Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (11 page)

To this end, Bill put aside his reservations about Obama. Bill has long regarded Obama as a lightweight unworthy of the Democratic presidential mantle. In 2008, he told Senator Ted Kennedy that Obama’s only credential was that he was black and that “a few years ago this guy would be getting us coffee.”
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There is no evidence that Clinton has fundamentally changed his perspective. Even so, he campaigned assiduously for Obama’s reelection. Why? To ensure that Obama would repay the favor, and four years later, when he could not run again, permit Hillary (rather than Joe Biden or someone else) to be his replacement. What Bill doesn’t seem to realize is that Hillary has her own agenda. While Bill wants the fun of being back in the White House, and being listened to again, Barack and Hillary want to implement the plan that Alinsky devised for progressives to retain power and change America.

As a young man Alinsky saw the hardships of the Great Depression. He saw what he regarded as the failure of capitalism, and even more the injustice of capitalism. Many Americans saw their savings evaporate and their jobs disappear. As a labor organizer, he set up “people’s organizations” in industrial slums, mostly in immigrant
communities in Chicago. Alinsky became a socialist. He confessed his socialist convictions in his 1946 book
Reveille for Radicals
. Alinsky wrote that radicals like himself “want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism… . They hope for a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people.”
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Alinsky’s real influence, however, has less to do with his ideology than with his tactics. He developed what he called a “science of revolution,” which is fully articulated in his second book,
Rules for Radicals
. This book was not published until 1971, a year before Alinsky’s death, although Alinsky had been putting its teachings into effect much earlier. By the time the 1960s came along, Alinsky was a middle-aged man. He was not exactly a creature of the 1960s. He supported the Civil Rights movement, but he was not closely involved with it. He opposed the Vietnam War, but that wasn’t the cause that drove him. He was sympathetic to the attempts of the 1960s radicals to break down traditional codes of morality, but at the same time he regarded the radicals as soft, ignorant, undisciplined, and ineffective—a “herd of independent thinkers” desperately in need of a better plan of action. The 1960s activists regarded themselves, not Alinsky, as the vanguard of revolutionary thinking, but as their organizations fell apart and their tactics failed, many of them turned to him for guidance.

Rules for Radicals
was informed by Alinsky’s close engagement with student radicalism, including the activists of Students for a Democratic Society and Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground. Alinsky scorned the Weather Underground as representing “comic book leftism” which achieved nothing and then turned to violence. Alinsky argued that violent revolution was a chimera, and that what could be achieved in America was “orderly revolution.” Orderly revolution requires getting the consent of organized groups and the power brokers of society. Alinsky was not impressed by the SDS either,
regarding it as a group of naive middle-class students playing at being revolutionaries. He spurned their foot-stomping political “tantrums,” dubbing them practitioners of “Rumpelstiltskin politics.”
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Bottom line: all these people were ineffective and didn’t know how to bring about real change.

Alinsky argued that there are two kinds of radicals. He contrasted what he termed the “rhetorical radical” from the “radical realist.” Rhetorical radicals like to talk. Anger is their touchstone of virtue. They are bombastic with their Marxist or Leninist slogans. Yet they don’t get much done. Alinsky wrote, “I have learned to freeze my hot anger into cool anger.” Cool anger is based on deliberation and experience, both of which “have made my actions far more calculated, deliberate, directive and effective.” Alinsky realized that changing social systems is hard, and that radicals need patience and discipline—a kind of Puritan sensibility.

Alinsky began by recognizing who the radicals were. Despite their histrionic self-descriptions as victims, these were not underprivileged working people or downtrodden minorities—they were educated members of the middle class. “With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society.” Alinsky agreed with the goals of the radicals—to destroy middle-class values. “All rebels must attack the power states in their society. Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, warmongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right.” At the same time, Alinsky disagreed with the strategy of the 1960s radicals. They habitually called the cops “pigs” and working people “racist” and traditional values “square.” Alinsky pointed out, “We must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change. The power and the people are in the big middle-class majority. Therefore, it is useless self-indulgence
for an activist to put his past behind him. Instead he should use the priceless value of his middle-class experience… . Instead of the infantile dramatics of rejection, he will now begin to dissect and examine the way of life as he never has before. He will know that a ‘square’ is no longer to be dismissed as such—instead, his own approach must be ‘square’ enough to get the action started… . Instead of hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of communication and unity… . He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.”
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The central problem is that middle-class people typically don’t want to be radicalized. They don’t want to undermine their country. They are patriots who would rather win wars than lose them. They don’t consider the people fighting on the other side to be the good guys. They like capitalism, and just want to succeed within the system. They believe in law and order, and support the police to maintain it. They are not fans of public sex or public defecation, in the manner of the most exhibitionistic hippies. They espouse traditional values, even though they don’t always live up to them. Alinsky realized that the task of the radical is to turn middle-class people against themselves, to make them instruments of their own destruction. This would not be easy.

So how did Alinsky figure out a winning strategy? He says he got it from the philosopher Machiavelli, author of
The Prince
. Alinsky wrote, “
The Prince
was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power.
Rules for Radicals
is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” Yet I was startled to see that, with the exception of a few maxims of realpolitik,
Rules for Radicals
actually draws very little from Machiavelli. I began to wonder if Alinsky’s invocation of Machiavelli was a diversion. If so that would be a very Machiavellian
thing to do. I began to flip randomly through Alinsky’s book in frustration when I came upon the dedication page. There I read perhaps the most unusual dedication in the history of American publishing.

