitutional and, frankly, anti-American.

Because the Framers presumed that the Citizenry would be Mastering themselves as adult human beings from the get-go, assisted by parents and culture and society. They would thus then bring these competences of maturity and self-mastery to the task of Grounding the actual political machinery of constitutional government, essentially governing their governors.

But instead We have a Society and Culture that do verrrry little to assist Mastery, and a Family that is now not only weakened by the centrifugal forces of urban life and consumerism, but also weakened by the Deconstructive assault on all ‘authority’ and ‘boundaries’ that has taken place – as official national policy – for the past 40 years. And on top of that, We have now a Society and Culture that consequently abandoned Maturity and Adult Authority in favor of Youthiness (to borrow Bush the Second’s term for it).

So in the SO Mania Regime I wonder if one of the thick cables of concern that support it is the government’s queasy awareness that having loosened up Society and Culture at their very core, it now has to resort to regulatory and criminal law to maintain any sort of social order at all.

If so, this cannot end well.

But Alinsky’s own Approach (Technique, Method) was taken from the days of labor-organizing and also of the revolutionary agitprop organizing refined (so to speak) by Communist and Nazi (Goebbels’ manipulation of public opinion for political purposes) organizing.

As I have said, that Approach was manipulative and although seeking decently a larger ‘empowerment’ for the workers (the Have-Nots in his schematic) it bore no small danger to a democratic, deliberative politics. It was also purely focused on economic matters as opposed to any Larger vision of America or of any culture and society, or of any Larger or Deeper dynamics.

This did reflect his unstated assumption that ‘economics’ were utterly essential to carrying on a decent life for workers and their families. And especially from the vantage point of American in 2010 I think that is an especially relevant assumption.

But the dynamics to which he did limit himself offered only a limited view of what is genuinely necessary in order to make a culture and society ‘tick’; he drank too deeply from the well of Marxist thought here. While economic empowerment (although that word must be verrry carefully deployed, especially after the past 40 years) is necessary, it is not sufficient to the health of a culture and a society. Engines are vital to a ship, but you also need a sturdy hull to ‘platform’ the motive-power.

An exclusively or predominantly Alinsky-ite approach to culture and society is going to be profoundly inadequate as a frame for reference and action.

So too, in the SO Mania Regime, an analysis of society merely from the point of view of sexual activity – society as merely a bunch of sexually active males and a bunch of potential female victims – is hugely insufficient, because hugely inaccurate, as a governing paradigm for appreciating and assessing AND sustaining the common-weal.

But THIS is precisely what has happened in the SO Mania Regime.

So simply taken on its own terms, Alinsky’s Approach is insufficient as a paradigm for effecting ‘change’. And ditto, the men-are-rapists approach is equally insufficient. And perhaps even more so, because whereas Alinsky, as a man of the Old Left, was primarily concerned with ‘economics’, the New Left concerns (driven so deeply by radical-feminism and Victimism) require monstrous Constitutional regression by engorging the power and role of the government police power.

And then, of course, History turns out to be more dynamic and complex than Alinsky’s Approach allows: his attempt to use his technique to organize and empower black and Chicano workers was quickly taken up by all of the other ‘revolutions’ that burst upon the American scene – with the Beltway’s vigorous support – in the later Sixties and since then.

The Boomers in their frothy youth did not simply seek to ‘organize’ the white middle class and its culture and society but rather to overthrow it (including the very productivity that allowed the country to convert its natural resources into actual wealth-assets); the goal for the Hippies and Yippies was some sort of Romantic perfect-society that would somehow ‘naturally’ arise once the oppressing detritus of ‘bourgeois white middle-class grown-up culture’ was swept away.

All of the anti-conformity and ‘gray flannel suit’ concerns raised (and legitimately so) in the 1950s by sociologists such as Riesman pushed the still-adolescent Boomers into a callow and thorough rejection of a culture and society that was not only ‘imperfect’ or ‘incomplete’ (as are all human endeavors, large and small) but in the Boomer view hostile to ‘freedom’ and enslaved to conformist servitude to ‘the Establishment’. The kids would bring creativity and freedom, mostly envisioned in the ways a teen-ager would imagine creativity and freedom: the chance to do what your parents told you you shouldn’t do too much of since you had to eventually get a job and support yourself and your family. ‘Free love’ – sex whenever, wherever, however – figured largely, as did the infatuation with short-cuts to feeling good about yourself, especially those short-cuts offered by various drugs and any state of intoxication that warded off the burdens of conducting your affairs with a mature and – not to put too fine a point on it – sober consciousness.

The Black Power second-phase of the civil-rights movement sought to inflame racial antagonism in order to emphasize the sweeping away not of merely the frakkulent Jim Crow Regime of the pre-1965 South but also the entire edifice of ‘white’ society and culture. The Haves were white; the Have-Nots were black.

The radical-feminists, who were mostly college-educated and read deeply in both Marxist thought and the derivative anti-colonial thought of French academics and intellectuals. The Haves were males and the Have-Nots were females. But this was a concept hugely fraught: rather than the palpable and measurable and very familiar Capitalist-Industrial concerns with economic security, the radical-feminists deployed Alinsky’s Approach in matters far less palpable and far more nebulous: the oppression of patriarchy, the radical individualism not of the worker-and-family but of the individual ‘woman’ – which logically called-for the fracturing of the entire concept of Family (not simply an American or capitalist construct but one that had been evolved by the species since its inception). **

Alinsky would have defined the essential Have-Not ‘unit’ as the worker-and-family; the radical-feminists would take his Approach and deploy it in far more troubled and foggy waters. For them the basic ‘unit’ of society and culture was not the Family, but the individual person (female, especially).

So too as Multiculturalism quickly expanded far beyond the Alinsky-ite concept of providing more economic security for migrant farm laborers toward an equally troubled and foggy waters where ‘American’ culture and society were themselves the Haves and they deserved no support and enjoyed no legitimacy that immigrants needed to respect. Indeed, much the opposite.

So too ‘Youth’ – that demographic eagerly erected by the Dems to bulk up the revolutionary momentum with its tinder-dry flammability, lack of ballasting ‘experience’ of life and events, and self-assurance that only ‘the young’ reely reely discovered the ‘secrets’ of life.

And so too Victimism, which seeks to reduce the Vision of society to merely a ‘war’ between the ‘perpetrator’ (primarily sexual in the American variant) and the victim.

And being in a ‘war’ is a seductive experience, especially if you’ve convinced yourself that you are on the side of Good. Both Left and Right could come together in the perfect matrix that was Victimism and in the perfect storm that was the SO Mania Regime.

The ‘struggle’ would provide that permanent source of Meaning and Purpose that meant any rival Meaning-systems (religion, philosophy) could be dispensed with. And indeed HAD TO BE gotten rid of, since – in best Marxist style – they were merely ‘opiates’ and tools of the Haves. Matters of Larger Meaning and Purpose could be left to private devotion if not, more usefully, completely dispensed with.

Alinsky reveals how much he is a man of the Old Left when he shares his vision of organizing “all of the low-income parts of our population … all the blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian poor whites”.

But he has laid the groundwork for subsequent decades by admitting that “if through some genius of organization they were all united in a coalition, it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes”. These ‘parts’ would still have to get “allies” because “the pragmatics of power will not allow any alternative”. He saw the ‘white middle class’ as the indispensable Ally (although as Haves they are the ‘enemy’ in his schematic, so I can’t see how he planned for any ‘alliance’ to be anything but tactical, in best Leninist style).

He did not envision that in the absence of any possibility of uniting all the disparate Identity Revolutions of the Seventies (and how could you simultaneously ally yourself with a ‘white middle class’ that you were in the process of Deconstructing root and branch, along lines of gender, ethnic diversity, and all the other axes-of-Identity?) the Beltway – the Establishment, the government itself – would engorge itself and step in to be the ‘ally’ of each and every Identity and the guarantor of whatever demands were made.

Since ‘men’ are almost one-half of the population, any rational national policy would want to ensure that their vital energies – not just their primal ones, but their advanced-level energies – would be well-grounded and well-Shaped. Instead, though, not only have ‘men’ been Deconstructed but they have been made the targets of Registration (I think the current numbers are that one out of every 200 males in this country is now on a sex-offender Registry for one reason (or pretext) or another).

And with the economy weakening – as it must, given the mess the Beltway has made of it – I worry that even more younger males, grown up under-boundaried, under-Shaped, and incapable of sufficient self-mastery, may well wind up regressing to or staying trapped in their primal sexual energies.

Alinsky presumed that the government would evolve (I would say ‘mutate’) into the Guarantor of the Golden Eggs, and simultaneously as the Prime (perhaps Only) Ally in the multivalent and polyvalent (and Hydra-headed) campaign to erase the infamy of ‘white middle class society and culture’. With results so inescapably obvious now. And We now have to add ‘male’ to ‘white middle class society and culture’.

He also errs hugely in equating the Boomery college students with the activist labor radicals of his own salad days: “Activists and radicals, on and off our college campuses – people who are committed to change … are products of and rebels against our middle-class society …“ But the campus radicals were not the gritty labor-organizers of the Old Left seeking a better slicing of the pie for adults who were trying to raise families and conduct life with decent wages.

The ‘radicals’ of the Sixties were precisely seeking to get away from ‘the pie’ altogether, abolish it, in favor of a less messy and more ephemeral ‘diet’ of groove and creativity and total freedom and ‘deep thoughts’ achieved through all manner of short-cuts.

In an America of – say – 1970, facing serious new world-wide challenges to its productive primacy, the campus radicals – demonstrating on their own campuses in a sort of in-house be-in – didn’t want to go out and improve productivity through larger and wider sharing of its fruits with the workers, but rather to do away with the workers and the culture they had built and in which, to wax scriptural for a moment, “they lived, moved, and had their being”.

Which – alas – has rather substantially been accomplished.

“Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right, but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-class majority.”

If you substitute ‘male’ or ‘patriarchy’ for ‘middle class’ in that statement, you get an idea of just what the Beltway has been enabling for 40 Biblical years, and you can see where the SO Mania Regime could be sold to the pols as ‘progress’.

You can see where Alinsky, in trying to apply his Approach to the emerging New Left, is running off the rails. From the bread-and-butter economic issues of serious adults trying to get better wages to provide for their families against the long-known difficulties with the capitalist-industrial system, the struggle is now transferred to a far more general, amorphous, and in many ways dubious assault on the entire culture and society. And a profound assault it would have to be.

