Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (10 page)

By contrast, the children of the 1960s had nothing comparable to live for. As far as they could see, the struggle against necessity no
longer existed. Nor did they appreciate what their parents went through; rather, they regarded their parents as soulless conformists who lacked true openness and idealism. The 1960s was motivated by repudiation of the old way and the quest for a new way. “Liberation” now came to mean liberation from old values—from the spirit of 1776. This took many shapes and forms—drugs, religious experimentation, sexual promiscuity, even bra-burning, as well as protesting, looting, and rioting. Perhaps most repulsive was the heartless ingratitude and even meanness that young people showed their parents. When frugal, hardworking, patriotic parents saw their teenage children giving them and all they held dear the finger, they saw, with a deep sadness, all that their hard work and savings had wrought. In the late 1960s, from the point of view of parents, America became a foreign country.

Yet by 1970 the movement had already lost its momentum, and by 1980 it was completely dead. America got out of Vietnam, women entered the workforce in record numbers, and the Civil Rights movement successfully enshrined equality of rights under the law. Americans had no more tolerance for hippies and bra-burning and riots and public sex. By the mid-1980s, the sit-ins and love-ins that had defined the 1960s themselves became archaic and incomprehensible. Michel Foucault was dead, and the gay bathhouses were closed. So what did the activists do? Many of them did what Bill Ayers did—they became teachers. Far from abandoning their ideology, they carried it with them into the school and college classroom.

As Ayers points out, teaching is for him simply activism by another name. During our Dartmouth debate, I asked Ayers whether he had given up trying, bin-Laden style, to bomb U.S. government buildings, and whether this meant he was no longer a revolutionary. Ayers answered that he was still a revolutionary, in the sense of seeking fundamental social transformation, but he had now figured out
a better way to achieve that goal, namely through the classroom. Comparing his old life as a terrorist with his new one as a professor, Bill Ayers writes, “Revolutionaries want to change the world, of course, and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world too.”
¹⁰

By withdrawing temporarily from the political sphere, the activists of the 1960s intended to consolidate their power by raising up a new generation—a generation that might be even more successful than they had been. A conservative era was coming—the election of Reagan made that clear—but perhaps out of the ashes, through the efforts of its committed followers, the spirit of 1968 might rise again.

CHAPTER 5

THE PLAN

We must first see the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be.
¹

S
AUL
A
LINSKY
,
R
ULES FOR
R
ADICALS

B
y the end of 1968, the spirit of the 1960s was politically dead. The radicals didn’t know it, but the country had turned against them. In California, the spiritual home of the 1960s, Ronald Reagan had been elected governor, and he would go on to win a second term. Reagan openly scorned the hippies, noting that they “looked like Tarzan, walked like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah.” When the radicals surrounded Reagan’s gubernatorial limousine, displaying signs saying “We are the future,” Reagan scribbled his response on a piece of paper and held it up to the glass: “I’ll sell my bonds.”
²
In 1972, four years later, the radicals would nominate one of their heroes, George McGovern, as the Democratic candidate for president, but he would go down to resounding defeat by Richard Nixon, who ran on an anti-Soviet, law-and-order platform. The Democrats were dubbed the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
Watergate would give the Democrats an unexpected reprieve, but even that would prove short-lived, and in 1980 Reagan would win the presidency, and govern for two terms, ushering the United States into a new epoch of conservatism that would last a quarter of a century.

If the radicalism of the 1960s were to be revived, in any form whatsoever, it would take new leadership. Even before such leadership emerged, there would need to be a strategy to bring the carcass back to life. Strategies require a strategist, and such a strategist would have to be a man of uncommon perception. Such a man would have to fully face the debris of the 1960s—the world as it is—without fog or illusion. At the same time he would retain the dream of the 1960s—the world as he felt it ought to be—and work to close the gap between current reality and future possibility. Without sentimentalism, he would have to repudiate the failed approaches of the 1960s, preserving the ideals and the agenda, but introducing new techniques that could work in a new era. Such a man would have to be tough, wily, even deceptive, both an idealist and Machiavellian. Even more, he would have to be patient, so that his approach could be implemented when the time was right. Quite likely he would not even live to see his schemes come to fruition, but with time he might produce converts who would use his strategies to carry their shared ideals to the highest corridors of power. Such a man, if he existed, would be the last hope of the 1960s. In Chicago, there was such a man.

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. He attended the University of Chicago, where he got a degree in archaeology. During the Great Depression, however, he saw that “archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies.” He studied criminology in graduate school and then became a labor organizer, working in the slums of Chicago.
He created the Industrial Areas Foundation and a network of activist organizations that soon expanded to other cities. Eventually he shifted his emphasis from labor organizing to organizing poor people and teaching them how to extract political and economic benefits from the government. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Alinsky developed a comprehensive strategy for social transformation. He did this partly in response to Richard Nixon’s attempts to woo the middle class—the “silent majority,” as Nixon called it. While he championed the poor and the underdogs, Alinsky himself enjoyed the good life. He liked good food, good wine, good cigars, and golf. One of his favorite places was Carmel, California, where he died of a heart attack in 1972.

Alinsky was a paradoxical figure. A labor organizer, he also hung out with clergymen, mafia leaders, and corporate tycoons. Jewish by birth, and atheist by conviction, he worked closely with Catholic bishops and Protestant pastors. A reflexive patriot, he nevertheless hated much about America and sought to replace the country he lived in with a different kind of country that he could unreservedly love. Modest in style, Alinsky was arrogant about what he could achieve. “I feel confident,” he once said, “that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution on Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.”
³
Alinsky was an architect of revolution, a revolution that sought to undo the Reagan revolution, and even the American Revolution.