Most books are dedicated to loved ones—family and friends—or to influential mentors. Alinsky, interestingly enough, dedicates his book to the devil. This is not a joke:
Rules for Radicals
is actually dedicated to Lucifer. Alinsky calls him “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” Now this is remarkable in itself, and yet it has attracted very little attention. Progressives who learn about it are initially surprised, and then tend to dismiss the dedication with a roll of the eyes and a weary “Oh brother.” This, however, is intellectually uncurious. Alinsky was serious about his choice. In fact, he returned to the same theme in a
Playboy
interview he did in 1972. In it he said, “If there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.” When the interviewer asked why, Alinsky said, “Hell would be heaven for me. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there. They’re my kind of people.”
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Back to the Lucifer dedication: Now why would Alinsky do this? The man was an atheist, so he didn’t believe in an actual Satan. Yet Alinsky calls him the “first radical.” Clearly a radical writing books called
Reveille for Radicals
and
Rules for Radicals
would have a lot to learn from the original radical. I turned for inspiration to Stanley Fish, one of the world’s leading Milton scholars, whom I interviewed on the subject of Lucifer as he is portrayed in
Paradise Lost
and, more broadly, in the Western tradition. I asked Fish to elaborate on Lucifer’s strategy against God.

Fish outlined a four-part strategy. First, polarization. Satan is deeply alienated from God. He doesn’t seek to mend fences; he polarizes. He issues a declaration of war against God. As Milton’s Satan
puts it, “War then, war open or understood, must be resolved.” Second—and this is rather ironic, coming from Lucifer—demonization. Incredible though it seems, Satan demonizes God. How? By making God into a tyrant, the symbol of “the establishment.” This makes Satan into a champion of resistance, of counterculture. He claims to be combating what he terms “the tyranny of heaven.” Third, organization. Satan is a mobilizer of envy; he draws on the very quality that motivated the bad angels to rebel in the first place. For Satan, envy against God is a great motivator, and he appeals to that envy among the other discontented angels. What’s Satan’s strategy for doing that? Satan is a community organizer. We see him in the early books of
Paradise Lost
building coalitions among the rebel angels, and motivating them to join him in a nefarious campaign against God and God’s special creation man. It is a project undertaken, as he puts it, “to spite the great creator.”

Finally, deception, or what Satan calls “covert guile.” Satan knows he cannot defeat God by force; he has to rely on deceit and cunning. From the moment he approaches Eve in the garden, he relies on camouflage. He doesn’t come as Satan; he comes as a wily serpent. And his rhetoric is serpentine: he tries to make Eve think he is on her side, even though he intends her destruction. Satan doesn’t feel bad about these deceptions because he has already rejected God’s moral order; consequently, he isn’t bound by moral rules. “Evil, be thou my good.” Remote though these ideas may seem from contemporary politics, we will see how Alinsky made full use of them. In fact, they are the cornerstone of the Alinsky strategy. Martin Luther King had a dream; Alinsky developed a scheme, and he got it from Lucifer.

One can see Lucifer’s influence in Alinsky’s contention that “ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.” Alinsky wrote that morality and ethics were fine for those who didn’t seek to improve the world for the better. But for those who do, the ends
always justify the means. “In action,” Alinsky wrote, “one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter.” This is not to say that Alinsky eschewed appeals to conscience and morality. He used them, but only when they proved strategically effective. Morality for Alinsky is a cloak that the activist puts on when it suits him or her. One of Alinsky’s ethical rules was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments.”
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When the 1960s activists came to see Alinsky—with their long hair and unkempt clothing and bad odor—here’s what he told them. You can be freaks, but you should not come across as freaks. You can be revolutionaries, but you should not look or act or smell like revolutionaries. Take baths. Use deodorant. Cut your hair. Put on ties and dresses if you have to. Don’t use obscenities. Don’t call the police “pigs” and U.S. soldiers “fascists.” Feign an interest in middle-class tastes; in other words, pretend to be like the people you hate. Speak their language, even to the extent of using local colloquialism or slang. Meanwhile, work creatively and even unscrupulously to build these people’s resentment against the big corporations and the military and the power structure. Don’t hesitate to tell lies, but make sure they can’t be easily found out. Create a sense of entitlement by making promises that cannot be delivered and then use the resulting frustration as a weapon to mobilize the people into action. This strategy can be summarized as: polarization, demonization, organization, and deception. In other words, the Lucifer strategy. In these ways, Alinsky said, the power of the white middle-class majority can be harnessed even to undermine the values and interests of the white middle-class majority.

Most of the radicals didn’t listen to Alinsky. And even today we see the Occupy Wall Street types, just as disheveled and dirtball as their predecessors in the 1960s, taking over parks and cursing the
system. One radical, however, who recognized the value of Alinsky’s counsel to look good and even “square” was Hillary Clinton. It took her several years to internalize this advice and transform her own appearance. If you see early pictures and video of Hillary, she looks and sounds like a former hippie. Over time, however, Hillary started dressing like a respectable middle-class mother and speaking in a clipped, moderate sounding voice. Young Barack Obama, too, looked like a bit of a street thug—in his own words, he could have been Trayvon Martin. Over time, however, Obama started dressing impeccably and even practiced modulating his voice. “The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster voice—there’s no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences,” he admits. “And there’s no doubt that when I’m with a black audience, I slip into a slightly different dialect.”
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