And this is only (1971) in a period when the Sixties ‘student’ revolution and the Black Power revolution are on the field. Once the agendas of radical-feminism and multiculturalism and so on and so forth have joined their own demands to the fray, the assault intensifies exponentially. And, of course, that includes the SO Mania Regime as one of its showcase and marquis ‘achievements’.

And Alinsky is forced into a combination of conceptual incoherence and duplicity: why ‘ally’ with so rotten a bunch as the middle-class? You are, after all, planning to tear them out, root and branch, and all their alleged pomps and all their alleged works. And why, now, ‘ally’ with ‘males’ and ‘patriarchy’? These elements are not only ‘decadent’ but ‘violent, oppressive, and sexually predatory’ by their very nature.

And surely there is absolutely no space left for a democratic politics. Indeed, a democratic politics would appear to be as debased as the society and culture from which it stems.

And just what ‘change’ can be wrought? What sort of ‘change’ can address ‘decadence’? And how much of all this ‘change’ – or at least the ‘struggle’ for it – can go on simultaneously without wrecking the society and the culture, twisting them to the point where they can no longer support the vital processes of any civilization and civilizing at all?

Worse, Alinsky addresses his organizers as themselves being from the middle-class. Thus, while he is tactically crowing that they should use what they know to go after their “own people”, he ignores the probability – inherent in his assessments – that anyone stemming from an American middle-class (and patriarchal) formative background has to be irretrievably tainted and compromised.

Still a man of the Old Left, though, Alinsky is urging that such an organizer will put away the “infantile dramatics of rejection” (p.185) and instead study the society and culture of his parents with cool analytic detachment, the better to in order to seek “bridges of communication over the gaps, generation, value”.

But still Alinsky, he urges this in order to effect this purely tactical bridge-building in order to “radicalize parts of the middle class”.

But why and how turn to your own purposes (radicalization) so thoroughly rotted a class? Alinsky here is no more On The Level than anything else in his darkling world: he is proposing merely temporary measures to manipulate a target class that is essentially rotten to the core – and how Communistical that sounds.

And you cannot read the material of the SO Mania Regime – the ‘studies’, the Findings, the court Opinions and Decisions and Orders – without getting a heart-strangling sense of the type of Leninist war on a target ‘class’ like the Kulaks (expansively defined as any peasant who owned at least one cow). Crush the Kulaks and it would be Year One of the glorious New Order! Yah.

Alinsky urges that special attention be given to neutralizing or mollifying “the nature of middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions”. After all, aggressive rudeness in the pursuit of ‘change’ is no vice. Come to think of it, NOTHING in the pursuit of ‘change’ is a vice, although this or that manifestation may be a tactical mistake depending on the moment.

But there is no deeper consideration of just why the middle-class might be slow to change. Or dubious of what is being proposed to replace what will be ‘changed’. Or worried that there is really nothing planned to replace what is ‘changed’. In this, Alinsky of the Old Left and the Boomery New Left merge; although Alinsky must betray his Old Left roots to do so – because no serious adult of the 1930s would have embraced the type of ‘revolution’ and ‘change’ demanded by the later 1960s (let alone the 1970s).

But the Boomers knew nothing of the 1930s, when your job suddenly disappeared and there was no way to put food on the table for your family. And they knew nothing of the 1940s, when Americans – especially those overseas – saw what happened when an entire society and culture were deranged and then, along with their supporting infrastructure, destroyed.

The Boomers had grown up with movies and TV and play-dough. And few has the rural farm experience that could have warned them that a dead Goose lays no Eggs, Golden or otherwise.

Perhaps now, in late middle age, the Boomers will come to appreciate the profound reservations that kept the adult generations of their youth from yielding invertebrately to every demand that showed up on the evening news.

But it may be too late – wayyyy too late – to fix things. Or rebuild what has been wrecked.

And in the gender-war mutation, the assault is on ‘patriarchy’ and therefore ‘males’ (and, although it is not considered polite to notice it, any females who don’t buy into the New Order). Victimism, dove-tailing nicely with the most radical of the radical feminist assertions about all sex being in essence rape, simply intensifies this sensibility.

Alinsky says about the lower middle class: “Insecure in this fast-changing world, they cling to illusory fixed points – which are very real to them.” Paging Dr. Alinsky! Dr. Alinsky to Examining One stat! He assumes that ‘change’ is always and utterly good, considers a fast-paced changing world to be utterly good and always to be preferred to less-change or more slowly-paced change.

In the gender-war mutation, such ‘illusory fixed points’ include the Constitution (put together by patriarchal Haves to oppress female Have-Nots) and all the conceptual tools that the Haves control: ‘Reason’, seriousness, tradition, prudence, established principles of any sort, and even ‘common sense’. And, of course, ‘Constitutionality’ – why respect the boundaries set by a document that was a sleazy ploy put together by the patriarchal Haves in the first place? It has to be ‘changed’, and ‘improved’.

And yet such ‘changes’ have come down to a monstrous RE-gression to police-state tactics and practices, to emotion-fueled frenzies, to all the symptoms that the Framers considered beneath the dignity of a free and mature People. Such progress.

Anybody who doesn’t get reely reely good and excited about all that is simply “insecure”. For Alinsky no other assessment of such people is possible; no other assessment will serve his Approach.

Fixed points that are “illusory” … naturally to Alinsky the Change-Minded all steadiness is illusory. Alinsky’s world is one in which a) Nothing Is On The Level and b) one of constant ‘change’. One simply keeps at it, ‘changing’ whatever looks to one as if it needs changing, and that can become a lifelong occupation, a vocation perhaps.

It was a little iffy in itself. When adopted by even more ambitious types (not the Hippies and the Sixties Youth, who never really took the time even to appear to think things through), the organizer-advocate cadres of the Identities of the Seventies, the whole thing mutated and permutated.

The list of ‘fixed points’ that needed to be Deconstructed and done away with grew like kudzu. Americans would be expected to live in a jelly-like world where nothing was solid, anything that was ‘established’ was most likely oppressive, and where all ‘change’ was pure liberation. If you had any doubts, you were merely a ‘backlashing’ Have who didn’t want to share Power.

What humans would become without a solid Trellis to Shape not only the structures and dynamics of society and culture but also the deep reservoir of individual energies would have to be ‘good’, and certainly better than what had been before. If you couldn’t see that, you were simply too far gone and would have to shut up or die off. You certainly didn’t deserve to have your concerns heard in the public forum.

The shift was intended to focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘democratic process’; as it had to be, from the revolutionary point of view, because by the very nature of a revolution most people aren’t going to really accept it and will stop it or slow it down if given the chance. They must not be given that chance.

He sees a Senate where “one third are millionaires” – a percentage long since surpassed. Nor, nowadays, has the presence of female pols done anything to reduce the irrationality or potential dangers of unbridled government. Indeed, just the opposite: from the earliest SO Regime in 1990 female politicians have been prime movers. (Which is not to say that women cannot make competent politicians.)

In what must be considered almost schizoid, and an indicator of how tortured his position had become, Alinsky quickly exhorts that the lower-middle class “must be worked with as one would work with the other part of our population – with respect, understanding, and sympathy”.

Alinsky’s Approach is demonstrably and almost necessarily manipulative even of those it seeks to help; it makes tactical alliances that are as permanent as paper, and he has assessed the lower-middles as grossly deficient and the rest of the middles as worse.

And while he has not embraced – has not yet seen – the full corrosive consequence of Identity Politics (he still refers to “our population”) yet he has already laid the groundwork for the divisiveness and manipulation and anti-democratic politics that Identity Politics has come to deploy.

Identity Politics and the cobbling together of tactical alliances: prime elements in the dove-tailing of Left and Right, of ‘science’ and policy and law, of ‘liberation’ and ‘order’; and all of it fueled by liberal infusions of cash, slyly doled out to any group or State that could produce the Correct theories and the highest ‘numbers’.

“To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear.” But they were rejected, for all practical purposes. Under the ever-intensifying assaults of ever-increasing demands by this or that Identity, and even more fundamentally by the abandonment of genuine deliberative democratic process and the embrace of revolution by elite imposition.

And in a hell-hot irony, as the dust clouds of the gender-culture wars fogged any long-term vision, the Beltway sought to enhance its own election-accounts by allowing Big Money to do whatever it wanted in exchange for PAC payments , thereby not only undermining Labor and the lower-middles but also – since the problem went unaddressed for so long - the middle-middles and upper-middles as well.

Alinsky saw something of that possible outcome in 1971: “If we don’t win them Wallace or [Agnew or] Nixon will.” In a two-party system, and given that the Dems would in 1972 turn themselves over to all the Alinsky-ite advocate-cadres of the Identities, there was no place for the lower-middles to go.

But Alinsky had convinced himself that he offered only a Technique, and not a philosophy of politics or of human beings (formerly called ‘philosophy of man’). That deftly kept him from having to deal with deep and complex matters he preferred to avoid, but the dynamics set in train by those matters continued to operate, now rendered more difficult by the veil of willful ignorance Alinsky had thrown over them.

The SO Mania Regime has someday to admit to its frakkulent underlying philosophy of man and of governance: if human beings are nothing but slaves to their primal energies, if they are incapable of effectively striving toward their ideals (or if they are so poorly raised that they have no higher ideals), if they are not united far more than they are divided, then only force (as Tito had to exert in postwar Yugoslavia) or cash (in post-Sixties America) or both (the National Nanny-Regulatory State) can unite them. But this is an unstable and shallow ‘unity’ compared to the profound unity of a common human species sharing the simultaneous capability for advancing to the uplands of a moral and social maturity or for stalling in the mud of un-mastered primal energies.

He hopes that even if the lower-middles (those employed-poor workers of his beloved Old Left days) can’t be completely won over, they could at least remain ‘in communication’ so that they could be persuaded not to offer “hard opposition” “as changes take place”.

But since he refused to see just how lethal and fraught the changes of the New Left really were, then he was unable to accurately grasp just how much opposition, and hardly unjustified, those ‘changes’ would ignite. He imagined that the New Left, in cooperation with the Old Left, would merely become a more powerful agent of the type of goals that the Old Left had espoused.

But the Old Left were not revolutionaries and their demands for better pay and working conditions were well within the bounds of what the American system was designed to handle. The New Left, on the other hand, was ‘revolutionary’ in the European sense: it sought not ‘reform’ but erasure, Deconstruction in the service of some cheerible Reconstruction, however much damage had to be imposed to get there. Damage such as the SO Mania Regime.

Indeed, with the assault on the entire concept of Family, the radical –feminist advocate-cadres were demanding an assaultive Deconstruction on one of the fundamental building blocks of Western and even world civilization. THIS was a ‘demand’ that required not only much deliberation but huge prudence, on the part of legislators and Citizenry alike.

