Remember, Obama’s an Alinskyite
One of the many many things that has long puzzled me about the election of Barack Obama is how many terrible elements of his resume had to be ignored in order to like him, trust him, vote for him.
A good example was his community organizer and Alinsky experience, which (unlike his connections to Ayers or Wright) he didn’t even bother to disavow, but instead celebrated. Obama was probably relying on the fact that leftists would love him for it, and everyone else except the right would misunderstand what that background meant.
Let’s let an expert on the left, David Horowitz, explain. In his book Radicals, he devoted a long chapter to Alinsky, containing the following telling excerpts:
The focus on power was illustrated by an anecdote recounted in a New Republic article that appeared during Obama’s [2008] presidential campaign. “When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!” In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.”…
Guided by these principles, Alinsky’s disciples are misperceived as idealists; in fact, they are practiced Machiavellians. Their focus is invariably on means rather than ends. As a result they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies or theoretical dogmatisms in the way their still admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power.
Horowitz’s book was published in 2012, and it’s not about Obama. But there’s a great deal in the Alinsky chapter that’s relevant to what we’ve seen unfolding in his administration. Read the following in light of Obama’s vague “hope and change” mantra in 2008, and you will understand its provenance even better:
Communists identified their goal as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” which generated opposition to their plans. Alinsky and his followers organize their power bases without naming their goal, except to describe it in abstract terms like “social justice” and an “open society.” They do not commit themselves to specific institutional aims, whether it is the dictatorship of the proletariat or government ownership of the means of production. Instead, they focus on identifying their opponents as “Haves” and the “privileged,” and work to build a power base to undermine the existing arrangements based on private property and individual liberty, which lead to social inequalities. By refusing to commit to principles or to identify goals, they are better able to organize coalitions of the disaffected, which otherwise would be divided over the proper means to achieve their ends…
The demagogic banner of Alinsky’s revolution is “democracy”…But it is not democracy as Americans understand it. Instead it is a radical democracy in which earned hierarchies based on achievement and merit are targeted for destruction…
“[The] failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” Alinksy wrote. What he really meant was their honesty was disastrous—their failure to understand the art of mis-communication. This is the art he taught to radicals trying to impose socialism on a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom. Don’t sell it as socialism. Sell it as “progressivism,” economic democracy,” “fairness,” and “social justice.”
Obama, of course, not only worked in various Alinskyite organizations, but also taught Alinsky workshops, although he never met Alinsky himself. And it’s not as though these facts were unknown in 2008; they were well-known. It’s just their significance that either was not understood by enough people, or not cared about by enough people.
Also, in line with the trumped-up charges that the Tea Party is racist, see the following from Horowitz’s book. Here he is quoting a biography of Alinksy written by an admirer, Sanford Horwitt, entitled Let Them Call Me Rebel, in which Horwitt describes a group of students in the early 70s who were planning to go to a Tulane University speech given by George H.W. Bush (who was UN representative at the time). They asked Alinsky for advice on how to picket or otherwise protest the speech:
That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined—not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading, “The K.K.K. supports Bush.” And this is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results.
Alinsky did not of course invent this sort of ends-justifies-the-means moral inversion. But he preached and perfected it. The fact that Obama was always known to be an Alinskyite should have engendered a great deal more skepticism and loathing than it did. We are reaping the dubious rewards now.
Once the low-information voter has been indoctrinated, through academia and the MSM, into the memes and narrative of the left; into acceptance of the underlying false premises of “progressivism, economic democracy, fairness, and social justice”… The fact that Obama was always known to be an Alinskyite can and was dismissed as irrelevant.
In the mind-set of the average low-information American, that holds true for every criticism of Obama excepting outright criminality, which is why Benghazi, the IRS and Justice dept. scandals so threaten Obama and his administration.
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
O’Brien’s speech to Winston Smith, 1984
This is a main reason the Tea Party should be an activist popular movement first, and care about elected offices only second, or not at all.
The whole frame of the popular political environment is diseased by the Alinskyite left, dragging down popular political discourse on the whole spectrum and corrupting our political process. The Obama re-election against a demonstrably more competent candidate (Romney) shows that even presidential candidates can be elected – and reelected – to the highest offices for reasons other than competence. That’s dangerous.
