chefdennis
Veteran Expediter
and his basis for his marxist / socialistis ideas and plans for our country...
September 2010
“Organized” crime
by Andrew C. McCarthy
“Organized†crime by Andrew C. McCarthy - The New Criterion
On the President's favorite philosopher, Saul Alinsky.
Finish reading this article on the next post...
September 2010
“Organized” crime
by Andrew C. McCarthy
“Organized†crime by Andrew C. McCarthy - The New Criterion
On the President's favorite philosopher, Saul Alinsky.
It is a matter of no small amusement for the journalist and agitator Nicholas von Hoffman that his beloved mentor, Saul Alinsky, learned the craft of “organizing” at the feet of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters. This was nearly eighty years before the self-proclaimed radical became a household name, having posthumously inspired an up-and-coming organizer who went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Alinsky’s entrée to the Al Capone gang (which, tellingly, he called a “public utility”) was neither his ruthlessness nor his penchant for rabble-rousing, though a surfeit of both qualities surely impressed his friend Frank (“the Enforcer”) Nitti. It was, instead, his academic credentials.
A freshly minted doctor of criminology from the University of Chicago, Alinsky sought out, bonded with, and closely studied anti-social types. His experience proved invaluable in his lifelong pursuit of “social justice,” the organizer’s panacea. Alinsky even found a Depression-era job at Joliet’s hard-knocks penitentiary, assessing the suitability of inmates for parole. Not every crook had the panache of the Enforcer, and the work soon bored Alinsky, whose promiscuous mind was easily given to boredom. Yet there was an oasis in this desert: the evaluation of an occasional con man. In an unintentionally hilarious vignette, von Hoffman relates that “one of the flim-flam men initiated Alinsky into the secrets of his trade.” We’re never told to which “his” the trade-secrets in question belonged—the flim-flammer or the organizer. It turns out not to matter. They’re both frauds.
Fraud is, in fact, the leitmotif of Radical, von Hoffman’s adoring portrait of Alinsky.[1] This oughtn’t be taken the wrong way: Radical is an enjoyable, sometimes even an endearing, read. Von Hoffman is an engaging writer, especially during the stretches when he manages to rein in his seething disdain for “teabaggers,” “the rich,” and other Americans who actually like America. There was a self-conscious coldness about Alinsky, who urged disciples to nurture what von Hoffman describes as the “cold anger that fosters calculated and measured action.” This “Alinsky aesthetic” held social workers and other idealistic progressives in nearly as low esteem as smug capitalists. It lauded the good sense of Saint Paul (a model organizer in the agnostic Alinsky’s eyes), for leaving “the poor to Jesus while he went after people with at least a little substance.” It’s a stripe of bloodless cynicism that will ring a bell for those who’ve closely watched the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Yet von Hoffman’s admiration for his subject illuminates the fire that burned within this “picador in the political corrida,” whose “irreverence was his banderilla.”
No, fraud is not a reason to take a pass on Radical but a cause to read it and be astonished. Even here, in this most affectionate of depictions, there can be no camouflaging that an “organizer” is a fraud through and through—in his tactics, in his motives, and in his carefully crafted self-image.
Take the organizer’s underlying premise: he presents himself as a builder of “small-d democracy.” “Democracy” is a codeword. To the unwary, it is drained of meaning, vaguely connoting a benign call to freedom and self-government. But for the revolutionary—and that’s what Alinsky’s radical is about, revolution—a democrat is the heroic Jacobin pitted in a fight to the finish against the evil, moneyed, ruling aristocrat. Life in America is a Manichean war in which the democrat inhabits the side of the angels.
Angels matter, by the way. Alinsky began Rules for Radicals—which was originally to be called Rules for the Revolution—with an “over the shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer as the “very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” Inconvenient, and thus glossed over by Alinsky and von Hoffman, is the minor detail that the kingdom “won” by the fallen angel was . . . hell—a trenchant observation from the former radical turned patriot, David Horowitz, who acidly adds, “Typical of radicals not to notice the ruin they have left behind.”