In the event, the legislators didn’t want deliberation and prudence, and the Citizenry were deliberately kept in the dark as to just how profoundly fraught the New Order’s prerequisites really were.

Alinsky wanted his organizers to engage in a reformation of people – “people must be reformed” (p.189) – meaning that the organizer had a tactical (if not also a moral) responsibility to give the targeted Have-Nots a working awareness of just what was at stake. His was still an inadequate concept, but compared to the comprehensive deception and destabilizing of the Citizenry’s competence and authority Alinsky seems closer to the Framers than he really is.

Rather than re-forming through persuasion, those who ‘just don’t get it’ will have the New Order imposed on them and they will shut up and like it or … well, there really wasn’t any other alternative. No doubt – as later when the Iraq War was ‘planned’ – it was simply assumed that nobody would stand in the way of elite power.

But humans and their democracies are stubborn things, stubborn as ‘facts’ – or more accurately, stubborn as ‘reality’ – and the elites find themselves now greeted as liberators only by their own choirs and such clients as have had elite bennies ladled upon them by a pandering government.

And the bennie-trough is drying up.

Re-forming people can easily mask what is actually a de-forming. PRO-gress can easily imitate what is actually RE-gression.

And getting the American Citizenry used to Registries and to impossible-to-defend accusations and to all manner of civic debilities – lasting in many cases an entire lifetime … there is absolutely no way any of this can be seen as healthy for the civic competence of The People. Nor will that civic incompetence, once introduced, remain only at the site of its introduction; it will spread like the ocean water into the compartments of the Titanic’s hull until the whole American enterprise – as a civil and democratic society as well as an economy – is dragged down and beneath Time’s waves.

Alinsky makes mention of “the silent majority” – that phrase popularly deployed by Nixon’s administration to give some shape and traction to the vast majority of Americans (who would, 49 States to 1, reject the Dems in the election of 1972).

Americans had enough on their hands trying to keep things together in the Seventies without frightening themselves further by imagining that their own government would embrace a profoundly revolutionary and corrosive and Deconstructive Identity Politics. Who could imagine, after all, that a national government would actually support the Deconstruction of its own society and culture and political ethos? Who could imagine that an American government would do such a thing?

But the Beltway’s gambit – so similar to the latter-day Soviet nomenklatura – was to feather its own nest while pandering to Big Identity for votes and Big Money for cash. The Beltway, in effect, figured that it would survive and could masquerade enough to appear like a government; its members and their clients would carry on, battened on the Golden Eggs that were – witlessly – assumed to be the permanent cosmic birthright of the country.

But masquerading as a government and collecting all the checks accruing thereto wasn’t enough to actually conduct the vital and heavy responsibilities of government. Cartoonish thinking fostered the thought that cartoonish masquerade could be passed off as competent governance, and in that way the skids were greased for a cartoonish fake-government. With consequences that have proven all too real.

The SO Mania Regime has been a significant element in that pandering. And I think its lethality is far more comprehensive and intrusive and assaultive than most folks yet grasp.

Almost pathetically, Alinsky assures the faithful that “the issues of 1972 would be those of 1776, ‘No Taxation Without Representation’”; he wanted to see funds made available so that “members of the lower middle-class can campaign for political office”. The Dems lost 49 States to 1 in 1972, and even after they got rid of Nixon on a charge that – next to Bush-Cheney – looks like child’s-play, they embraced more and more of the Identities’ Deconstructive agenda in 1976, and the lower middle class so much the concern of Alinsky had by then become the rabid pool of every Identity’s boogeyman: white, male, oppressive, patriarchal, back-lashing, lumpish, bigoted and obstructive to any and all ‘change’.

He spends his last pages taking accurate aim at “the Pentagon”. But in the event, the New Left made common-cause with the Pentagoons (for significant consideration) and by Clinton’s time was eagerly demanding that as the Beltway had imposed ‘change’ on the American population, the military could do so on selected targets among the rest of the world’s populations. A project which the Bush-Cheney Mad Hatters considered a most useful and attractive Tea Party indeed.

Part of that ‘change’ has been the SO Mania Regime, even if Alinsky could never have imagined it (and perhaps as a man of the Old Left of the 1930s would have been repelled by it).

On his final page he insists that what he is proposing is merely “Part 2” of “the American revolution”. He clearly doesn’t understand the difference between the European approach to revolution (exemplified so luridly by his own Approach with its Marxist-Leninist conceptual heritage) and the American approach to revolution (exemplified by Washington and Franklin and pretty much the same major players who constructed the Constitution to ground the gains of their hard-won independence).

The So Mania Regime is certainly more in the ‘European’ approach to revolution and change than to the American approach as formulated by the Framers. Thus any student of 20th century European and Asian history will recognize the police-state tactics and the hellhot darkness of the assumptions underlying those tactics.

He does this, I think, in order to give his otherwise ‘valueless’ and ‘un-dogmatic’ Technique and Approach the validity and the robust allure of a genuine vocation: “the human cry of the second revolution is for a meaning, a purpose for life … literally a revolution of the soul”

As if the first revolution (1776, buttressed by 1787) offered no meaning and purpose; as if all the American generations prior to the New Left had lived their lives and made their achievements – large and small – without a sense of meaning or purpose and without a soul.

This is the type of exaggerated mega-hype that not only deluded the cadres but also demeaned everybody but the Boomers themselves.

And I would say, deluded Alinsky himself.

That concludes my look at him.

Trying to offer his Old Left organizing techniques as ‘relevant’ to the New Left, hoping to sidestep the yawning voids that separated the two Lefts by soft-selling his Approach as merely a Technique with “no dogmatic assumptions”, he embarked on a task that was deceitful and impossible from the get-go. But in stretching as far as his own temperament and imagination could manage, he wound up offering a rich trove of manipulative and deceitful tactical advice to those who were indeed revolutionaries, anti-democratic and illiberal and dismissive of any deliberative political ethos in their arrogant assurance that they ‘got it’ and everybody else in the country ‘just didn’t get it’.

The results are with Us now. And they will remain with Us for a long time to come.

What then are We to do with him now?

He has had such a profound influence on the development and conduct of Identity Politics that he cannot simply be considered as being of ‘historical’ interest. His reductionist and Flat and negative view of humans and human affairs; his dismissal of any reliable efficacy residing in human ideals and the human ability to self-correct through rational means; his consequent dismissal of the dynamics of a genuine deliberative democratic politics; his darkling paradigm of suspicion that leads to a form of nihilism in the context of those politics; the poisonous fruit of his abiding dysphoric suspicion in the eternal ‘war politics’ of Have vs. Have-Not (however the definitions of those terms are expanded); his abiding refusal to look fully and deeply into the motivating dynamics of his Approach nor entertain the hardly negligible consequences of certainties; his cartoonish conception of humans and their strivings and their political affairs … all of these are active today and indeed have contributed to the stunningly incompetent state of American politics.

None of this can be ignored. (Whether the damage to the American Framing Vision and ethos can be sufficiently repaired is another question, no less vital.)

And you can apply all of this to the grounds of the SO Mania Regime and the tactics that went into establishing it.

But I think a first step is to open to wide public awareness and discussion the many questions and problems inherent in his Approach and Technique. This was not ever done in the past 40 years, and in fact there are now generations of Citizens and even cadres of Identities who do not realize the full history and implications of his influence decades ago.

If We don’t look more carefully at this still-operative layer of frakkery, We shall be condemned not so much to repeat History (although that will be bad enough) but also to keep repeating and applying Alinsky.

And I don’t think the American polity can take much more of THAT before it mutates beyond any effective deliberative democratic ethos and regresses into something from which, once upon a time, America had been raised up and – in the best sense of the word – saved.

I have added a lot of recent history into this Post. I do not do it in order to inject ‘politics’ into the discussion but rather to show just how the SO Mania Regime is not only grounded in but an outgrowth of many fraught strands in American society as things went along since the Sixties. The Regime is many things, but as I have said before, it is no accident.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

**In a hellhot and hugely under-noted irony, the Sixties phase of the feminist programme was given its first entrée into federal law not – wait for it – through any process of extended and careful deliberative legislative (let along public) process, but rather as a shrewd legislative tactic by an elderly but powerful pol in the House, Chairman of the Rules Committee Howard W. Smith, D-VA, who would end his career in 1966.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reflected the wide-spread public and national attention to the matter of Black (or, then, Negro) civil rights, and although the Bill received much attention in Committee, Smith waited until the Bill was on the floor (therefore before the entire House) where he suddenly introduced the insertion of the word “sex” as a category alongside “race” to which the Bill would apply. Additionally, the vote on the Bill was tallied by teller vote: each Member selected one of 3 colored cards (Yea, Nay, Present) and then the cards were put in separate piles and counted. No names were involved – thus shielding Members from responsibility.

While there is debate among students of these matters as to Smith’s intentions (to support feminism, to kill the bill, to embarrass Northern Democrats who feared (perhaps prophetically) that such an extension would endanger jobs and reduce productivity), there is no doubt whatsoever that Smith’s sly sleaze provided the launch vehicle by which Sixties-and-subsequent Feminism became a fait accompli in national policy and law with pretty much NO DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATIVE PROCESS WHATSOEVER.

In the Alinsky-ite Approach, although he never considered that high-ranking and powerful legislators would actually out-Alinsky the Alinsky-ite cadres and organizers themselves, the maxim that Nothing Is On The Level received stupendous justification.

In terms of democratic process one of the largest, most dubious or at least questionable, and most potentially consequential changes in national law and policy ever introduced into the polity, was effected by sidestepping substantial deliberative scrutiny by the public or its elected representatives.

At least on that score, Alinsky would be impressed.

From the point of view of the SO Mania Regime this bit of history – probably not forgotten inside the Beltway – is tremendously relevant. So many of the enabling laws have been ‘snuck into’ the public consciousness by legislative backers who sought to stifle legislative debate and legislators’ doubts and reservations and concerns. As well as by launching a well-coordinated campaign designed to manipulate public opinion with selective mis- and dis-information and by stoking public fear with the most luridly constructed images and spins.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 6

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 6th installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations, and you can access it here.

In this Post I will simply deal with the SO-relevant material.

His fifth chapter is entitled “Communication”.

Alinsky defines communication taking place “when they understand what you’re trying to get across to them”.

That’s a narrow and limited approach to communication; ‘sharing’ or the exchange of views isn’t in it. But then, if those whom you have targeted for ‘organizing’ don’t really know what’s good for them and if you are there to move or manipulate them toward where you are sure they need to go, then why waste time?