Tea Party endorsed candidates can’t make a difference in government when the political process itself has become disconnected from the voting public holding the governors and lawgivers accountable for their actual governance.
I want the Tea Party to focus, organize, and concentrate their efforts on fixing the popular political environment first before aspiring to elected offices. In the long term, popular power for the Tea Party will give the Tea Party political power, anyway.
The infection, the cancer, the weeds of the Alinskyite left needs to be countered at the root. If the Tea Party isn’t the cure, then I don’t know what else we have for the job in present-day America.
Here’s a wedge issue that makes community organizing an effective tea party activity: school choice. Not only does that do something for Eric’s concern (fixing the popular political environment) it begins to create a new generation of high information voters.
When there is a crisis and the fixing of the crisis means using resources that normally are directed at normal operations, then you have just created a perpetuating cycle. Better to cut your losses and get control of the process. The process in this case, education, has been given to the Alinskyites thus producing the low information voters, can be husbanded back to families and, ironically, communities.
The implosion of the incompetent is coming and you can bet that the socialist progressives will demand Wilsonian wartime controls because of the urgency of the moment.
I respect Alinskyite tactics because I experienced them as a college activist in a campus campaign that was opposed by indoctrinated, even cultist, Alinskyite radical leftists.
Their stock in trade are strawmen, ad hominems, and shutting down opposing voices. Most of the flyers I spent many tiring hours taping and tacking up in college were torn down. Invitations to moderated debate were refused, mockingly.
For them, democracy doesn’t mean winning by merit for the greater good. Their democracy is adversarial, winning by force of the gang or the mob.
What I also learned in college is that the Dems, except for a few admirable exceptions, won’t help because they prioritize coalition cohesion and loyalty over principle and merit for the greater good. (Our cause should have been supported by the campus Dems.)
Worse, when you’re the challenger, they don’t need to win, they just need to undermine you in order for them to stay on top. After all, in case of a draw, the champion retains the title.
Which is why I emphasize that it is *not* enough for the GOP and the right to criticize Obama, the Dems, and the left. Because the GOP and the right are on the low ground right now, they need to rehabilitate Bush’s legacy, eg, by an Obama v Bush frame, offer a positive affirmative alternative to the people, and actively take the political high ground.
The Tea Party should be aggressively advancing the positive affirmative alternative to the people right now.
More than anything else, Alinskyite tactics remind me of ‘Mean Girls’ bullying tactics. They’re brutally effective, and men of honor and higher purpose, gentlemen (like Romney), are loath to go to ground to fight the fire.
But take heart. It can be done. In college, it took more than 1 generation of college students, but we eventually won our campus campaign. It was not in our nature to be activists, but we learned the activist game well enough to beat the Alinskyite leftists.
Right now, the right needs activists like Horowitz to lead the way in the ground fight against the Alinskyite left in the popular political arena. Instead of focusing on elected offices, the right needs the Tea Party movement to focus on winning the fight on the ground in the popular political arena.
sharpie: “When there is a crisis and the fixing of the crisis means using resources that normally are directed at normal operations, then you have just created a perpetuating cycle. Better to cut your losses and get control of the process.”
Yep. A common complaint here and elsewhere in the right’s commentariat is that the GOP is increasingly operating within the frame of the left.
Even opposition that’s based on the terms of the frame supports the current frame.
So advance a different frame and replace the current frame.
“Obama was always known to be an Alinskyite . . . . We are reaping the dubious rewards now.”
Thank God for that! At least the truth is rising to the surface now. Can anyone imagine the damage to this country if all of this had continued to be buried by the administration and the press while Obama politics went on as usual?
Rush is lambasting the Republican Club: “They’re so desperate to be loved by the people that aren’t voting for them.”
At the heart of Alinskyism and modern leftism generally is conflict theory sociology. Conflict theorists take the social status quo, whatever it is, and identify disaffected groups within it whom they organize and advance as a cause. It really doesn’t matter too much who the disaffected group is or why they’re disaffected, although if they’re members of a racial or ethnic minority it works most well. But they don’t have to be. And that’s why leftists end up supporting what would otherwise seem to be opprobrious characters and causes. It matters less who they are and what they stand for than their disaffected nature, and the mere promotion of them and their causes is unsettling and disruptive, which is the main point of it all. By this constant and ongoing social disruption conflict theorists seek to transform society by levelling it, group by group.
