Taking another look at Alinsky

Richard Porter is a Trump supporter from Illinois who attended the DeploraBall last weekend. He writes at Real Clear Politics about the experience of "protesters"

thuggishly blocking traffic, shouting epithets at strangers, and making thousands walk in the cold.

Perhaps it's time to refresh Saul Alinsky's middle-aged "Rules for Radicals" (now in its 46th year), which has instructed this and prior generations of radicals who want to "burn the system down!"

But upon pulling a dog-eared copy up on my smartphone, I discovered that Alinsky's cookbook for how to upend the establishment (setting aside the awful, outdated Marxism) is more timeless than I realized—and that today’s protesters might want to read it themselves.

“This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” Alinsky wrote in explaining why some tactics invariably turn off many more Americans than they inspire. “Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience—and give full respect to the other’s values —would have ruled out attacks on the American flag….”

"These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police ‘pig’ or ‘white fascist racist,’” he continued, “and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, ‘Oh, he's one of those,’ and then promptly turn off."

So there you have it: The anti-Trump crowd is so out-of-touch with the people and even their own principles for effective protesting that their efforts backfire and give aid and succor to their enemies. And, interestingly, the folks that seem to have best learned from Alinsky's instructions for how the powerless can seize power are Steve Bannon and others on the Trump team. Take the third of Alinsky’s rules: "Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat." Doesn’t that evoke Trump and Twitter?

Fourth rule: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." Think Trump and Bill Clinton.

Fifth rule: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage." Think Trump and everyone from Jeb Bush to CNN.

Sixth rule: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." We Deplorables get this -- the Trump campaign was fun. We embraced this absurd characterization of Americans who deplore a system in which a politicized and corrupt Justice Department gave Hillary Clinton a pass no other American would get and that protected the IRS as it abused groups that opposed the Obama administration. The chant "Lock her up! Lock her up!" was not the angry call of a mob, it was a gleeful catnip to a Clinton-loving media, which couldn't resist breathlessly reporting the chant, which then inadvertently served to highlight Obama's refusal to neutrally enforce the law, as well as Clinton's own profound corruption.

The seventh rule is a sage warning to Republicans: "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag." Republicans must move swiftly while we have momentum, for all too soon, as the ardor of the movement cools, Republicans will be judged on accomplishments and not tactics.

Read more here.

Trump understands Alinsky

Chicago was the breeding ground for the brilliant organizer named Saul Alinsky. At Chicago Boyz a blogger named Mrs. Davis asks, is Trump the Alinskyite radical in this election?

Look at Alinsky’s rules and recall how many of them have been observed by Trump thus far. Trump stopped the War on Women by applying Rules 2, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 12 to Hillary through Bill Clinton, with a big assist from Bill Cosby. He froze his 16 Republican competitors to the point where none of them could effectively respond to him.

Cruz is still my preference, but should Trump win the nomination he will give a master class to whom ever the Establishment grants the Democrat nomination in the tactics they have used to dominate the national debate for the last 30 years. And should Cruz prevail, he would do well to learn from Trump’s demonstration of Alinskyite tactics.

* RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
* RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
* RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
* RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
* RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
* RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
* RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
* RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

My one encounter with Saul Alinsky

I think it is time to write another post in defense of Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky was a hero of mine for a time in the 1960s. First, some background.

I came of age in the 1960s. Just as it was in 2008, change was in the air all throughout the 1960s. Young Americans wanted to be involved in changing things. Folk singers like Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan inspired us. The assassination of JFK rocked us. Some of us wanted to overcome against racial discrimination. Some of us wanted to stop communism. Some just wanted to give the middle finger to the establishment, smoke pot, have sex, and run to Canada to avoid the draft.

I was raised in a conservative Republican family whose hero was Dwight David Eisenhower. Growing up in Iowa my family had great respect for the farmers who grew things. I knew no blacks, but my hero was a black basketball player. Dwight Eisenhower brought to our attention the fact that there was discrimination against blacks. It was he, remember, who sent troops into Arkansas to make sure that black children could go to Little Rock High School.

I won an athletic scholarship to attend Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. It was a school operated by the Southern Baptist Convention. I had been raised in the Methodist church. My dad was an usher. It was a very conservative, somber place where we attended every Sunday. When I got to Texas, I started to attend Baptist churches. I was amazed at the joyous singing. People really seemed to love Jesus Christ and want to follow Him. I did, too. I was baptized and immersed myself in learning about the Bible and Jesus. I took Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, as my foreign language.

To be a follower of Christ is to be radicalized. You get a different set of values. You become interested in serving others. You know a joy that permeates your life. You see things that are wrong, and you want to change them. You ask questions. One of Saul Alinsky's trademark ideas is a question mark turned upside down into a plowshare that upends settled soil. Why are there no blacks in our churches, I asked. Why are there no blacks on the basketball team? Why are there separate drinking fountains?

I enrolled in Army ROTC and completed my first two years. When my mom found out I wanted to take the advance courses in my junior and senior years, she, unbeknownst to me, contacted our family pediatrician who had treated me for severe allergies as a child. He wrote a letter to the draft board, and I was classified 4F, making me ineligible for the draft. I continued on to graduate with a B.A. degree in psychology, with a minor in history. I was elected President of the Baptist Student Union and won an award at graduation as the outstanding male graduate.

My first job out of college was as a caseworker in a child welfare department. At night I would watch the national news on television. Two topics dominated the national news, Viet Nam, and Civil Rights. Although Walter Cronkite is remembered as America's anchorman, my favorites were Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. I particularly liked Brinkley's sense of humor. However, at coffee the next morning if I would mention something I saw the night before on the Huntley-Brinkley Report, my supervisors would caution me not to watch "Frontley-Pinkley." (Frontley stood for "Communist front", and Pinkley also stood for Communist).