It’s this type of ‘communication’ that lubricated the Mania Regimes: it’s not ‘communication’ in any ‘civilian’ sense (such as you might find in a reputable dictionary); rather, it’s more the one-way pumping of selected information (or spin or what-have-you) being aimed at recipients not for the purpose of informing them so they can make a reasoned decision but merely to stampede them. (Which means that any government office-of-communications has a purpose not covered in a dictionary.)

Naturally too, this has the effect of habituating the government to a certain dishonesty (to put it nicely) when dealing with the Citizens: dishonesty and manipulation are simply folded into the concept of ‘Communication’, which is a good thing that everybody thinks a government should be doing.

Which is what the Beltway wants everybody to think.

“When you are trying to communicate and can’t find the point in the experience of the other party at which he can receive and understand, then, you must create the experience for him.”

In other words, you know what s/he SHOULD be experiencing, so you have carte-blanche to ‘create’ what you are already sure should be there. Thus, among other things, the unending series of ‘symbolic incidents’ that are designed for no other purpose than to convince large numbers of people (modern communications technologies are far more efficient in pulling this gambit on masses of people rather than the slow one-person-at-a-time approach) that derange a democratic politics, derailing it from a ‘politics of substance’ and rendering it merely a ‘politics of symbolism’ and ‘appearances’.

The SO community will be familiar with this phenomenon, even if at least at the beginning its origins and precise causal dynamics were not clear. Having made up their minds what SHOULD be ‘there’ (because they believed it was there OR because the wanted and needed it to be there) then advocates and ‘experts’ made the Alinsky-ite pressure-moves on legislators who were eager to have such ‘cover’.

And so in the Mania Regimes of DoVi and SO you see a ‘politics of appearances’ rather than substance mutate into a ‘legislation of appearances’ rather than substance: in terms of the what the statistics and ‘stories’ claimed, in terms of the purported monsters that were committing them (whether a few hardened recidivists or millions of lumpish unripes, take your pick) … there is no ‘there’ there.

And from a ‘legislation of appearances’ rather than substance you mutate further into a ‘jurisprudence of appearances’ rather than substance, by way of a ‘law enforcement of appearances’ rather than substance.

And the whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors. Only lethally so.

Alinsky’s vision floods wide and deep. His vision spreads like a toxic flood: “For another example of the same principle, here is a Christian civilization where most people have gone to church and mouthed various Christian doctrines, and yet this is really not a part of their experience because they haven’t lived it. Their church experience has been purely a ritualistic decoration.”

He echoes many serious religious thinkers, whether he knows it or not. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the intense and acute German pastor who would take part in the plots against Hitler and be executed just a couple of weeks before the Nazi surrender, visited New York in the early 1930s. What struck him were the shallowness and superficiality – although buttressed with an optimism and enthusiasm that he found to be unserious – of the theology and ministerial students he encountered in his year of study at a great metropolitan divinity school.

But it was one of the abiding themes of his vision, and he preached this in 1932 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin on Reformation Sunday of that year, that they were all there not to celebrate Martin Luther but to bury him and his spirit, and with it the spirit of a genuine religious commitment lived out with the entire mind, heart, and soul of a human life.

This accusation can be leveled at just about any congregation of believers at any time in any religion, but coming as it did on the last Reformation Sunday before Hitler took power (January, 1933) the message bore a special intensity and focus.

Yet Alinsky is no minister. His observation about the abiding distance between living a ‘genuine’ and a ‘conventional’ religious life is not made to encourage or exhort folks to a less-incomplete or more perfect religious or spiritual commitment. No, it’s to justify the adolescent simplistic reduction, the one precisely made by Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”: everybody is a phony.

And therefore everything they do or preach or believe is phony.

And if they say that they are not phony then you can’t believe them because they’re phony.

You can see why adolescents can be so moody, being convinced that they have brilliantly figured out the ‘real’ nature of life and yet then have to live in so phony a world. And perhaps with the fear that they themselves are phony – which terrifies them … and yet, it never ever occurs to them, even in the depths of their Angst, that their analysis itself might be wrong: THAT never occurs to them. Funny how the psychological night moves.

The dissatisfaction stemming from the imperfection or incompleteness of human existence – the dukkha of Eastern mysticism – is for the revolutionary merely a useful pretext for his/her adolescent reductionism: what is there is phony, which justifies our doing whatever we have to do to clean up Dodge by bringing the revolution to fulfillment for everybody’s good.

The revolutionary does not want to improve anybody: a little improvement here or there, the very stuff of daily life, is nothing but evasion and postponement of the Inevitable Struggle that will bring about that creative destruction which will smooth and clear the path of the revolution toward Perfection.

I suppose Lincoln ran into this sort of thing when the Abolitionists realized that he was saying he was Anti-slavery but not Abolitionist – and it enraged them that he would try to make such a distinction. Abolitionism shared the revolutionary impatience: if you find wheat growing with the tares, you must immediately rip out the tares (exactly what Jesus said God has chosen NOT to do).

It’s not just impatience in the sense of time; it’s an existential impatience, an impatience with the very existence of an irritating or undesirable or disliked state of affairs (and – always dangerous – with the human beings whom you associate with that state of affairs).

But Lincoln was a leader, not a revolutionary: as a human being he was and always had been Anti-slavery; but as a leader he knew that (at least up until the circumstances of military success made it possible) Abolitionism could not be embraced as national policy because it would rip the nation apart.

The SO Mania Regimes participate in this Alinsky-ite simplistic revolutionary reduction: ‘men’ are phony, and sex-offenders are the worst of ‘men’ so they are the most evilly phony of all and you can’t trust them. And in the Abolitionist existential impatience: they must be Abolished because their ‘evil’ must be Abolished and it must be done now because it is so evil or at least could become even more evil if allowed to continue.

Of course, you then have to factor in Alinsky – who draws on Lenin but also on advertising and marketing strategy, especially as those strategies were applied to the manipulation of public opinion by that dark master, Joseph Goebbels – and once you’re dealing with Alinsky-ite Method (and almost all of today’s ‘advocacy’ is rooted in it, whether the current practitioners realize it or not) then you have to consider the elements of exaggeration, selectivity, and outright ‘manufacture’.

Whenever you’re dealing with the Alinsky Method, you have to be on your guard. That’s not suspicion of an irrational kind: he wages ‘war politics’ and if you are in his sights, and the sights of those whom his organizers have organized, then they have already decided that you are a Have, that you Have something – even if what you Have is a ‘monstrous evil’ that, for everybody’s benefit (including their own, nicely) must be warred-upon until it is thoroughly abolished.

And in the SO Mania Regime, that’s exactly what they are aiming for.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 5

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 4th installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations, and you can access it here.

In this Post I will simply deal with the SO-relevant material.

His fourth chapter is entitled “The Education of an Organizer”.

Alinsky recounts some of the problems he had with training folks to be organizers. Labor organizers , he says, don’t make good Alinsiky-ite organizers: they were “used to set-piece, fixed-point campaigns but couldn’t handle the fluid and fast-moving operational milieu of ‘mass organizing’” which is “a different animal … not housebroken … no fixed chronological points or definite issues”. (p.66)

It’s strange, when you think of it, that the classic American labor-organizer, mainstay of the great labor struggles from the 1890s to the 1930s, wasn’t any good at what Alinsky was doing. But Alinsky was doing ‘revolutionary’ organizing, not labor organizing: there was no reality principle involved, no absolute focus on some quantifiable and palpable goal like so much for weekly salary and this right and that responsibility … all of which could be put in a contract.

Instead, Alinsky is looking to agitate for ‘issues’ – and it really makes no difference to him what the ‘issue’ might be, as long as you can get folks worked up over it. And, conversely, if you can get enough folks willing to get worked up about something, then that something has to be a ‘real issue’ because so many people are worked up about it.

In the SO Mania, it’s an open question as to which came first: the real ‘issue’ or the ‘necessary-issue’ that had to be nursed along like a poisoned-plant in a dark castle’s laboratory.

He isn’t impressed with ‘social worker types’ because they work to clear away “four-legged rats” and call it quits, whereas he wants to get rid of the four-legged rats so that “we can get on to removing two-legged rats”. Vivid imagery, and is speaks volumes of his essential approach and mindset: you get the sense of that demonization that was necessary (and understandable) in the Russian Revolution and in Soviet thought and practice: those who ‘oppress’ (or even those who simply ‘oppose us’) are bestial enemies and anything that has to be done to destroy them or shut-them-up is Good.

This is not a mindset or a heart-set that belongs in a democratic polity and it will eat through the structures of a democratic politics like a highly corrosive acid.

And notice how quickly ‘demonization’ of one sort or another had to be created as an ‘issue’: the Family and the Male, as well as Authority and Tradition and Structure, were attacked in the Domestic Violence Regime and then, of course, all the stops were pulled out and the ‘Sex Offender’ was created (eerily, much as ‘Sadaam’ was later created as a ‘mastermind’ of 9-11 who owned ‘WMD’).

I don’t blame Alinsky himself for all this, but this is where his Approach has led Us all.

It goes to show, I think, that the opposite of ‘liberal’ is not ‘conservative’; rather, the opposite of ‘liberal’ is ‘illiberal’ and I can’t see how the Nanny Regulatory State is anything but illiberal and how it can deliver or create anything except the most fundamental illiberality (although, of course, in a reeely reeely Good cause).

And though the Left and the Right made some sort of common cause in the Sex Offender Mania Regime, yet the thing made ‘illiberals’ of them all.

Typically eager to demonstrate the creds of his own Approach, Alinsky quickly asserts that “Actually, Socrates was an organizer … the function of an organizer is to raise questions that agitate, that break through the accepted pattern”. And so far so good – it’s precisely this type of awareness that fuels a democratic politics.

But Alinsky then reduces the famous Socratic injunction to ‘know thyself’ to the Flattened sense of ‘knowing’ that you are a Have-Not and thus being extorted and oppressed by the Haves. Socrates, therefore, was not “carrying out the first stage of making revolutionaries”. Socrates worked in a Larger world, whose planes of existence included an Interiority and perhaps even a Verticality; the human self was a cosmos and constituted a ‘new world’ and a genuine ‘frontier’ the hidden reaches of which every human being had to enter, explore, and master.

To Alinsky, as to all materialistic revolutionaries, energies directed toward the mastery of Interiority constituted nothing less than a dangerous distraction, a siphoning off of human energies that should – must – be better spent changing the material, external world. Interiority is the enemy of every revolution.