Paul in Boston: yes, I had originally included a quote from 1984 in the post, but I took it out as too long. The quote I chose was the one about power and the boot stomping on a face. The one you chose is actually more apropos.
Orwell is somewhat of an enigma. He so well understood what the left was about, particularly the Communist version. And yet he remained a socialist all his life. He seemed to have felt that socialism could avoid the problems inherent in leftism. I disagree.
The GOP establishment is still enmeshed within the Rockefeller gestalt that came to predominate in the 50’s, during the Eisenhower era.
The idiot-savants of the Republican establishment have not changed their innermost beliefs since they fell from power in the late 1920’s …save for the Reagan interlude (and to a lesser extent, the first Nixon administration), they are still more focused on getting along with their liberal dinner party social equals than with the Goldwater ne Tea Party base.
They need expunged from power …relegated to relatively obscure and powerless positions where they can self-congratulate themselves on their lack of contact with the hoi poloi, while still funding the work of the constitutionalists …yet still be able to exchange clever classist bon mots with their “superior” evening party friends as they all gaze with approval at each others non-soiled sparkling white gloves.
The GOP establishment need diminished – forever – to an historical abberation of the self-defeatists that their pathology demands of their politics.
…or the GOP needs subsumed in a resurgent Tea Party that is enabled – truly enabled – to utterly crushing the power of the entrenched bureacracies (populated by leftist group-think at every echelon), with conservatives wielding power.
The political landscape needs to become the Tea Party and the New Democrat party.
G Joubert,
Correct. Why their protests often cover a range of seemingly disparate causes. Also why they’ll energize disparate ‘anti-war’ arguments that seemingly contradict each other.
Their intent is to mass the force of opposition, not rhetorical congruence of principled stances. Their goal is dominance, not winning debates.
Robert Stacey McCain has a post today that, taken together with this post, made me remark about conflict theory sociology. Particularly, it was his discussion of when the whole teenage angst passage dealy was adopted by the left as a political cause and movement. Alinsky seems to have been a part of that too, or it’s traceable to him.
davisbr,
I disagree with you on the 1st part and agree with the 2nd.
The problem with the GOP is not their beliefs. Or if their beliefs are a problem, it’s a separate problem.
The GOP’s problem is their inability to grasp the game has changed, that the Dems have increasingly embraced Alinskyite political strategy after 2000, with a complete tip-over after the 2004 election.
Right now, the GOP’s positions and legislative agenda are a secondary concern to learning to win the game as it is, not what it used to be or ought to be.
It’s helpful to know that Karl Marx is officially credited with being the first conflict sociologist -the father of conflict sociology. And they’re proud of it too.
http://www.burtfolsom.com/?p=2513
This article by Burt Folsom “Which Vision for America Will Our New College Graduates Embrace?” prominently mentions Ted Cruz.
Who understands the particulars mentioned here.
I think the full “power” quote from Orwell’s 1984 is this:
G Joubert, with a nod to sharpie’s recommendation to choose a specific issue (school choice) to make a broader difference,
In order to counter conflict politics at its core, I recommend the GOP mount a dedicated campaign to support Asian American advocates fighting against anti-Asian practices in university admissions.
Related, I also recommend the GOP make a high-profile, cause celebre campaign against the NAACP LDF effort to replace the objective math/verbal/logic rank-ordered high school entrance exam, the SHSAT, for NYC specialized public schools with a subjective admissions process that favors black and Latino applicants. The schools are currently majority Asian.
Why the Asian American education cause?
Conflict politics are persuasive because the left claims that even if the system’s process is facially objective and neutral, rich whites will somehow game the system and hold down minority identities. That means the *only* chance for minority identities to prosper in America is to give their allegiance to the divisive, covetous, adversarial advocacy of the left. Think the tribal gang mentalities for survival in prisons or rough neighborhoods.
While the right champions neutral, objective standards.
Championing Asian American interests in the flashpoint issue of university admissions and HS entrance exams puts a minority face on the GOP and highlights that a neutral and objective society does work for minority identities. That minority identities are empowered Americans, not helpless victims that can only survive via gang allegiance. That the right’s stance of neutral, objective standards should be favored as the guiding principle for American society over the conflict politics of the left. That miniority identities should identify as Americans first.
