Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (22 page)

In 1977, Hillary wrote an essay titled “Children’s Rights: A Legal Perspective” which was published in a book titled
Children’s Rights
. Here she made the startling claim that even for minors, “Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child’s future should not be made unilaterally by parents.” So who should make them? Hillary’s answer is: state-run institutions can do so, supposedly taking into account the welfare of the children who are affected by those decisions.
²¹

That same year, Hillary was recruited by Marian Wright Edelman to work with the Carnegie Council on Children to prepare a book-length report. This report,
All Our Children
, recommends that “child ombudsmen” be installed in public institutions and some type of insurance be provided for children to hire their own attorneys to represent their interests not only against their parents but also against private corporations. For example, children could file class action lawsuits against companies for future damages their goods and services might cause.

In the words of the report, “The critical point is to expand our concept of children’s protective services. Child protection should go far beyond the traditional model of social workers looking for neglected or
poorly-fed children to embrace a federal children’s consumer and environmental watchdog agency that screens the practices of private industry and government alike for their effects on children. In the long run, nuclear power, disruption of the ozone layer, chemical additives, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and industrial pollution may well represent more pressing legal problems for whole generations of children than a relatively small number of neglectful or abusive parents.”
²²

Notice how little attention Hillary and her collaborators devote to the actual developmental needs of children. Instead, they use children and their welfare—as interpreted by ombudsmen and child advocates—to justify a massive progressive expansion of power.

In a sense, progressives become the child’s ventriloquist. Children’s entitlements serve as a pretext for progressives to gain control over a whole range of industries. These industries are subject to regulation because their products supposedly endanger children, even though no one—neither child nor adult—is compelled to buy or use any of these products.

Hillary’s scholarly output on the subject of children—from her
Harvard Educational Review
article to
All Our Children
—reflects a totalitarian conception of the relationship of children to the state. Her whole literature is quite literally fascist in tone and content. If we translated it into German, put a German author name on it, and dated it to the 1930s, scholars would have difficulty separating it from the Hitler youth propaganda generated by the Nazis. Interestingly Hillary has never repeated these views since their original publication, but neither has she ever repudiated her creepy conclusions.

A HARD SELL

In the 1930s, however, totalitarianism of the type that Hitler and Mussolini represented was a hard sell in the United States. In Italy, Mussolini could get away with it because he presented himself as a necessary alternative to Italian political chaos and anarchy. In Germany there was an autocratic tradition going back to Bismarck that made progressive centralization more palatable in that country.

In America, however, FDR had to build for the first time a coalition that would support a stronger federal government—a greater centralization of power—than had ever been seen before in American history. How to do this?

Mussolini supplied the answer. Mussolini gave fiery speeches promising the Italians “rights.” They had a right to this, and a right to that. In a way, Hitler also promised rights—the right to
lebensraum
or greater living space—but his list wasn’t as expansive as Mussolini’s. Mussolini of course didn’t provide these rights; he didn’t have the resources, and it’s not even clear he intended to. But he won applause for placing himself on the side of these promises. They became
entitlements
—you had a right to them even if the government didn’t actually provide them.

FDR alerted his brain trust to check out Mussolini’s implementation of fascism. He dispatched members of his staff to Italy to study fascist administrative methods. One of his leading advisers, Rexford Tugwell, found Italian fascism to be “the cleanest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” This was pretty much in line with FDR’s own assessment of Mussolini, whose methods FDR found “admirable.” FDR was “deeply impressed with what he has accomplished.”

The admiration between FDR and Mussolini was mutual. Mussolini reviewed FDR’s 1933 book
Looking Forward
for an Italian publication. He loved it. Mussolini had special praise for Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, which was formed to enforce production and price controls on American industry. Basically Mussolini decided that FDR was a fascist in the same mode as he was. The methods of the New Deal, Mussolini said, “resemble those of fascism.” Mussolini concluded of FDR, hey, this guy is one of us!