“Imagination” is necessary to an organizer. Alinsky means that the organizer should be able to place himself through imagination in the heart of the problems that people face. And so far so good.

But then, he says, having felt their suffering, “you organize rebellion”. In other words: having gotten yourself good and mad, then you forget about the democratic politics (which is just part of the ‘status quo’ and on top of that was developed – like the ‘opiate’ of ‘religion’ – just to sedate the Have-Nots as they were extorted by the Haves). You ‘war’ on everything that’s part of ‘the Establishment’ (and, therefore, anything that’s established).

But are some of those established type of things essentially carrying walls or foundational elements of the Constitutional ethos? Of a democratic politics? Of a functioning democratic republic? Can you simply Just Get Mad and then figure that whatever you do is going to be Good and Will Work Out OK and Be Progress … ? I think that in the run-up to the Sex Offender Mania Regime an awful lot of ‘elite’ types did think this. (Just as they later did in the run-up to the Iraq War.)

“Contradictions are the sign-posts of progress”, he says. Phooey. This is not only dumb but so shrewdly self-serving as to be sleazy. If you try to move in a direction and run into a contradiction – either a conceptual problem where your theory doesn’t seem to correspond to reality, or a problem of other people opposing you by contradicting what you’re claiming – this is not a ‘sign of progress’. This is a sign that either you’ve got a theory that isn’t quite ready for prime time or else you’ve got one that isn’t receiving the support of the people who are going to have to live with it.

And when you get these ‘contradictions’ therefore, you can’t simply insist that your theory is ‘Right and Good’ and then dismiss everyone who isn’t so sure as people ‘who just don’t get it’. Nor can you, in a democratic politics, figure that you can just do an end-run around folks. (Although, in a world-class historical development that will be talked about by historians in generations to come, the government itself participated and supported the ‘revolution’ against a democratic politics.)

And so in the SO Mania Regime you see legislators making ‘Findings’ that were hugely dubious when they were proclaimed and have since been greatly discredited by serious analysis and research, and yet the legislators refuse to see it. And feel that in taking such an irrational approach they are Right and Good.

(Although at this point I’m going to imagine that there are more than a few legislators and staffers who realize what a mess they’ve gotten themselves (and the rest of Us) into but can’t figure out how to back away without admitting they made a huge mistake. THIS was the type of situation that kept the Vietnam War going. LBJ was being told as early as 1965 by some of his own advisers that the US should get out of there but he couldn’t see how to ‘back off’ without looking ‘soft on Communism’; so he made the Vietnam situation his own and then made it a ‘War’ for all practical purposes. And Nixon inherited the mess. In this view, so many of those caught in the toils of the SO Mania Regime are like the casualties of that War who were destroyed simply because the Beltway didn’t want to admit it had made a huge mistake.)

Alinsky, equally moved by sorrows, equally angered, chooses not a robust democratic organizing but a darkly-tinged organizing for civic-war based on the assumption that Haves and Greed will outweigh any possibility of common-weal. Like Machiavelli, his surrender to the dark potentials as not only ‘real’ but as the constitutive ‘reality’ of American – or any – politics, has led him to assume (eerily, so much like Bush-Cheney would claim 30 years after his death) that Evil must be warred upon.

Alinsky then says that “With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason – this is a fight with a windmill. The organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved, although it may have been achieved for the wrong reason – therefore he should search for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals. He should be able, with skill and calculation, to use irrationality in his attempts to progress toward a rational world”.

And can you imagine a piece of advice more suitable for erecting the SO Mania Regime? On top of what else I have been noting here, Alinsky-ite legislators and staffers can sleep easy at night knowing that it’s OK to ‘do the right thing for the wrong reasons’ – although in the SO Mania Regime there’s absolutely no conclusive evidence that it was the ‘right thing to do’ in the first place, and an awful lot of indication – topped now by increasing research evidence – that it was indeed very much the wrong thing to do.

I am NOT here trying to create an impossible Good Position from which ANY less-perfect efforts can be simply dismissed as Bad. This dimension of existence, this Plane of existence, is by its nature incomplete and imperfect. (Alinsky reduces the cause of that to Greed, which, nicely, in the Christian and the comprehensive Catholic worldview, is a sin – and Sin is the factor that continually derails human efforts at achieving a lesser-incompleteness through efforts at improvement.)

I say ‘lesser incompleteness’ rather than using the term ‘fulfillment’ because I think We’ve had enough hyper-agitated excitements based on this or that group’s assurance that if only this or that Agenda is established, then Fulfillment will be reached. Politics is the effort of a human group to determine a course, necessarily imperfect and incomplete, by which the polity might move a bit more forward. But it is not in the Catholic (although it is in the Fundamentalistic Christian) view possible to ‘fulfill’ anything in this dimension or on this Plane of existence.

But it is precisely the Method of Stampede that you claim that your Outrage-Emergency is soooo bad that anything less than ‘total’ solution will be an insensitivity and a re-victimization and that in the face of Pain (to the extent that it genuinely exists) you must do ‘whatever it takes’. Driving the ambulance, then, at 120 mph you run it into the trees – or ram it into the by-standers. This is not wise and it really doesn’t help matters. And, as We are seeing, it actually creates more problems and worse problems.

But as I have said previously, Alinsky – following the Flat materialist and reductionist worldview of Marxism and Leninism – must force all possibility of fulfillment into this dimension and squeeze it onto this Plane alone, and consequently must invest any efforts he makes with the Aura of Fulfillment in order to motivate and justify his followers.

Alinsky also urges “multiple issues” because “single-issue” organizing doesn’t last long. And from that flows “continuous issues”, meaning that a ‘successful’ Advocacy (the new word for Alinsky’s ‘organizing’) has to ‘keep the pressure on’ (and keep itself in business) by continually coming up with new ‘issues’ (meaning new ‘emergencies’ and new ‘outrages’).**

And so a continuous stream of SO ‘laws’ to ‘take the next logical step’ and to ‘close loopholes’ and to ‘refine’ and so on and so forth. And if nobody puts a stop to it then the dynamic, like a low-frequency radio wave, will just keep going on forever.

An organizer must also have “Ego”, which Alinsky defines as “unreserved confidence in one’s ability to do what he believes must be done”. (p.79) And if this isn’t a description of the Bushist-era’s ‘real men’ then I don’t know what is. You don’t need to ask questions, you don’t ‘think’, you ‘just do it’ – because you are the ones that really ‘get it’ and you are the ones who are on the cutting-edge of History and indeed are making History while the rest of the chumps – those who ‘just don’t get it’ – are passively sitting around trying to ‘think’ and ‘deliberate’ and see if there actually any justifiable and coherent grounds for what you are Just Going To Go Ahead and DO!

And, I note, this is a pretty good description of most of the organized Advocacies as well, for the 30 years before Bush-Cheney got control of things; by their time, the whole Standard Operating Procedure had been in place inside the Beltway for decades.

And you can imagine legislators being urged precisely to ‘Just Do It!’.

But in this regard, I note that there has been so much shifty maneuvering even in legislatures (no committee review, comments only allowed to be made on the floor, voice-votes) that I think there were a lot of legislators who had (probably still do have) serious reservations, and that it was against THEM that a lot of this skullduggery – often in violation of the letter or spirit of the legislature’s own rules – had to be deployed by the ‘organized’ supporters of this or that Bill.

Alinsky concludes the chapter saying “Finally, the organizer is constantly creating the new out of the old. He knows that all new ideas arise from conflict; that every time man has had a new idea it has been a challenge to the sacred ideas of the past and the present and inevitably a conflict has raged”. (p.79)

Again with tossing around ‘sacred’.

But he also presumes a) that anything new is by definition ‘better’ (and ‘workable’) and that b) that everything ‘new’ must come from conflict.

Yes and no but mostly no.

Humans are always going to Kick Tire when something ‘new’ comes along, especially if they sense that the novelty has to do with profound and vital matters such that screwing around with them might yield baaad and dangerous and expensive consequences indeed.

But THAT’S WHAT a democratic politics is for: to work through all that and achieve some workable outcome that everybody can live with (and that the structure of the polity and the culture can handle without buckling or caving in).

Alinsky’s Approach – so much the revolutionary approach of Lenin – is for those who have decided that they ‘get it’ and that everybody else ‘just doesn’t get it’ to organize to attack and undermine and ‘take the low road’ in order to do whatever it takes to get what they demand. All the while deceptively spinning their activity as just a little ‘change’ and ‘reform’ and ‘tweaking’ – until they can be in a position, as Lenin famously observed and Alinsky proudly recalls, ‘ballots can be exchanged for bullets’.

There is a violence (even if in America it hasn’t come to actual physical bullets) to Alinsky’s Vision and his Approach and his Technique. Nor is it sufficient to assert that since ‘oppression’ is violent then you have to take the low road and be as violent as you need to be yourself.

The SO Mania Regime, true to its Alinsky-ite influences, has gone to ‘war’ against ‘the sacred’. By that word I mean not so much its religious connotations (although Charity and Prudence would certainly count here) but its metaphorical connotation: the Constitution and the Constitutional ethos and the democratic polity and its deliberative politics … these are ALL ‘sacred’ in the sense that they are simultaneously both vital structural components of the American culture, society, and civilization and also important and (rightly) treasured values whose stature reminds Americans of just how valuable and important a heritage We have received from those who have gone before.

To ‘war’ upon all that is indeed ‘revolutionary’, but it is in no way a good or commendable idea: it is not ‘progress’, it may be ‘transgressive’ but it is not ‘progressive’, and it is more of a betrayal than an ‘enforcement’ of what the American Vision and the American Experiment is all about.

And in the course of human events, Bush-Cheney came along and asserted that since they were dealing with violent and dark and irrational and truly evil folks, then the US government and its troops also had to ‘take the low road’ and “walk on the dark side” and be just as violent and dark and irrational and – alas – evil. But of course, America being God’s Deputy, then – in the accents of Nixon – When America Does It, It’s Not An Evil.

Yah.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

**Just this week, up in Boston, following an Obama visit over the weekend, the Attorney General – she who pushed the Shanley recovered-memory case to its sad end and on behalf of whose election-bid for the US Senate the State Supreme Judicial Court chose to pretend that recovered-memory was a professionally-accepted scientific fact – held public hearings to dramatize ‘internet child porn’.

This internet-child-porn Emergency is part of the recent Bill that has quietly been constructed to back the government away from the ‘classic’ Sex Offender scenario BUT creates a different one. If you follow this I think you will see all the old SO Mania gambits now being deployed all over again. I put up a Post on the new internet material here.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 4

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 4th installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations, and you can access it here.

