Have we come full circle? In defense of Saul Alinsky: Part Two

Are we on the verge of a revolution in America? I don't know, but there is surely a great amount of discontent, and masses of people are stirring to protest too much government control. Where can we find literature to guide those who wish to stand up against too much government power and control? Saul Alinsky notes in Rules for Radicals that "Once the American Revolution was done with we can find very little (literature) besides the right of revolution that is laid down in the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental right." Then Alinsky points us to this from Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural: "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

Saul Alinsky was one of the few who studied this question and came up with action plans. While reading Alinsky, I am also reading W. Cleon Skousen's wonderful book
The 5000 Year Leap: Principles of Freedom 101. Skousen points out that we should not get hung up on right versus left, since both extremes lead to tyranny. Alinsky, too, was not fond of ideology: "I know that all revolutions must have ideology 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."

So, Alinsky focuses on training organizers working in and for an open society. What is the ideology of the organizer? The question mark! Alinsky writes, "Some say it's no coincidence that the question mark is an inverted plow, breaking up the hard soil of beliefs, and preparing for the new growth." The organizer's most frequent word is "why?" Does that mean the organizer is rudderless, asks Alinsky? No, because the organizer is "free from the shackles of dogma. 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...Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic politicial tradition. Democracy is not an end, but the best means toward achieving those values."