To do that he needed leaders, and over the years he inspired and tutored many influential writers and activists. One was Cesar Chavez, head of the United Farm Workers; another was the scholar and activist Armando Navarro, one of the champions of a separate homeland for Mexican Americans. A third was the former student-activist Tom Hayden, who along with his then-wife Jane Fonda
organized anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Hayden want to Hanoi in 1965 to meet with North Vietnamese leaders. So did Staughton Lynd, another Alinsky acolyte who was active in socialist agitation and demonstrations against U.S. foreign policy. This roster is impressive enough, but it leaves out Alinsky’s two most influential disciples. Rarely has a man been more fortunate in his students. Alinsky found two individuals, a man and a woman, who more than three decades after his death, might actually realize his goal of replacing the America that is with the America that Alinsky believed ought to be.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Barack Obama, a native of Hawaii, with his roots in Kenya and Indonesia, kept going to Chicago to find jobs as an activist and community organizer. Although Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, and courted by high-paying law firms, he chose to take a low-paid job in Chicago. There he built his political career, first as a community agitator, then as a state representative, then as a senator from Illinois, before he ran for president. In an interview for my
America
film, I asked the social scientist Stanley Kurtz, who has studied Obama closely, why Obama, who had no roots in Chicago, kept returning there. Kurtz responded that Obama made Chicago his new home because he became an Alinskyite, and he wanted to master the techniques of Alinsky. I knew of course that Obama’s first job in Chicago was working for the Alinsky network; there is a picture on the web of Obama teaching Alinsky’s techniques to fellow community activists. Kurtz, however, has documented a deeper connection between Obama and Alinsky. He discovered that Obama during the mid-1990s even joined a radical political party called the New Party that had been founded by the Alinsky spinoff organization Acorn.
⁴
Yet this has received very little press coverage, in the manner that all information damaging to Obama receives very little press coverage. Obama himself suppresses
his debt to Alinsky, saying nothing about it in his autobiography
Dreams from My Father
.

As I have argued earlier—and as Obama’s own autobiography confirms—Obama got his dreams from his father, but the story doesn’t end there. While Obama’s anti-colonialist dreams may have originated in Barack Obama Sr.’s experience in Kenya, they were reinforced in young Obama’s life through his experiences in Hawaii and the years he spent growing up in Indonesia. Then, young Obama learned chapter and verse of the anti-colonial ideology in New York at Columbia, in Boston at Harvard, and in Chicago through various Alinsky organizations. Obama learned from Alinsky how to convert radical ideology into political power, in other words, how to win and retain high office. Obama was such a good student that he became a teacher of Alinsky techniques, and ultimately he used those techniques to carry himself to the White House, and to win a second term. Describing Alinsky’s influence on Obama, Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt said in an NPR interview, “Barack Obama is in the White House because he really learned a lesson on the streets of Chicago.”
⁵

Now, by a kind of arrangement, Obama intends to hand over the baton of leadership to his fellow Alinskyite, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was a Goldwater girl in the early 1960s. She became radicalized in high school by a teacher who introduced her to a Methodist magazine that promoted leftist causes from economic redistribution to gay rights. By the time Hillary entered Wellesley College in 1965, she was a committed leftist. Yet she was smart enough to realize that the tactics of the 1960s were juvenile. They were the tactics of people outside the tent, peering in. Hillary wanted to be inside the tent, peering out. She had met Saul Alinsky in high school, but she renewed her association with him in college, inviting him to speak at Wellesley, and writing her undergraduate thesis on him. Hillary
viewed Alinsky as a theorist of power—able to take radical ideas mainstream. Interestingly when Hillary became first lady, Wellesley removed her thesis from public circulation. One of her professors got a call from the White House, requesting this, and Wellesley responded by adopting a rule that the senior thesis of any president or first lady should not be publicly available. The rule of course applied to a single case, that of Hillary.

When Hillary graduated, she was offered a job by Alinsky. She refused, and decided instead to go to law school. In her book
Living History
, Clinton portrays her decision as arising out of a “fundamental disagreement” with Alinsky. In Clinton’s words, “He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t.”
⁶
Hillary wanted to complete her education and get the best credentials she could to get into the mainstream institutions of power.

Initially, Hillary’s trail was not one of feminist trail-blazing. She did a brief stint as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the Watergate investigation, but that seems to have ended when her over-zealous tactics resulted in her ouster. She then married Bill and followed him to Arkansas, where he was later elected governor. When Bill was elected president in 1992, she accompanied him to the White House. She endured Bill’s lecheries and backed him, with admirable stoicism, through the impeachment attempt. Since Bill’s presidency, she has forged an independent identity, first as senator and then as secretary of state, qualifying her to become a formidable candidate for the White House in 2016. If that happens, Hillary the Alinskyite will have succeeded Obama the Alinskyite, and Alinsky will be, at least in part, responsible for the election of two American presidents in a row.

The Alinsky train really got rolling in 2008 when the Democratic nomination was contested by two Alinskyites, the man who wanted to be the first African American president and the presidential wife
who wanted to be the first woman president. Ultimately the black Alinskyite beat the female Alinskyite, in part because in America the politics of race trumps the politics of sex.

Some Americans think that if they elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 they are also going to get Bill. We occasionally hear of how nice it would be to get back “Billary.” Even some conservatives relish the prospect, because, they say, Obama doesn’t have a clue and Bill is smart. Yet here is the case where Obama and Hillary—not Bill—may get the last laugh. Bill of course is a White House addict and he desperately wants to hang around the Oval Office, hobnob with foreign leaders at State Dinners, and issue White House pontifications. The only way for him to do this is to help get his wife elected.