In this Post I will simply deal with the SO-relevant material.

His third chapter is entitled “A Word About Words”.

“Politics”, he says, is “generally viewed in a context of corruption”. Without asking if such a generally held – presuming that it is, which is a big presumption – assessment is accurate, he builds on it; it serves his case well. Because if all politics is indeed reducible to nothing but corruption, then corruption is normal or at least the norm.

Legislators, especially under the pressure from Alinskyite-trained advocates, didn’t need to hear that what they were being pressured to do, which would probably garner them some votes, was the ‘normal’ thing to do whether they had once been taught to think of it as ‘corruption’. Because in Alinsky’s approach, the idea is to use that life-defining corruption in the service of some Good Cause (and thereby ‘baptize’ it, to use my term).

And so what happens in the SO Mania, I would say, is that ‘good’ corruption (ignoring the Constitution and its ethos) is deployed against ‘evil’ corruption (the monstrous Sex Offender). And so ‘corruption’ is embraced with something approaching a clear conscience by people sworn to know better and faithfully “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution.

It’s a clear indicator of how far astray Victimology has led the country that so many average readers and even legislators themselves might immediately assume that their job was to “preserve, protect, and defend” ‘victims’ and ‘prevent victimization’. As I have said before on this site, not even Hitler or the SS got up in the morning saying “today we are going to continue to wreck Germany and the world”; no, they were sure that they were preventing the further victimization of the German nation and people.

And by the time it dawned on many Germans what had really happened, it was too late: the rot was in too deep or they had committed such treacheries and crimes that it was impossible to step back from the abyss.

But Alinsky advises that the good organizer must learn to “use other words – words that mean the same but are peaceful, and do not result in such negative emotional reactions”. Words, as Orwell says, are designed to convey realities; and if you are up to something that you’d rather not admit, then you have to use words that precisely will NOT convey the reality of what you are up to.

Because people might have adverse reactions and get all worked up against what you’re trying to pull off. And why create that problem for yourself if you can avoid it by sidestepping the truth of what you’re doing by using nicer words that don’t get people all worked up and that actually sort of assure them and keep them calm.

Thus ‘change’ and ‘reform’ are better choices.

After all, most people ‘just don’t get it’ anyway, so why waste your time and energy fighting opposition you didn’t need to rile up.

But emotions have to be part of the political process because they are part of people, not to put too fine a point on it. Emotions are NOT the whole of the political process, but things have to start there. IF you are going to do things democratically and tell the truth to The People.

But Alinsky’s approach has that covered: since most people ‘just don’t get it’ then whether they know it or not they are collaborators with or enablers of the Haves. So since this is a ‘war politics’ then they are the ‘enemy’ – or at least dupes of the enemy, and so you have to move around them or move them around.

And if the ‘words’ aren’t enough – avoiding ‘emotions’, then you can whip up other emotions that will be more useful for achieving your Objective. Thus create an ‘outrage’ and thus an ‘emergency’. Monsters will do nicely for this type of work; anybody who has watched villagers in a Frankenstein or vampire movie knows that.

The trouble is: the average American never imagined that Americans would be treated so widely, deeply, consistently, and with malice aforethought as the ‘villagers’ in a horror flick. But that’s where Alinsky is going with this. And he thinks it’s a good idea because making civic-war against the Haves is a Good Cause.

Do people – some or a lot of them – have negative emotional responses to a proposal? Do they ‘get a bad feeling’ about what you want to do? That’s where persuasion and deliberation come in. That’s what a democratic politics is all about – otherwise for all practical purposes it’s not a democracy. Which is OK with Alinsky since he thinks democracy as an Ideal is just baloney, an ‘abstraction’ deployed by the Haves to continue extorting the Have-Nots. BUT if you can use the processes of a democratic politics, and the nice words that are attached to it, in order to neutralize or sidestep a whole lotta people who ‘just don’t get it’, well that’s fine and dandy. It would be treason to the Have-Nots to stir up time-consuming problems that you didn’t have to on the way to getting what you want.

“We begin to dilute the meaning”, he smiles with satisfaction.

And so in the SO Mania (and now in international affairs as well) ‘words’ have been so twisted and diluted that nothing means what it says. Look at the SO Mania Regime laws: to read them and to read far too many of the court opinions, it all sounds so reasonable and assuring. And yet, when you look at what is actually THERE, what thing has actually been erected on the basis of all those nice words, it’s a monstrosity.

What you want to do with words, he teaches, is to create “an aseptic imitation of life”.

‘Asepsis’ means “free from the living germs of disease, fermentation, putrefaction”. So, much like Lenin advising his cadres that until they had real power they would have to say they supported ‘ballots’ – when they got power they would use ‘bullets’, Alinsky wants to use words merely as a Trojan Horse to get inside the heart of the political process. Tactically, then, as the Greeks saw long ago when they built the Horse, you want to lull your enemy’s senses, so that you can get inside with the least amount of time and effort. Once inside, well – that will be a different story.

‘Democracy’ is, in Alinsky’s vision, far too messy, infected with the feelings of far too many people who are too stupid or greedy to see what he sees: that Nothing Is On The Level, that everything is the result of Greed (economic in his actual vision, but as adapted by follow-on Advocacies it could be, say for example, the Greedy desire to steal sexual satisfaction by violent means).

He gets close to an uncomfortable democratic truth – without knowing it perhaps – with that “fermentation”. There is a ferment in democratic politics: people with feelings BUT ALSO with reason debate and disagree and hammer out some sort of agreement or maybe decide a proposal is just too wrong or at least too unworkable to be adopted.

For Alinsky this will never do. You organize precisely because you know you have identified something that you are sure needs to be ‘changed’, and you can’t let yourself get stopped by the mere fact that there are enough people who ‘just don’t get it’ to constitute, this time around anyway, a majority. You go around them, sidestep them, sweet-talk them, stampede them, or maybe – for the most outspoken – you attack their credibility or their personal integrity. You do ‘whatever it takes’. Otherwise you are a lukewarm and wishy-washy failure.

It’s all about Power: the Haves have it and the Have-Nots must “wrest it away from them”.

Power isn’t good or bad – it’s a fact of life, in Alinsky’s view. It can be “a man-killing explosive” or it can be “a life-saving drug” – and who would want to pass up the opportunity to administer “a life-saving drug”?

But he stops at that point and doesn’t pursue the point to where I would say the real question lies, the question that much more closely lies at the heart of the awful problems that have now deranged the country’s politics: what happens, Dr. Alinsky, if you give the wrong drug to the patient? Or in the wrong dosage?

Because there is no such thing as a Universal Life-Saving Drug: a drug that might save one patient might kill another patient. A dosage or frequency of administration necessary to save one patient might kill another patient.

Alinsky’s ‘analysis’ is wayyyy too simplistic and juvenile.

And so I say that Alinsky’s All-Purpose Life-Saving Drug – organizing to wrest Power through ‘change’ – is indeed powerful. But it is soooo powerful and so complex a ‘drug’ that it needs to be very carefully administered, if indeed a comprehensive diagnosis justifies giving the drug to the patient at all.

And in the SO Mania Regime I say that the ‘drug’ chosen was doubly toxic: not only was it administered in far too high a dosage and far too frequently, but that the ‘drug’ itself – demonizing people as monstrous Sex Offenders and then setting up police-state regimes (though merely ‘civil’, ‘administrative’ and ‘regulatory’ – those nice nice words) to control the monsters – was fatal to the body-politic of a working, living democratic polity.

Alinsky, as I have said in earlier Posts, made the simplistic equation between the ‘established’ and ‘status-quo’ of the Imperial Czarist autocracy of early 20th century Russia and the American Republic and its democratic polity of the mid-20th century. To him a ‘status quo’ is a ‘status quo’; the approach specifically designed to destabilize the Czarist government could be with equal justification be applied to the American democracy of the 1950s and 1960s.

And, of course, those trained in the Alinsky-ite method, or those who simply accepted it as the ‘new cutting-edge wisdom’ that ‘everybody knows is right’, assumed the same thing and came to the same wrong-headed conclusion. After all, weren’t ‘men’ just like the Russian czars and aristocracy? Weren’t they just sexually greedy the same way that the wealthy Haves of the Russian Empire were economically greedy?

And isn’t ‘sex’ even more important than ‘economics’? (You can look around you at the country this very day and ask yourself if the advocacies, the legislators, and the assorted elites answered THAT question correctly on the exam.)

And if all that weren’t bad enough, Alinsky exhorts and warns: “to know power and not fear [using it] is essential to its constructive use and control”.

To use the polite British diplomatic usage of a bygone age, this assertion is rather distressingly extraordinary.

Only youth – un-ballasted by the experience of consequences and their own mistakes, un-burdened by the experience of friction and the un-controllability of events once they are set loose – could imagine that it is a good thing not to fear Power. In the obvious sense of the word ‘fear’ – that you have a deep concern that this thing will take you and others to an unintended and possibly dark place – or in the scriptural sense of ‘respect’ – that you understand that Power, like fire, can serve or destroy depending on how well you handle it … well, ‘fear’ in both those senses is an absolutely essential component of maturity and that seriousness that the Framers were so concerned to secure in government service.

The ‘real men don’t waste time thinking’ bit is a shiny bit of immaturity that We saw in the 1960s among the Boomers and in the 1980s in wayyyy too many ‘patriotic’ shoot-em-up fliks.** This is a characteristic of American society, especially since the Age of Industrialization began to go into high gear after the Civil War.

Alinsky doesn’t seem to pick up on this synergy too much. He is content to emphasize the brassy self-assurance of the committed organizer, who is really just a watered-down version of the revolutionary cadres of Leninism that had attracted Alinsky in his own youth.

But both dynamics came together in the Sex Offense Mania, offering politicians a chance not only to pander to ‘demographics’ but also to ‘prove’ that they could ‘protect’ the womenfolk and children just like any frontier settlers who didn’t have a sheriff handy. Except – of course – that by the 1990s there was no frontier and there was a Constitution. But then – ‘real men’ don’t waste time thinking too much.

‘Morality’, he says, is simply the nice-word cloak for covering up the naked self-interest that abides in all status-quo situations. And if ‘morality’ can get tossed aside so quickly, and reduced to being merely a ‘cover’ for baaad things, then Constitutionality is surely not going to fare any better. And it didn’t in the SO Mania Regime laws.

There is a thick stream of this Alinsky-ite assumption underlying the Regime, and it’s been taught in law schools (yes, Alinsky-ite visions excite the profs there) for decades: the Constitution is merely the cloak behind which the Haves hide.