Obama is not an Alinskyite. He is a viciois and wicked narcissist who thinks he can run people’s lives and amass power and glory to himself – a classic tyrant in other words. So is the Left as a corpaorate entity.
He and they use Alinskyite tactics.
If he were a mere ALinskyite, that would lessen the criticism of the man and distorts the truth of him. It would make it seems like he is just another political flavor or something.
He and the Left are not “some like it this way, some like it that way” flavors of politics.
They are vicious people (and I mean that in the strict sense of being full of vice).
Obama and the Left essentially despise normal and decent people. They keep them on for the taxes they give is about the extent of it.
Mike: I think you misunderstand what “Alinskyite” means, and underestimate the viciousness of Alinskyites. The term refers to methods and tactics more than anything (although it presumes a leftist point of view), and Obama most definitely and absolutely has studied Alinsky, taught Alinsky, practiced Alinsky, and uses it in the furtherance of leftist goals. That makes him an Alinskyite, a term which offers no protection at all, and is not “mere” anything.
Recall, by the way, that Alinksy dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to the “first radical, “Lucifer.
This is good news:
http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/terrorism/300491-issa-subpoenas-benghazi-auditor-pickering
I hope Issa gets his questions from Ted Cruz.
Ayers is another father mentor to the Obama King
So long as Democrats and Republicans took the Left lightly, started talking about bipartisan deals and “making things go along to get along”, they were underestimating the Left. They were taking it lightly. They were being naive.
Evil will not allow such naiveness to go unpunished.
So long as the Left, Ayers, and everyone in that enemy camp was seen by Americans as “political opponents” that had human rights, free speech, and a place amongst the social sphere, they were never going to do a single thing to destroy the Left’s power.
The Left would go on beyond the mere limitations of politics.
The Left is not evil because of Fast and Furious, Obama, Valerie, Alinsky, Ayers, abortion, PP for profit doctors, or anything else of that nature, scandalous or not. The Left is evil because it is evil. As a result of that evil, X, Y, Z, 1, 2 to a billion, happens. People’s logic isn’t at fault. Their hearts are. They do not feel hate towards evil. They do not feel the need to accept truth. They do not feel the need to fight against the Left’s evil. It’s easier to close one’s mind, come up with excuses, and use logic to pretend there are bipartisan and political “solutions”, when there has never been a “political solution” to evil.
Evil is evil not because of their politics, personality, or corrupt power. Their politics, personality, and corrupt power comes from the fact that they are evil.
So long as people were always distracted by the fact that the Left were A, B, C, and D, in politics and policies, they ignored the fundamental root of it all. They refused to connect the dots. They wrecked their hearts to be unable to feel hate towards evil so they Could Not connect the dots.
The Left is not evil because of scandals because the things Americans have suffered under the Left are less than 10% of what the Left has really been doing. The things they didn’t let you know about.
Hi, I’m a long time reader, first time commenter. Just thought I would share a pagan’s perspective on Alinskying.
I think it’s fun when flipped around.
This is my second in the style of the pious saint Saul the progressive.
My first was a confessional to “the holy office of the Inquisition the IRS.”
Is Barrak Hussein Orquemada’s IRS (figuratively) feeding Christian to the Lions?
American as a nation has what could be called a national “forum”. The Kennedy center. It however was never designed to witness the murder of ideological opponents of the regime holding power. So even if America kept a pride of man eating Lions (we do not) it would be well beyond the realm of possibilities to literally feed Christians to the Lions, we have no State mechanisms to make that work. But what if you’re really needing to feed Christians to lions. How would you go about it?
Could you figuratively feed Christians to the Lions in America today? If you’re careful, the answer seems to be yes.
read more http://kpr37.newsvine.com/_news/2013/05/17/18322735-is-barrack-hussein-orquemadas-irs-figuratively-feeding-christians-to-the-lions
I’m not a neo-con.
pagans, are Conservative. I take qoute one as “holy write” or word of the Logos (LOL)
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2936846.Tacitus
It was easy to ignore his background, if the only focus was his race.
As Harry Reid observed, Obama was “clean” and only spoke in Negro dialect (his words) when he wanted to.