FDR, of course, never described himself as a fascist. Drawing on Mussolini’s ideas, however, FDR sought to develop an American version of the things that he admired most in Italian fascism. The consequence of these reflections was FDR’s famous “second Bill of Rights.” The basic idea is that people have a right to food, a right to education, a right to a job, a right to a home or place to live, a right to health care, a right to provision
for retirement, even what FDR called a right not to be fearful. Americans, being Americans, are entitled to these things.

Now admittedly earlier generations of Americans would have found this concept incomprehensible. What does it mean to have such rights and entitlements? For FDR, it meant licensing the power of the state to seize the wealth and income of others in order to guarantee the various rights to all citizens. In other words, your rights are realized by picking someone else’s pocket, a Democratic Party constant to this day.

If we reflect on this, we can see how progressive rights contrast markedly with the rights guaranteed by the American Founders, and listed in the original Bill of Rights. Most of the provisions in the Bill of Rights begin, “Congress shall make no law.” Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech, or establishing religion, or preventing the free exercise of religion, or outlawing free assembly, and so on. Basically, we secure our rights against the government—by limiting the power of the government.

Progressive rights, by contrast, are rights against our fellow citizens, and they are secured by expanding the power of the federal government. After all the government is the coercive power that robs Peter to pay Paul, and in this way it secures Paul’s allegiance and support. Progressive government relies on multiplying the population of beneficiaries. Through this mechanism, Democratic politicians, intellectuals, and media types gain power over the entrepreneurial sector and establish increasing control over the institutions of American wealth and power. This is not what the Founders wanted.

So FDR continued Wilson’s repudiation of the founding, although he was much cleverer than Wilson in not doing so openly. Wilson denounced the Founders in speech, while FDR repudiated them in deed. As a practical matter, FDR founded the progressive state. He also established the Democratic Party as the party of progressivism, which it remains to this day.

Johnson’s Great Society, although continuous with FDR’s New Deal, would take things to a new level. While the New Deal was at least an emergency response to a genuine crisis, the Great Depression, the Great Society
was a response to nothing in particular. It was just a progressive power-grab. Similarly, Obama and Hillary’s progressivism uses the bogus chants of “inequality” and “social injustice” to implement wealth-confiscation and power-grabbing schemes much more expansive than anything previously attempted.

In listening to Hillary and reading the blueprints of the progressives, we can see where this is going in the future. There is a movement among progressives today to look back to those halcyon FDR days in which the state had virtually dictatorial powers over the lives of citizens, presumed security risks like Japanese Americans could be tossed into confinement centers, income tax rates were over 90 percent, and even wealth was subject to appropriation and confiscation.

What FDR justified as wartime measures, anchored in the real fear that Americans had of the Nazis and a potential Japanese invasion, today’s progressives support as peacetime measures that they seek to justify by creating artificial panics. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
²³
Adolf Hitler could easily have uttered those words, which were uttered in 2008 by Obama aide Rahm Emanuel. We see that fear, entitlements, and state appropriation of the powers of the private sector—the three defining features of fascism—continue to inspire progressives today.

I have laid out the low, dishonorable roots of modern progressivism and shown how that progressivism incorporated racism to become the ideological foundation of today’s Democratic Party. This is the vile, shameful tradition that Obama and Hillary are part of, even as they shamelessly lie about that tradition to escape accountability for what their party has done, and what their movement stands for. Now it is time to dig deeper into the secret history of these two, the one who has done so much damage to this country, the other who aspires to do far, far more.

CHAPTER 7

THE EDUCATION OF A MAFIOSA

WHAT HILLARY LEARNED FROM ALINSKY AND THE MOB

Life is a corrupting process; he who fears corruption fears life
.
¹

—Saul Alinsky,
Rules for Radicals

I
n the 1980s and 1990s Barack Obama made multiple trips to Chicago—to attend conferences, work summer jobs, take his first job after college, and again after Harvard Law School. This by itself is curious. Obama wasn’t from Chicago. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. Obama did, however, learn about Chicago—first from one of his early mentors, Frank Marshall Davis, and then from radical activists at Columbia, where Obama attended undergraduate college.