Which, marvelously, gives so-called ‘liberals’ the chance to prove that they too are ‘real men’ (of either gender): ‘real men’ don’t let the Constitution stand in the way of doing ‘whatever it takes’, because the Constitution is really only an ‘opiate’ (as Marx would say) and ‘democracy’ is ditto: a cover for ‘oppression’.

He concludes his chapter with some thoughts on “Conflict”. The word has gotten a bad rap, he thinks.

He blames, firstly, the Advertising Culture in America (he’s writing in 1971): it has given people the idea that you should always be polite when, really, life is a war between Haves and Have-Nots.

I’d say that the problem goes deeper: the Advertising Culture was concerned for appearances, not for substance, and wayyyy too many people got used to simply ‘being nice’ in an outward way without really accepting the burden of truly respecting the dignity of other human beings, their fellow (and sister) Citizens. But then – Alinsky isn’t going for the ‘mutual respect’ route, and doesn’t seem to think that humankind is capable of reliably sustaining such a mature achievement.

A sentiment and conviction that sustained the ‘war-politics’ without which the SO Mania Regime could never have gotten started. And by which it is now continued.

He blames, secondly, “organized religion” with its insistence that one must “turn the other cheek” (which, of course, is not what you do in a war).



This surely fits in with the Victimologists’ insistence that ‘closure’ requires a vengeance (a huge legal regression in Western history) administered by the State on behalf not of the common-weal, but on behalf of the ‘victim’. ***

And as far as ‘turning the other cheek’ goes, I recall that the Australian author, J.M. Coetzee, notes this in his 2007 book of essays entitled “Diary of a Bad Year”. In the vision of Hobbes, the world without an organized State and the rule of law is a rat’s nest of “internecine warfare without end (reprisal upon reprisal, vengeance upon vengeance, the vendetta” (p.3)****

While there is a modest – but hugely incomplete – psychological value to seeing somebody ‘paid back’, Coetzee later points out that as best he can make out after watching the world – and especially South Africa after apartheid was abolished but Identity grievances crept back – ‘vengeance’ or ‘revenge’ simply continues the cycle of offense-revenge that locks BOTH perpetrator and victim into a darkling level of existence.

(In a later chapter, Alinsky will lustily relate how the ‘reaction’ of the Haves, of the ‘enemy’ you have chosen, is absolutely vital to feeding the dynamic you need to force ‘change’ and ‘wrest power’. And, as you may imagine, the ‘reaction’, the ‘conflict’, is what drives the melodrama of the ‘story’ for the media.)

And that a polity where the Citizens are constantly at war among themselves is doomed.

In that regard, by the way, Coetzee – no ‘religious nut’ – comes to the sober conclusion that Christ really is the only one to get it right by advising that one must ‘turn the other cheek’ lest the cycle of violence in interpersonal and societal and national and international affairs simply continue ad infinitum.

Governments have many options open to them besides considering themselves in a ‘war’, diplomacy being not the least.

Individuals have an even larger range of options, which in a democracy include uniting together and working for change. The nation as a whole is not the South of the Jim Crow Era nor is it Russia of the Romanovs only with warmer weather.

Alinsky’s Approach is the equivalent of driving a vehicle equipped with heavily-studded tires, suitable for a winter in Montana, on the roads of Florida. Or of driving an entire State-full of vehicles so equipped over the Florida roads. Or maybe, the equivalent of driving a main battle tank with its heavy treads on the roads; war is hell on roads.

And this reflection of Coetzee’s about Christ would no doubt be taken as heresy by the Alinsky-ite school, but there it is.

And thus the cycle of offense-vengeance would be broken.

But breaking the cycle of any outrage is precisely what the Alinsky approach does NOT want to see happen. You need the ‘outrage’ to continue to fuel the war-politics.

How at this point legislators are going to ‘back away’ is an interesting question – and one of some real urgency.

I am not at all proposing that Alinsky’s ‘war’ be met with ‘war’ by the SO community. But there remains a great and necessary service that the SO community is well-placed to perform for the country: to roll-back this monstrous Regime and in the process help the country regain balance and integrity.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

**If you need some good reading, I’ve just finished “The Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America 1877-1920”, by Jackson Lears. It’s a meaty read, and a great story, and it’s out in paperback for less than $20. He talks about the tremendous anxiety among American elites of that forgotten generation that had been too young to fight in the Civil War but had to find a way of ‘proving themselves’ to be as strong and grown-up and ‘masculine’ as the generation of 1861-1865.

***For those interested, it is sobering – if not also stunning – to read Anthony Rhodes’s 1974 book “The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators: 1922-1945”. There, especially on pages 207-209, he recounts the campaign undertaken by the Nazi Reich in 1937 after the Pope, Pius XI, issued his encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern), that expressed to the world his deep anxiety over what was happening in the now-4 year-old Reich. Immediately, Hitler declared “I shall open such a campaign of propaganda against them in the press, radio, and cinema that they won’t know what’s hit them”.

But he instructed his underlings not to make martyrs out of the priests; “It’s better to show that they are criminals”. Attacks, Rhodes recounts, were made on priest’s morals, as the Nazis had done from time to time, “but they were nothing compared with the new accusations and mass trials”. At Koblenz, 170 Franciscan monks were arrested forthwith and put on trial for “corrupting the youth and turning the monastery into a male brothel”. As Rhodes notes from the record, the trial excluded the public and “most of the witnesses were children”, which “raised doubts as to its equity”. The Nazis accused the friars of running “orgies”, cartoons appeared in the Nazi press in which an adult male in priestly garb beckoned to young boys over the scriptural quote ‘Let the little children come unto me’. Goebbels himself (who would, in April 1945 kill his own six children with poison before killing his wife and himself) announced in a speech that he came before the German people as a concerned parent and father himself, attacking those parents who still believed in the Church, allowing “their most precious treasure delivered to the bestiality of the polluters of youth” by letting them go to Catholic schools rather than the Reich schools.

(Marvelously, the German Consul in Caracas reported regretfully to Berlin that in light of the well-publicized homosexual incidents among the Imperial German General Staff in the time of Emperor Wilhelm 30 years before (one high ranking general died of a heart attack at a costume party dressed in a pink tutu and by the time anyone thought to get the corpse more suitably attired in its uniform rigor mortis had set in and bones had to be broken) the Venezuelans were referring to homosexuality as ‘the German vice’. Could we not please, he asked, have some heterosexual incidents? As if on cue, reports began to come out of Berlin of priests ‘caught’ with women. In case this all sounds like too much, Rhodes quotes the volumes of the Nazi diplomatic archives captured intact after the war. The pink-tutu episode is related at length in Raymond K. Massie’s history of the Edwardian era, “Dreadnought”.)

It’s sobering to read all this in light of recent American excitements.

**** Coetzee, J.M. “The Diary of a Bad Year”. New York: Penguin: 2007. The edition I am using is the paperback: ISBN 978-0-14-311448-2. This book is curiously structured: each page is divided into three sections, with the top section being his essays. They are well worth the read, especially his reflections on Thomas Hobbes and his vision and the consequences that flow from it.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 3

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 3rd installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations.

Here I will simply get to the SO-relevant material.

In this chapter of his book Alinsky deals with Ends and Means: how do you determine what is an acceptable or unacceptable Means to achieve an End, a purpose?

Simple, Alinsky says: there is no general rule. In each particular situation, you have to apply your judgment to the particular use of a Means to achieve the End you want.

But this effectively rules out any Higher Law or any already-existing law as being allowed to interfere with that you want to do in this particular situation.

You can see where this could (and did) go when it comes to SO Mania laws: there is no Higher Law such as God’s, and there isn’t even the Constitution. You’ve got this ‘emergency’ here, this ‘war situation’, and you have to judge for this particular situation. (But, of course, he’s removed all the Law or law by which you must judge your options, leaving you with a wide-open choice of options for yourself. Neato!)

Machiavelli, whom Alinsky quotes even more than he does Marx or Lenin, came to the conclusion that as late-Renaissance European life and culture began to speed up, it was clear that ‘God’ wasn’t going to be a reliable referee for the game as it was now being played: God, as the gospels say, is willing to “let the tares grow with the wheat" until the Master of the Harvest comes at harvest time and separates the weeds from the wheat.

This doesn’t work for Machiavelli’s more human time frame, which – not surprisingly – seems to Machiavelli the more important time frame in Western culture as it was picking up speed and complexity in his day. The tares-and-wheat idea was maybe OK for a slow-moving, agrarian society built on agriculture and animal husbandry, but for a ‘world’ now building upon ‘business’ and ‘trade’, you needed referees who would reliably police the game in the here-and-now.

And clearly God could not be relied upon to do that.

The result for a Prince – responsible for governing and keeping safe and prospering his realm – is clear, in Machiavelli’s take on things: any Prince who tries to be ‘honorable’ and ‘virtuous’, trusting that God will vindicate him and keep him and his realm safe, is setting himself up to be a hot lunch for any opposing Prince who’s willing to ignore God’s rule and ‘do whatever it takes’. So, Machiavelli says, given the stakes of the matter, the only ‘moral’ thing for a Prince to do is to get down and get dirty and to get there faster than any opponent. Otherwise, not only the Prince but his people and realm will pay the price for his ‘honor’ and ‘virtue’. The only ‘virtue’ is to be the biggest, baddest guy in the valley.

You can see what might happen to a government – the Beltway, say – when ‘advocates’ start quoting Alinsky who is quoting Machiavelli.

Since God can’t do the referee work, then the government will just have to step up and take His place. That God – or the Constitution – might be working on a different frame of time and events OR that the Framers wisely foresaw the possibility of Stampedes and built protective speed-bumps and fences into the Constituion itself … those are not things Alinsky (or Machiavelli) thinks about; after all, the ‘stakes are too high’ to trust the situation to an unreliable referee or policeman like God, so the government will do God’s police-work for Him. And, no doubt the Beltway figured, do it better.

This, you might imagine, could set off some sort of race-to-the-bottom. And I think that with the SO Mania Regime it has.

Marx and Lenin, faced with the staggering complexities and incomplete justice of one of the world’s last great Divine Right monarchies (the Romanovs) that was at the same time developing into an Industrial power, though ruled not only by Wealthy businessmen but by a dense layer of hereditary Aristocracy … well, you can see where they figured they needed to give themselves all the space they could to ‘do whatever it takes’.

But Alinsky tries to ‘baptize’ the Techniques without all the ‘Communism’ and set this sort of dynamic loose in the US.