Then, there was the stunning assassination of JFK in Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reported that some Texans actually celebrated. I wanted out. I made plans to go to graduate school at The University of Kansas, a nice kind of halfway point compromise between Iowa and Texas.

As I began my studies to earn a Masters degree in Social Work, I learned that in that profession there were three pathways of emphasis. One was working with individual clients as a kind of junior psychiatrist. Another was to work with groups of clients. A third was community organizing. I didn't see myself as a junior psychiatrist, so I gravitated toward the groupwork and community organizing pathways.

During my second year I had a field placement at an elementary school. The principal referred to me every student who was considered by him to be a behavior problem. Instead of working one-on-one with the students, I worked with them as a group, and also with their parents. We put on a play for the school on Abe Lincoln's birthday. The baddest, biggest, blackest kid in the school was Abe Lincoln. Later in the year, a girl in the group won the school spelling bee. None of the kids' parents had ever been involved with the school, but they did begin to get involved.

After earning my Master of Social Work degree, my first job was Director of a counseling center in the Kansas City, Kansas ghetto. The funding came from LBJ's War on Poverty. My office was located in a Lutheran Church, then later in a Catholic school. The civil rights movement was in full sway. While Martin Luther King led the movement in the South, Saul Alinsky did so in the North, from Rochester, New York to Chicago, to Kansas City, to California.

Martin Luther King was assassinated. The ghettoes erupted in violence. Non-violence gave way to Black Power. On the one year anniversary of King's assassination, my wife and I crossed the bridge over to Kansas City, Missouri to go out to dinner. A police car pulled us over. We waited for a long time for the officer to get out of his car. When he finally did, he informed me that he would have to take me to the jail and book me. I asked why? He said because I had accumulated a ton of parking tickets. I told him that was not true. Then I remembered: I had cosigned for a black teen to purchase a car. The car was in my name. The boy was the son of one of my workers at the counseling center.

This was the second and last time in my life I was booked into a jail. The first time was when one day in high school a kid named Mohammed Sadden had greeted me one morning and informed me that my girlfriend was a "slut." I swung at him and we scuffled for a while before agreeing to meet each other across the street on the lawn of the Lutheran Church after school. We did, along with most of the spectating student body, and the cops were called, after about 20 minutes of our brawl.

Back to Kansas City. After being booked into jail, I was put in a "bullpen," with about fifteen other guys. A cop brought in an inebriated black man, then wound up and punched the man as hard as he could right in the gut. I asked another officer if it was true that a person could get one phone call. He said yes. I called a Methodist minister who I knew was counseling Chief of Police Kelly on how to deal with groups like the Black Panthers. He called the Chief, I was released, and the cop who slugged the inebriated black man was fired a few days later.

The Methodist minister was one of a coalition of Christian ministers who had invited Saul Alinsky to come to Kansas City. One of the main reasons was to help the community deal with incidents of police brutality. Word got out about my experience witnessing police brutality, and the man himself, Saul Alinsky, wanted to meet me. I invited him to my house for dinner, spent a very enjoyable evening talking with him, and drove him back to his hotel.

Saul Alinsky was all about the least of these, the discriminated against, the ones Jesus wanted to reach. Alinsky was about empowering people, getting them to stand up for themselves. Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who studied Alinsky's tactics and used them to promote themselves and their own agendas, Alinsky was about empowering poor people. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have used Alinsky's tactics to make Republicans the enemy. Alinsky would come into a community, find out who was most hated, such as a Chief of Police, a Superintendent of Schools, a County Commissioner, and then purposely make himself the enemy of that hated person, thereby gaining the trust of the people he was trying to organize. Invariably, he was invited by coalitions of Christians; Catholics and protestants united, unlike Obama's promotion of ties with Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian mullahs. Alinsky died a few years after my one evening with him, and that was my last and only contact with him.

Often I read various conservative pundits writing about Alinsky. They make him out to be evil. He was not. He was a man who loved and stood with and for the least of these, the exploited and the discriminated against. Because Obama and Hillary studied his tactics and used them to promote their own rises to power, Alinsky is considered guilty by association. It isn't fair.

"A free and open society is the best way that we have"

Saul Alinsky in his own words: a supporter of the founders of this country. "Where mankind is achieving his own dignity, freedom, and equality. The founders realized the country's future rested in having as many people to act, be involved as citizens, as possible. Able to act = power. If we ever ran into a situation in this country where a large segment of our population was disenfranchised politically and economically, it would very likely become malignant and bring down the hopes for the future of this country."

Then, Alinsky's continued explanation of his beliefs gets edited out of this video. I wish I could see this whole program without it being cut and edited, as is obviously the case here.


Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Should Republicans urge people to vote out of ideologically pure motives, or out of their own self interest?

Jim Geraghty writes today that the Mississippi Republican primary was an example of Al Davis's "Just Win, Baby" strategy that the hated (in Colorado) Oakland Raiders employed for so many years. One candidate, Thad Cochran, ran on his record of bringing pork home to Mississippi, while the other candidate, Chris McDaniel, ran on cutting pork. Cochran won.

Proving once again what Saul Alinsky advocated: If you want to have a successful boycott, for example, choose to boycott something people rarely eat, like maraschino cherries. People act out of self interest, not out of ideological purity.

Geraghty wants people to vote out of ideologically pure conservative principles. Cochran, however, knows what has worked for him for six terms in Congress: bring home the bacon.