Setting aside that it would make no sense for a sitting president of the United States to adopt the rules and tactics of a radical anti-Establishmentarian, the truth is that President Obama does not utilize tactics of Saul Alinsky. And, contra Sarah Palin, the candidate most obviously using them is Newt Gingrich, not his enemies in the Establishment.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I have to disagree this time: Obama is closer to the spirit of Alinsky than to the cartoon parody served up by Gingrich or the concern trolling of Melinda Henneberger. A quote from Rule for Radicals (1971):
This failure of many of your younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience – and gives full respect to the other’s values – would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America’s hopes and aspirations, and he would have conveyed this message to his audience. On another level of communication, humor is essential, for through humor much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously. This is a sad and lonely generation. It laughs too little, and this, too is tragic.
the “spirit” of Alinsky? Sure. I’ll agree with that.
But the “tactics”?
No. I can’t agree with that.
Obama might want to start polarizing issues since he’s kind of stuck with a too-conservative Congress for the foreseeable future. But his method has been to depolarize issues just enough to get them passed.
He didn’t have the luxury of time that would be needed to use Alinsky tactics with Congress. Tactically, he’s been the anti-Alinsky, and with good reason.
I think Chris Matthews has been making some good points about Grinch’s ramblings about Alinsky, a name that evokes Jewish, leftist, intellectual, like Trotsky. It his nothing to do with anything Alinsky actually promoted, whether tactics or ideas, just the connection between the names Alinsky and Trotsky. The point is that the people coming out to hear Gingrich (or Palin) talk don’t know anything about Alinsky. They just hear his name combined with European style socialism and food stamp president, and they explode with anger. Of course, they have no clue what it’s like living in Europe either; they just take it for granted that everything about their American lives is superior to anywhere else in the world.
About .000001% of the American electorate knows the difference between Trotsky and Alinsky because they don’t have a clue who Trotsky was or why he wound up with an icepick in his brain.
But they know Trotsky is the left, Communism, Soviet, even if Trosky and Stalin were not the same person, had different ideas, etc.
gotta disagree. Almost no one under 60 knows who Trotsky was.
That’s just Chris Matthews showing his age.
You don’t evoke an unknown name because it sounds like the name of someone else that no one knows, or fears.
He brings up Alinsky mainly because Gingrich is a wanker, but also because it speaks to an activist base that watches Glenn Beck.
Good point, but his name (like Soros) does sound European, which ties in well with the European style socialist bull shit.
“Alinsky strictly resisted political labels and affiliations, once explaining “if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.” But conservatives began invoking his name as something of an epithet to sully the left’s tactics as sneaky, underhanded, unethical — or Marxist.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Alinsky taking a place alongside top contemporary conservative bogeymen like Michael Moore, George Soros and Jane Fonda. His seminal 1971 guide to organizing, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals,” became a must-read for a new wave of conservative activists who mobilized — many for the first time — in opposition to the ambitious, big-government agenda pushed by President Obama and the Democratic Congress.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34751.html#ixzz1kscGditV
Nobody under 60 saw any of this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Trotsky_in_art
Snowball, anyone?
Interesting. He has indeed been thrown about in popular culture. As such, I still think most people know his name even if they don’t know all the events of his life.
He’s just a cute pig.
Agreed, in spirit š and letter. Let’s not overthink this. Alinsky is an inviting target because he published two books with “Radicals” in the title.
I learned about Trostsky in high school and I’m about your age. Granted, the teacher presented him in a positive light in contrast to Stalin, but we still learned the name.
They both have commie-sounding names. That is all ye need to know.
I think that is the point–Commie-sounding and foreign/European-sounding.
I’ve come to think that the “community organizer” background that many of us thought would make Obama a new and better kind of president turned out to be his most negative trait. He adopted the “one nation”, bipartisanship-as-a-value, and the odious “I want to look forward, not back” implications of Alinsky’s marketing strategy but left out the part about it being a tool for “radicals”. Maybe he does get some credit for inventing radical centrism, though.
I doubt that Alinsky would be any happier than Trotsky or Marx to see how his notions played out at the higher levels of power.
Alinksy dealt with this issue in the previous Reveille for Radicals.
The problem is that these tactics were not articulated in print for the higher levels of power but for the perceived powerless. Note the “reverses” that are necessary inside an establishment (inside game) in my comment below.
Catalysis is a common goal in community organizing. The organization appears but the organizer is not so personally involved that he or she cannot leave to organize somewhere or something else. Yet a strong organization remains with a life of its own.
A question historians of the future will raise is would either the Tea Party or the Occupy Wall Street movements have occurred if Obama had not been president.
Good observation, Booman. Not that Gingrich (or, perhaps, anybody but me) is interested, but people who read “Rules For Radicals” as a kind of cookbook (measure and mix these ingredients in these proportions, bake for x minutes and presto!…radical change)for political action are missing at least half the point.
Alinsky wrote “Rules For Radicals” near the end of his life, at a time when the student left was rapidly growing and desperately in need of mentors and wise advice.
Alinsky had lived through the McCarthy Era (which actually started in the late 1930s in places like New York), and had seen hundreds, if not thousands, of his peers fired, blacklisted, or otherwise shamed into inactivity.
He wrote “Rules” in an attempt to pass on the practical wisdom he had learned from the CIO and from his experience in places like Back of the Yards in Chicago.
After Alinsky died, the IAF nearly died as well—and basically was exiled from Chicago for a generation. Alinsky’s successors (Ed Chambers and company at IAF, Greg Galluzzo and company at Gamaliel, and others) had to take what they call “the universals” of public life that Alinsky had taught them, and figure out how to apply them in the absence of a mass social movement.
One reason Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and company have so much trouble attacking Pres. Obama is that they’re the ones still stuck back in the 1960s with Alinsky. Obama and many of his progressive peers have learned the lessons of those times and moved forward.
Just for clarity, here is a summary of the rules for radicals:
Look at these over against Obama’s actions (his own, not those of subordinates, especially Rahm Emmanuel).
What Newt Gingrich leaves unsaid is that he and a whole lot of Republicans operatives used Alinsky’s rules for radicals to take over and purge the Republican Party and to gain Republican control of the South and for four years (2003-2007) of the nation.
I think Obama has avoided 7, for example in HCR; when things were dragging on he held his health care summit (where he made use of 5 to great advantage, remember Eric with his stacks of paper he hadn’t read, etc
It was an open exercise in testing the thesis of how aligned with Alinsky’s tactics Obama was.
I would be interested in other folks data for each of the Alinsky tactics.
Alinsky alway maintained that these had to be tailored to the specific situation.
Very nice. I read Obama as a community organizer through and through, which would mean adapting but innovating on Alinsky, pragmatic and eyes on the prize. I’m never sure whether to laugh, cry or tear my hair at comments such as “has Obama finally learned not to trust the Republicans”, or realize they won’t compromise. frankly, I read his appointing Geitner et al in the community organizer vein as well and imo it was a good move.