To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (7 page)

With this 1970s-era cohort in charge, it’s unsurprising the major legislation passed by this Congress has increased centralized economic planning. Another example is the government takeover of General Motors, engineered by a “car czar” who is not subject to congressional approval.

And then there’s the Left’s redistribution of taxpayer money for massive housing subsidies through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing,” said Democratic congressman Barney Frank in 2003. Of course, this gamble helped spark the housing crash, but that hasn’t stopped the Left. In fact, in December 2009, the Obama administration lifted the $400 billion cap on Treasury funding to Fannie and Freddie, a big step toward nationalizing the home loan market.

For these archaic, left-wing Democrats, their return to power with the Democratic House and Senate majorities of 2007, along with the 2008 election of a new, left-wing president, is their last chance to achieve their dream of instituting socialism in America.

The policies of the Left are clearly socialist. They would have government define and dominate every aspect of energy production in America. They would have government define and dominate healthcare—one-sixth of the U.S. economy. (The first healthcare overhaul bill to pass the House gave the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to unilaterally reduce benefits, increase premiums, and establish waiting lines for high risk patients.) They have taken over AIG, America’s largest insurer. They took over General Motors and Chrysler. They dominate banking. They have a “pay czar” in the White House to dictate salaries at ostensibly private companies. These actions are consistent with a socialist vision of America where the government defines and dominates the private sector.

If you are a political candidate with unpopular secular-socialist beliefs, you simply cannot be candid about what you want to accomplish. Therefore, secular socialists learn very early they have to misinform and mislead in order to get elected.

Additionally, if you’re a secular socialist, you have to maintain your power in ways the public inherently dislikes: paying off supporters by putting earmarks in appropriations bills; holding secret conferences to write bills; making absurd deals to pick up enough votes to pass legislation; and appointing really bizarre people to top government jobs. You learn to hide what you are doing, deny what you are doing, and if caught, try to deceive the people about what you’ve done.

Finally, if you’re part of a movement that believes it knows better than the American people what’s best for them, you inherently scorn the values and judgment of the people you intend to change. Since the vast majority of Americans have the “wrong” values and the “wrong” attitude, they have to be misled into voting for the enlightened elite who will remake them into the right attitudes and the right values.

Thus, in order to achieve its historic mission of transforming America, the secular-socialist movement must resort to dishonesty in communicating with the American people.

Perhaps nobody has been more clear about the Left’s need for dishonesty than Saul Alinsky.

One of the twentieth century’s most influential radicals, Alinksy is considered the godfather of community organizing. His two most famous works,
Reveille for Radicals
and
Rules for Radicals
, were published
in the late sixties and early seventies. In these works, Alinsky draws a distinction between meek, garden-variety liberals and brave, revolutionary radicals. “While liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues,” Alinsky writes, “radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.”

Many of his “rules” are guidelines for engaging in immoral, dangerous, political dishonesty. Echoing the maxims of Vladimir Lenin, the architect of Soviet Communism, Alinsky justifies almost any immoral act, especially outright dishonesty and hypocrisy, if it’s done while pursuing revolution. Alinksy writes, “[The organizer] does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

David Horowitz, in his small book
Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model
, cogently explains the significance of Alinsky’s teachings to the modern Left.
⁷
In particular, he cites what he calls the “most important” chapter in
Rules for Radicals,
“Means and Ends,” whose “rules” include the following:

For Alinsky, a radical’s primary goals must be acquiring power and destroying the current system. What replaces it is of secondary
concern. He teaches that you amass power by organizing people based on their naked self-interest, not on any idealism or common vision for the future. In fact, he argues that clearly naming or describing such a vision—and spelling out clearly how to get there—only alienates some people and therefore divides your potential power base.

Now consider Alinksy’s eleventh rule of Means and Ends:

“Change We Can Believe In” fits nicely into that list of bromides. Horowitz aptly sums up Alinsky’s teachings:

If you think it’s unfair to hold the current leaders of the Democratic Party responsible for the teachings of a deceased left-wing radical, consider that in his early days in Chicago, Barack Obama taught courses on Alinsky’s techniques for community organizing groups. So his endorsement of these tactics of fundamental dishonesty is a matter of a public record.

President Obama’s own website displayed a picture of a younger Obama teaching in a Chicago classroom. On the chalkboard behind him are written the phrases “Power Analysis” and “Relationships Built on Self Interest.”

In an interview with Ryan Lizza of the
New Republic
, Obama said, “The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people’s self-interest was met, and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in.”

Saul Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinksy, writing in the
Boston Globe
, marveled at how many of his father’s methods were evident at the Democratic National Convention. It was clear, he wrote, that “Obama learned his lesson well.”
¹⁰

Another primary weapon in the secular-socialist arsenal is the deliberate misuse of language. George Orwell, one of the most insightful analysts of tyranny and politics in the first half of the twentieth century, explained the danger of corrupted language in “Politics and the English Language.” In that brilliant essay, Orwell warns, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” He explains,

Remember Orwell’s warning the next time you listen to a secular-socialist politician, academic, or TV analyst employ euphemisms and other rhetorical tricks that allow them to avoid calling things by their proper names. Consider these examples:

It would be hard to overstate the degree to which the modern Left appeal to the self-interest of their various interest groups rather than to any sort of unifying vision for the future. There’s a reason for that:
while secular socialism is the intellectual mindset of the left-wing party bosses and politicians, it is not the worldview of the vast majority of Americans. It would be impossible to build a governing majority around such an alien ideology.

But secular socialists know the bigger and more powerful government gets, the more politicians can use its power to benefit their supporters. In other words, secular socialism doesn’t win power because it’s a compelling vision for the future; it’s just a convenient way to pay off members of their coalition and bribe new ones into joining. And the more power secular-socialist politicians have, both in elected positions and in the bureaucracies, the better these coalition members can be fed from the public trough.

The secular-socialist machine is diverse. Trial lawyers are among the biggest donors to left-wing Democrats, who return the favor by preventing tort reform. This allows the lawyers to continue suing doctors and businessmen and women for huge sums of money that the lawyers then donate to left-wing Democrats.

Union bosses are another key machine component. They donate money to secular socialists from compulsory member dues and “encourage” their members to man phone banks and conduct get-out-the-vote operations. They expect their candidates, once in power, to change laws to give union organizers even more leverage against the businesses they are bankrupting, as well as to prevent reform of our union-dominated public bureaucracies, like education.

“Social justice” groups like the corrupt ACORN organization have received public dollars to perform voter registration drives that are really just operations to turn out voters for far-left Democrats, who gratefully steer more money toward groups like ACORN. Although ACORN’s long history of fraud has finally put it out of business, the group’s branches are now reorganizing to continue the same scam under new names.

And finally, big business hedges its bets by funding big-government supporters in both parties, hoping they will craft legislation that gives big business an advantage over its competitors.

There is one name for this kind of cynical cronyism and crass political manipulation: machine politics.