What Davis and his Columbia buddies told Obama was that Chicago was the training ground of Saul Alinsky, the radical activist par excellence. The more Obama studied Alinsky, the more he grew intrigued. This was a man he could learn from. This was the only man who could teach him what he needed to know. As Obama later put it, “All the strands of my life came together and I really became a man when I moved to Chicago.”
²

What Obama means is that he learned his trade by becoming an Alinskyite. Call it politics or community organizing or (as I prefer)
professional thievery, Obama learned it through his apprenticeship with the Alinskyites. Never mind that Alinsky died in 1972; Alinsky’s organizations were still around. Surely there were other Alinskyites who could train Obama to become what he aspired to be.

When Obama made his various pilgrimages to Chicago, however, he had no idea that Hillary Clinton had beaten him to Alinsky’s door. When he found this out much later, Obama must have felt like the British explorer Robert Scott, who rushed to the South Pole only to find out to his dismay that his Scandinavian rival Roald Amundsen had already gotten there first. Hillary didn’t have to hang out with Alinsky hangers-on; she knew Alinsky. In a sense, she discovered Alinsky as much as he discovered her.

Hillary met Alinsky in high school and she realized right away that this man was unique. The Democrats in the 1960s talked a good game, but Alinsky was someone who knew how to deliver for the cause. And Hillary also saw that he knew how to collect, which is to say, to make himself the main beneficiary of his causes. Hillary was magnetically drawn to Alinsky, and he, apparently, to her. Alinsky seems to have seen in Hillary a younger version of himself.

Once a Republican “Goldwater girl,” Hillary moved sharply left at her alma mater, Wellesley college, and Alinsky was a catalyst for this transition. As an undergraduate, Hillary invited Alinsky to speak at Wellesley, and decided to write her senior thesis on him. In preparation for it, according to her thesis adviser Alan Schecter, “She read all of Alinsky.”
³
Hillary’s thesis was titled, “There Is Only the Fight.”

Let’s take in the significance of this. The current president of the United States, and the aspiring next president of the United States, were both mentored by the same man, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky didn’t seek them out; they sought him out. They became his acolytes during a formative period of their lives. If Hillary makes it to the White House, Alinsky’s influence, already huge, will have reached mammoth proportions. Surely there is no other mentor in American history that can legitimately claim to have trained two successive presidents.

A POLITICAL GANGSTER

So what is it about Alinsky? What did Obama and Hillary learn from him? This chapter will show that Alinsky was a political gangster, who learned his trade from criminal gangs, notably the Al Capone mob. Obama and Hillary are two con artists who came to Alinsky to learn his con-man techniques. Alinsky taught them the art of the shakedown. Obama studied well under Alinsky, eventually becoming an instructor of Alinskyite techniques. Hillary, however, went beyond Alinsky. As we’ll see, she figured out how to take Alinskyism to a new level.

Before we dive into Alinsky, it’s worth noting that Alinsky’s public press is almost entirely positive. He is portrayed as a champion of social justice. He fought for the working man, he fought for civil rights, and he took on the powerful forces of corporate America and government on behalf of the downtrodden. If he went overboard or got carried away, it was for human dignity and social justice. This is the general progressive story line, and quite a “story” it is, very much in line with the other tales of progressive whitewash that we have encountered in this book.

A case in point is Sanford Horwitt’s book
Let Them Call Me Rebel
. This is supposed to be the authoritative biography of Alinsky. It is an unbelievably boring book. Yet Alinsky was not a boring man; oddly enough, the author omits all the juicy details about Alinsky. Now why would a good biographer do that? The short answer is that he’s not doing biography. In fact, Alinskyite foundations funded his book. It is not a work of history, but of propaganda.
⁴

Fortunately there is a good source from which we can get the real story: Alinsky himself. It may seem that the best place to get Alinsky’s account is his two books
Reveille for Radicals
and
Rules for Radicals
. In those books, however, Alinsky gives strategic advice. Part of Alinsky’s counsel, however, is for radicals to be deceptive in the Machiavellian sense. Radicals should camouflage who they truly are. Naturally we would expect Alinsky to follow his own advice, and he does. Consequently, he says little of genuine value about himself in these books.

