There are some who are not fond of Barack Obama because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of his philosophy of change. They mistake his late-Alinsky-based non-ideological change methodology for “triangulation” and mistake his call for “unity” for some kind of capitulation to right-wing ideologues. They mistake his call for pragmatic citizen-based united action for a Lieberman-like cozying up to the political enemy in the seats of power. This is a fundamental misperception that could not be further from the truth.
Those who hold these mistaken ideas are expecting him to follow a paradigm different from the one he has been working within for social change for over twenty years, first as a community organizer within the Alinsky-inspired network and later as a teacher of Alinsky’s methods of grassroots activism and citizen empowerment to achieve pragmatic social betterment:
As Alinsky says:
An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth–truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist. He accepts the late Justice Learned Hand’s statement that “the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right.”…
Does this then mean that the organizer in a free society for a free society is rudderless? …
First, the free-society organizer is loose, resilient, fluid, and on the move in a society which is itself in a state of constant change. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents. In the end he has one conviction–a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite–either a dictatorship or some form of political aristocracy. (Alinksy, p. 11)
That is the ideology – support for nonideological, bottom-up driven action for empowering the disempowered:
Alinsky:
“I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous. To diminish the danger that ideology will deteriorate into dogma, and to protect the free, open, questing, creative mind of man, as well as to allow for change, no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.'” (Alinksy, p. 4)
In applying this approach to the messages of his political campaign, Obama is trying to rewrite the country’s political frames of reference. The old left-right dichotomy has been fractured and become meaningless. The Republican-Democrat dichotomy is just as meaningless, with elected Democrats who legislate for the sake of industry lobbyists and their biggest contributors and fail to defend the civil rights, privacy rights, and economic rights of the people, no different from how Republicans do.
The new dichotomy, the new operational frame of reference he’s promoting is –
- Who supports bottom-up mobilization efforts versus Who opposes them and tries to impose top-down solutions for the elite?
Don’t forget that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were offered jobs in Alinsky-inspired organizations. Obama accepted and worked as a community organizer and later a teacher of Alinsky’s methods, calling it the best education of his life. Clinton turned down the job, leaving her involvement at writing her senior thesis on Alinsky’s grassroots organizing methods and ultimately rejecting them for being too small scale and therefore of limited value.
In thinking about the course each of these fine Democratic politicians has travelled since, I am reminded of what Alinsky said about realism in power politics:
Two examples would be the priest who wants to be a bishop and bootlicks and politicks his way up, justifying it with the rationale, ‘After I get to be bishop I’ll use my office for Christian Reformation,.or the businessman who reasons, ‘First I’ll make my million and after that I’ll go for the real things in life. Unfortunately one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric or the first million… (Alinksy, p. 13)
Barack Obama wrote a chapter in After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, and it shows a roadmap of a contrasting path of constant, practical, grassroots-based action:
In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.
This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative. (my emphasis)
For one example of how Obama has been implementing this philosophy of democratizing power and decision-making for local social benefit, see how he worked with grassroots activist groups like his former employer, the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of 1,600 faith congregations, to revive the workforce development provisions Republicans had resisted in the 2005 federal transportation bill (PDF HTML).
The Republican support needed to pass the bill was enlisted through several strategic compromises, and the legislation was then used as an “organizing hook” by a range of activists ready to quickly press for further action on local needs, spinning portions of that federal transportation funding into support for local unionized jobs and job training, thereby democratizing the decision-making away from the connected and lobbyist-influenced usual suspects and directing it to specific community betterment actions instead.
I can only contrast this with Hillary Clinton’s efforts to pass healthcare legislation in 1993 – a well meaning but top-down insider approach that failed. It failed because of a lack of belief in the value of devolving power and influence to the people and trusting them enough to open up the process, leveraging the power of the self-interest of millions of citizens in order to bring change. It’s a lesson she apparently still hasn’t learned, blaming the failure to pass the program on the power and money of “special interests” and not on her own failure to engage a broad coalition of stakeholders and legislators to fight for it along with her.
Here is Obama’s contrasting approach in a nutshell:
That doesn’t sound like “playacting unity” or triangulation or capitulating to Republicans to me. It sounds like Alinsky-inspired revolution.