Yet the US is a constitutional republic with a democratic and deliberative politics. How can you deploy weapons that were designed to assault the rock-solid layers of a completely different type of society and polity? It’s like using a rocket-launcher designed to blow up tanks in order to open the door that’s stuck on your car … you’ve brought a lot more to the job than you can reasonably or safely use.

But the Beltway was eager to please a new powerful demographic, or at least please the Alinsky-trained organizers and advocates who claimed to represent the interests of that new big demographic. And it was the early Nineties, and the USSR had collapsed, and Billary was in the White House and there was no stopping ‘change’ now!

Alinsky had said that “The real arena [of life] is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life”. (pp.24-5)

Alinsky is a long long way from Carol Gilligan’s crowded but clubby breakfast table, with Mommy exercising her ‘intuition’ with all the authority of a Benevolent Despot to calm her squalling brood around the table.

And it didn’t do the Beltway any good to hear that ‘corruption’ is just a part of life and you make what use of it you can manage, as long as you mean well and it’s in a Good Cause.

Surely Bush-Cheney didn’t need to figure that they were being advised – and by one of the great and early ‘liberal thinkers’ (and Alinsky isn’t quite that at all) – that ‘real men’ embrace corruption and harness it; you can hear echoes of this in Cheney running up the flagpole the idea that America might just have to “walk on the dark side” to get her Great and Good Work accomplished.

But you can most certainly sense Alinsky’s presence in the SO Mania Regime. Here is a Great and Good Work, and an Emergency to boot, and if there’s anything that’s corrupt, it’s Sex Offenders, and so let’s do ‘whatever it takes’ and legislators would fail in their responsibility to their people if they let soething as general as the Constitution or some old abstractions like Due Process and Statutes of Limitation and Rules of Evidence and Presumption of Innocence stand in the way of doing the Right and Good Thing.

And if life is so corrupt (Alinsky) and Males are so permanently and naturally sexually violent (radical feminism) and if ‘victimization’ in these areas is running 10 or 50 or a 100 times more than anybody dares to think (Victimology) then you can see where there isn’t going to be too much left standing to slow down the Mania or at least try to keep it within some kind of proper channels.

By this point, Alinsky (like Lenin before him), in company with the radical-feminists and the Victimology types,has given so much away to the darknesses of human existence that he can’t imagine how any responsible man of action could in good conscience (so to speak) legitimately neglect ‘the low road’. (And does any of this sound familiar from the days of Bush-Cheney and the run-up to the Iraq War?). He draws an almost cartoonish pair of alternatives: you can either be some bloodless philosopher in an ivory tower or you can go out and do whatever it takes to accomplish some good in the world. Again with the adolescent oversimplification.

There is only the “low road” in politics, he says. Real men take it and don’t sit around worrying about it. Neither the radical Victimology types nor Cheney had to hear this sort of thing.

Alinsky offers several ‘Rules’ for determining the ethics of Means and Ends.

His first Rule is that the further away from being affected by a problem you are, the more you will waste time on ‘ethics’. The SO Mania Regime solved this problem by making Sex Offenses everybody’s problem because – it was insisted – Sex Offenders were everywhere, slavering like monsters or masquerading as ‘normal’ folks.

His second Rule is that your ethical judgment depends on where you sit. If you are in the middle of the bulls-eye drawn around you and your family by Sex Offenders, then you know what you have to do.

His third Rule is that in war, the End (Victory for you) justifies almost any Means. So there had to be a ‘war’ against Sex Offenders (or at least Sex Offenses, which is a distinction a little too fine for most folks). And Alinsky’s Revolution is more than just a ‘war’; it is and has to be a civil-war of Citizens against Citizens. Or at least against one group of Citizens who have been demonized to the point where they no longer have the rights of a Citizen and are, for all practical purposes, just another ‘enemy’. Call it a 'civic war'.

His fourth Rule is that you have to really be there in order to judge, and if you’re not there then you can’t judge. Neat – if you’re not part of the Stampede, you have no right to say whether the Stampede is a wise thing to set in motion.

He talks about Sam Adams, who played a great role in getting the so-called Boston Massacre going: heartless British troops firing on innocent colonial civilians. Unfortunately, one of the shot-up civilians, soon-to-be-a-martyr, confessed on his well-attended death-bed that actually, the Brits were just minding their business doing guard duty when a mob of tanked-up folks attacked them. This threatened Adams’s entire plan and so by extension threatened the possibility that there would ever be an America. What could Adams do? He had to denounce the dying man in public, calling him in a round-about way a drunken Irishman who was also probably a closet-Catholic. (Harsh words in those days – although, come to think of it, the ‘Catholic’ part seems eerily familiar, doesn’t it?)

Alinsky has no problem with that. And says nobody who was not in Adams’s shoes has the right to judge either. Which pretty much removes the entire rug out from under anybody who has to judge anything at all. But it’s war and stuff happens.

Do a bunch of folks have to be degraded and derided in public, even if the charges you are making against them aren’t really – ummm – true? If it’s in a Good Cause then it’s OK. This type of thing never ends, as anybody can see looking at the Sex Offense Mania regime.

The fifth Rule is that if you don’t have many Means available, then you really can’t waste your time passing judgment on whatever Means you do have. So if all you’ve got is a Hammer, then hammer away. Which explains, I think, why so many SO Mania laws don’t really seem to get at the source of such problem as there actually is.

The sixth Rule is that the more important the End, the less time you can spend on ethical stuff. But if this is a ‘war’ against the most heinous (perhaps evil) creatures on the planet, and if it’s an Emergency – then that means you don’t have time and cannot legitimately take time to think things through. In fact, legislators who might have objections to this or that SO Mania law have to be kept from taking up everybody’s time with their own ‘hang-ups’, don’t they?

The seventh Rule is that if you win, then nobody’s going to question your ethics. You can imagine easily that this is truly the LAST thing anybody should have told Bush-Cheney. But long before that, this was considered cutting-edge justification for the legislation – and the legislators – of the SO Mania laws. They figured that they’d be greeted as liberators and as the wise but efficient lawmakers who saved the helpless settlers from the terrible Injuns known as Sex Offenders; they will have cleaned up Dodge; or like Ben Cartwright and his boys, they will have come down from the Beltway-Ponderosa into Virginia City to clear out all the Sex Offenders.

The eighth Rule is that if you are losing and you have to do a particularly nasty thing, well that’s OK because you gotta do what you gotta do when you’re fighting a war in a Good Cause. Notice here that you have already declared yourself to be fighting a war in a Good Cause, so you have pretty much written yourself a free ticket for whatever you figure you have to do.

The ninth Rule is that anything you do that works is automatically going to be termed unethical by the opposition (and the people you use it against). So, of course, Sex Offenders will naturally claim that your Mania Regime is unconstitutional and corrosive of good government and of the integrity of legislation and legislators and jurists and prosecutors alike. But you just have to expect that sort of baloney from them – after all, you’ve ‘caught’ them.

But then too, as your integrity and the integrity of the entire ethos and edifice of Constitutional safeguards drains away, you’ve caught yourself in a terrible net as well. When Ben Franklin told everyone that America has a democracy if We can keep it – he wasn’t just referring to foreign enemies. In fact, he probably figured that the country was in greater danger from its own Citizens and elected officials than it was from any foreign invasion.

The tenth Rule is that you do what you have to and use nice words to make it seem moral. And anybody who has ever had to sit through an explanation of why this or that SO Mania law is ‘good’ will recognize this dark scam. (Although pols are verrrry careful not to talk – or be recorded talking – about their part in these laws, except at the particular rubber-chicken appreciation dinners thrown for them by the particular lobbyists and/or advocates.)

The eleventh Rule is that your goals and objectives must be phrased in nice and catchy terms that will get people to like what they hear. Packaging and appearance is everything, and don’t worry about the substance or the reality of the thing. You couldn’t read some of the pious legislative bleating that introduces the text of these SO Mania laws, or read some of the court Opinions and Decisions, without feeling like you were supporting the bestest thing in the whole world.

I haven’t overstated Alinsky’s Rules, although I’ve paraphrased them. You are welcome to follow the link to the other site and read them as quoted verbatim. It shocks to realize that this entire programme has been making the rounds of the Beltway (and assorted State capitals) as ‘cutting edge’ thinking.

But it explains, I think, an awful lot about where the stunningly repugnant SO Mania Regime and its laws came from and out of what noxious brew they were hatched. Alinsky is essentially deploying the ‘war tactics’ developed by Lenin for use against the Russian Czarist autocracy, and he is deploying them against the ethos of the Constitution. And, in a further ‘refinement’, his approach then passed through the filters of radical-feminism and Victimism, and the result is … what the SO community knows so well.

I think future generations of historians, when they look back at the period 1990-2010 in this country, are going to be amazed at how such a system came to be accepted with so little substantive and effective objection by the elites but also by the Citizenry.

Part of this is explainable by the fact that Alinsky’s system so cunningly and shrewdly masks itself – like the Trojan Horse or a chameleon – in the ‘acceptable’ language of democratic process that lulled so many into merely accepting the surfaces and appearances of the new policies without any serious Kicking of Tire.

And of course, for 20 or more years prior to 1990, the Goebbelsian technique of manipulating public opinion, itself a close cousin to the far more ‘innocent’ American approach to advertising (‘creating desire’ and ‘creating needs’), helped develop both the ‘Emergency’ that generated the Mania and the necessary public Stampede and also the Correctness that pre-squelched any skepticism and objections.

And Alinsky’s approach had, by 1990, already done its lethal work on American politics itself: a ‘war’ and a ‘civic war’ – some Citizens versus some other targeted group of Citizens – is all that American politics had to offer by then.

And in order to keep up emotions and precisely to avoid careful, objective, and even constructively skeptical Tire-Kicking and analysis and wide deliberation (which is exactly what any ‘revolutionary’ wants to avoid), that American politics had degenerated into a Manichaean us-vs-them dynamic, with each Party’s ‘base’ consisting only of those ‘true believers’ who were already convinced and were convinced that ‘facts’ would only confuse issues that to them were already ‘clear’.

So again I say to the SO community that the roll-back efforts do not simply help all of the persons caught up in the toils of the SO Mania Regime, but also help to recall the entire country BACK toward some more mature and effective politics than the lethal soap-opera into which We have descended, which is an abyss that will – I guarantee it – swallow the republic and the democracy and end that phase of American history that can legitimately be termed “The Great American Experiment” as the Framers envisioned it and “the last best hope of mankind” as Lincoln described it.

So much remains to be done.



NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

LINK

To chez orig http://chezodysseus.blogspot.com/2010/10/saul-alinskys-rules-3-i-continue-this.html