Alinsky did, however, give a series of interviews in which he spoke very candidly and at length about his life. Here I focus on two sets of
interviews, the first with
Harper’s
magazine, published as a two-part series in June and July 1965. The second was with
Playboy
, appearing in March 1972—the year Alinsky died. From these interviews we discover a totally different Alinsky than appears in Horwitt’s biography and other works of progressive hagiography.
⁵

Born in 1909, Alinsky grew up on the South Side of Chicago. His parents were Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. His father was a tailor, ran a deli, and then opened a cleaning shop. “We were poor,” he says. “As a kid I remember always living in the back of a store. My idea of luxury was to live in an apartment where I could use the bathroom without one of my parents banging on the door for me to get out because a customer wanted to get in.”

The era from 1909 to 1929 was a prosperous one for America, but it was also harsh for those at the bottom who were struggling to make it. Alinsky’s father never did, and as a consequence Alinsky seems to have developed contempt for his father. According to Alinsky, the two of them barely spoke; mostly they exchanged the words “hello” and “good-bye.”

Alinsky’s father, for his part, did not seem to hold young Saul in high esteem. Alinsky recalled that at one point during the Great Depression, when he had moved away from home, “I had exactly four bucks between me and starvation, so in desperation I sent a registered letter to my father, asking him for a little help, because I didn’t even have enough for food. I got the receipt back showing he’d gotten the letter, but I never heard from him. He died in 1950 or 1951 and I heard he left an estate of $140,000. He willed most of it to an orchard in Israel and his kids by a previous marriage. To me, he left $50.”

Alinsky didn’t just despise his father; he also despised the capitalist system that, in his view, draws the life out of you while never delivering on its promise of success and leisure. “As a kid I don’t remember being bothered by a social conscience,” Alinsky recalled. In fact, what he didn’t get from his father he decided to take from others. As a teenager, Alinsky was “shacking up with some old broad of twenty-two” and learning the art of petty thievery on the slum streets of Chicago.

THIEVERY 101

Alinsky enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where, despite receiving a scholarship, he looked for ways to take advantage of the university. With evident relish, Alinsky described his scam for eating full meals in the university cafeteria system while only paying for a cup of coffee. He would go up to the cashier and order coffee; at that time, it cost just a nickel. The cashier would write him a ticket listing the price, and he would take the coffee and keep the ticket.

Then he would go to another university cafeteria—part of the same chain—and order a full meal. “I ate a meal that cost about a buck forty five,” Alinsky recalled, “and believe me in those days you could practically buy the fixtures in the joint for that price.” The waitress would then give him his check for the meal. In those days, customers didn’t pay the waitress; rather, they went up to the cashier and paid. So Alinsky would pocket the bill for his meal, and submit his nickel ticket to the cashier. By switching checks, Alinsky ate full meals and paid just for his cup of coffee. “I paid the five-cent check and then I left.”

This is the kind of scam one can see any cunning, impoverished slum kid pulling off. What makes Alinsky original is that he developed a whole system based on this scam. “All around the university I saw kids who were in the same boat I was. So I put up a sign on one of the bulletin boards inviting anyone who was hungry to a meeting. Well, some of them thought it was a gag. But they came. The place was really jumping.

“I explained my system, using a big map of Chicago with all the chain restaurants spotted on it.” Pretty soon he had teams of students signed up. “We got the system down to a science,” he recalled, “and for six months all of us were eating free.”

