Obama’s an Alinskyite

[philunderwood]

neoneocon.com/2013/05/17/remember-obamas-an-alinskyite/


Remember, Obama’s an Alinskyite

One of the many many things that has long puzzled me about the election of Barack Obama is how many terrible elements of his resume had to be ignored in order to like him, trust him, vote for him.

A good example was his community organizer and Alinsky experience, which (unlike his connections to Ayers or Wright) he didn’t even bother to disavow, but instead celebrated. Obama was probably relying on the fact that leftists would love him for it, and everyone else except the right would misunderstand what that background meant.

Let’s let an expert on the left, David Horowitz, explain. In his book Radicals, he devoted a long chapter to Alinsky, containing the following telling excerpts:


The focus on power was illustrated by an anecdote recounted in a New Republic article that appeared during Obama’s [2008] presidential campaign. “When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!” In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.”…

Guided by these principles, Alinsky’s disciples are misperceived as idealists; in fact, they are practiced Machiavellians. Their focus is invariably on means rather than ends. As a result they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies or theoretical dogmatisms in the way their still admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power.

Horowitz’s book was published in 2012, and it’s not about Obama. But there’s a great deal in the Alinsky chapter that’s relevant to what we’ve seen unfolding in his administration. Read the following in light of Obama’s vague “hope and change” mantra in 2008, and you will understand its provenance even better:


Communists identified their goal as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” which generated opposition to their plans. Alinsky and his followers organize their power bases without naming their goal, except to describe it in abstract terms like “social justice” and an “open society.” They do not commit themselves to specific institutional aims, whether it is the dictatorship of the proletariat or government ownership of the means of production. Instead, they focus on identifying their opponents as “Haves” and the “privileged,” and work to build a power base to undermine the existing arrangements based on private property and individual liberty, which lead to social inequalities. By refusing to commit to principles or to identify goals, they are better able to organize coalitions of the disaffected, which otherwise would be divided over the proper means to achieve their ends…

The demagogic banner of Alinsky’s revolution is “democracy”…But it is not democracy as Americans understand it. Instead it is a radical democracy in which earned hierarchies based on achievement and merit are targeted for destruction…

“[The] failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” Alinksy wrote. What he really meant was their honesty was disastrous—their failure to understand the art of mis-communication. This is the art he taught to radicals trying to impose socialism on a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom. Don’t sell it as socialism. Sell it as “progressivism,” economic democracy,” “fairness,” and “social justice.”

Obama, of course, not only worked in various Alinskyite organizations, but also taught Alinsky workshops, although he never met Alinsky himself. And it’s not as though these facts were unknown in 2008; they were well-known. It’s just their significance that either was not understood by enough people, or not cared about by enough people.

Also, in line with the trumped-up charges that the Tea Party is racist, see the following from Horowitz’s book. Here he is quoting a biography of Alinksy written by an admirer, Sanford Horwitt, entitled Let Them Call Me Rebel, in which Horwitt describes a group of students in the early 70s who were planning to go to a Tulane University speech given by George H.W. Bush (who was UN representative at the time). They asked Alinsky for advice on how to picket or otherwise protest the speech:


That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined—not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading, “The K.K.K. supports Bush.” And this is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results.

Alinsky did not of course invent this sort of ends-justifies-the-means moral inversion. But he preached and perfected it. The fact that Obama was always known to be an Alinskyite should have engendered a great deal more skepticism and loathing than it did. We are reaping the dubious rewards now.