Ruin indeed, for neither is the organizer the “builder” he purports to be. Unless, of course, we mean “build” in the sense that an army munitions squadron builds bombs. The organizer comes not to build but to destroy. Oh, he talks a noble game. After all, the rules preach that the revolution is all about communication: “social justice,” “racial justice,” “economic justice,” “equality,” “living wages,” “sustainable development,” and so on. These, though, are abstractions, and Alinsky admonished acolytes from von Hoffman to Hillary Rodham to Barack Obama that abstractions don’t get people motivated, marching, and moving. The revolution is about razing, not raising. It is not defined by what it is for. It is nihilism, defined only by what it abhors: the “establishment,” the “system,” in essence, the Haves.
Alinsky studied Machiavelli and produced what he saw as the antithesis of The Prince. The former, he posited, “was written for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” What they might do when they get it is not explained. Alinsky radicals do not know what they want, except that it will be “Change,” and it will be perfect. Contrasted to this utopia, no real human society, no matter how decent, stands a chance. It has to be destroyed.
Alinsky also stole voraciously from Marx. The contention that he did no such thing, that he was no Marxist, is another example of the organizer’s pose—designed by the master and played to pitch-perfection by the student, Obama. The feint is that Marxism is dogma, whereas the organizer rejects all dogma. Unmoored from rigid principles of any kind, he is merely engaged, we are to understand, in “a pragmatic attack on the system”—a non-ideological quest to give voice to the voiceless. Von Hoffman thus scoffs at conservatives who have purportedly imagined Marx into Rules.
The organizer is a man of action, not theory, the story goes. Consequently, von Hoffman is at pains to recount Alinsky’s derision of the unabashed communist Bill Ayers. The Weather Underground leader was the “archetypal example of petulant ego decision-making,” whose “comic-book leftism” led to the “Rumpelstiltskin politics” of terrorism—albeit, von Hotffman snarks, “without the Taliban’s skill with explosives.” “Communists,” von Hoffman maintains, were “a thorny problem” for Alinsky, and one he was willing to solve remorselessly. The trade-union trailblazer John Llewellyn Lewis (revered by the organizer as “the old Napoleonic master of power and strategy: cold, ruthless, ingenious”) even called on Alinsky, his protégé, to extract Communists from the Congress of Industrial Organizations—a confidence von Hoffman (not very) reluctantly betrays, despite having promised not to, the better to limn the Enforcer-like Alinsky, giving those rascally Reds “the choice
of leaving town or finding themselves in an ‘ash can.’”
It’s all a fable, though, just as when Obama brays, “How dare you call me a socialist!” all the while directing attention away from Van Jones behind the curtain. The organizer is not a freelancing pragmatist. He is pragmatic only within the self-imposed, carefully unstated confines of an immovable framework: the Marxist schema of society as a class struggle. Until the Have-Nots overcome the Haves (the endgame of “change”), there is no justice.
Alinsky’s implacable premise is that the “setting for the drama of change has never varied. Mankind has been and is divided into the Haves, the Have-Nots, and Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” As Horowitz explains in a new and essential pamphlet, “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution—the Alinsky Model,” this is virtually unfiltered Marx. Thus does the Communist Manifesto open, proclaiming that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,” locked in a permanent clash that ends, inevitably, “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Even Alinsky’s nod to Lucifer finds roots in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in which, Horowitz notes, Marx invoked Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
The salient difference is that Alinskyites don’t talk about the endgame. There is no discussion of a proletarian dictatorship on the road to universal classlessness. That would just turn people off, and the organizer’s task is to turn people on. Telling them where you want to take them would be counterproductive. The idea is to make where they are repugnant to them: “They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.” And as the Have-Nots have not, the common ruin of the contending classes—the utter destruction of the existing order, the pillage of the Haves (by, say, putting them on the hook for an inconceivable $20 trillion or so in national debt)—is social justice.
No one was more dogmatic than Alinsky in diagnosing the capitalist establishment as incorrigibly racist, rapacious, and corrupting, or in the conviction that revolution is the only cure. These core conceits drove his life’s work—that’s what he called it, “the work.” And without these principles, the Alinsky organizer, the Herald of Change, has no purpose. A builder seeks harmony; the organizer sows discord and makes no apologies for it. An organizer, von Hoffman avers, is “an agitator.” If he can’t agitate, he withdraws. Absent a rabble to rouse, Alinsky saw no point in proceeding. “When you have unanimity before the fact, before people are organized,” von Hoffman expounds, “there could be no change, no reform, no progress. Unanimity is for after the struggle has been waged.” (In grand Alinsky style, the preceding is offered as this Boswell’s refutation of claims that his Dr. Johnson was “wedded to divisiveness.”)
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