Unfortunately for Alinsky and his pals, the university changed its payment system and the scam didn’t work anymore. Asked whether he had moral qualms about ripping off the university, Alinsky erupted, “Are you kidding? There’s a priority of rights, and the right to eat takes precedence over the right to make a profit.” Even here, we see in the young thief that familiar progressive sense of entitlement. He feels justified in gaming the system, and takes pride in teaching others how to do it.

This is a point worth pausing over. Alinsky isn’t just a thief; he is also a theft educator, somewhat akin to the pickpocket Fagin in
Oliver Twist
. Alinsky’s educational program would ultimately guide a whole political movement, progressivism, and inspire two of the most important figures on the American, and world, stage. It is strange to contemplate that modern progressivism may have found its basic modus operandi in a petty rip-off scheme to get meals in college without paying for them.

Alinsky’s defense of his actions—his argument about the priority of rights—reveals another important technique that he bequeathed to modern progressives. He parades his crooked scheme behind the moral banner of social justice. In other words, he isn’t just a lowlife thief; he is a thief with a conscience.

Alinsky confesses that the concept of a priority of rights wasn’t his original idea. He got it from the labor leader John Lewis, who organized union strikes in the Midwest during Alinsky’s college days. Lewis was asked about strikers who were breaking the law by trespassing and destroying private property. Lewis retorted, “A man’s right to a job transcends the right of private property.”

Alinsky noticed this response shut the interviewer up. The reporter was stumped by the social justice rationale. Alinsky recognized right away that in some situations one could get away with illegal and otherwise-indefensible actions if they came wrapped in a noble-sounding justification.

GETTING IN WITH THE GANGS

Alinsky knew, however, that he didn’t want to spend his life on petty rip-off schemes. So he changed his academic focus to criminology, not so much, it seems, to reform crime as to understand how to be a more effective thief. He proposed to his professors a unique project: an indepth study of Chicago’s criminal gangs. At first his teachers were skeptical that Alinsky could penetrate those gangs, but ever the schemer, Alinsky was fully up to the task.

He began with the smaller gangs, like the Sholto gang and the 42 Mob, where he was able to befriend hoodlums and convince them to tell
him their “life histories.” Alinsky asked gang members to write down their recollections about when they first stole or had their first encounter with the police. These detailed personal histories would prove useful not only for getting him academic credit but also for learning how people stole stuff and got away with it.

The gang that Alinsky really wanted to get in with was the Al Capone mob. Alinsky admired those guys. “When Capone showed up at a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day,” he said, “three thousand Scouts got up and yelled, ‘Yea Al.’” I mentioned a similar incident in an earlier chapter to liken the popularity of Al Capone with that of Andrew Jackson.

Most of all, Alinsky admired the Capone mob’s political clout. “They owned City Hall,” he recalled. “Why, when one of those guys got knocked off, there wasn’t any court in Chicago. Most of the judges were at the funeral and some were pallbearers.”

Far from viewing the Capone operation with revulsion, Alinsky said, “I came to see the Capone gang as a huge quasi-public utility serving the population of Chicago.” From Alinsky’s viewpoint, the public wanted illegal booze, gambling, and prostitution and the Capone crew supplied them.

Capone himself took this view, saying on more than one occasion that he was merely offering what people wanted. For this, he groused, he should receive more credit but instead he had become a hunted man. Alinsky sympathized. More subtly, by observing Capone’s connections with political figures, he saw that crime and politics were related, so that a mobster could be understood as not so different from a “public servant.”

With single-minded determination, Alinsky set out to get in with Capone’s mobsters, to learn their techniques. As Alinsky recounted the experience, “My reception was pretty chilly at first—I went over to the old Lexington Hotel, which was the gang’s headquarters, and I hung around in the lobby and the restaurant. I’d spot one of the mobsters whose picture I’d seen in the papers and go up to him and say, ‘I’m Saul Alinsky, I’m studying criminology, do you mind if I hang around with
you?’ And he’d look me over and say, ‘Get lost punk.’ This happened again and again, and I began to feel I’d never get anywhere.