I need to get a few words down about Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Two of his disciples now respectively occupy the main seat in the Oval Office and the chair behind the desk belonging to the Secretary of State, and so I thought it was high time to go back in time and read some musings from this old guard pinko agitator.
Having read this small book, I am now prepared to say that Alinsky was a tactical genius, a man who knew exactly how to rattle the establishment. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. A born iconoclast, the necessary friction that arises in the course of said iconoclasm didn’t bother him, not even a little bit. A bit of admiration was once offered by his ideological opponent William F. Buckley — “Alinsky takes the iconoclast’s pleasure in kicking the biggest behinds in town and the sport is not untempting . . .”
But in order to get to this shrewd tactical analysis, there are chunks of this book when the reader needs to wade through Alinsky’s homespun philosophy of ethics, life and meaning, his accounting of why he was doing what he was doing at the level above field tactics. Picture a drunk sophomore in a 1950’s bull session, around 2 am in the dormitory of a state university, with the radical music of the Kingston Trio somewhere in the background. In those sections of the book, the phrase that kept coming to mind was from my old mentor Bugs Bunny — as he would put it, “What a maroon.”
I am not changing the subject now, but it might look like that for a second. As providence would have it, I finished the book on the way back from the ACCS convention in Atlanta yesterday. I had to leave a skosh early, and consequently I was very sorry to miss the final plenary address given to our people by Charles Colson. The reports I received indicated that he was top drawer — I can hardly wait to get to the tape. But in the run-up to this conference of ours, Colson was taking some heat for coming from the usual suspects — the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Americans for the Separation of Church and State, and other stuffed shirts. The line they took was entirely predictable — “Colson has really gone around the bend now,” like he was going to a conclave of one-toothed wonders instead of a convention of over 900 classical Christian educators.
And in this context, something occurred to me, while I was reading Alinsky. I would file this under the heading of apropos poetic justice. At periodic intervals in the book, Alinsky would lament the fact that a number of his disciples were the paint-by-numbers kind — you know, the kind who wouldn’t know the difference between principles and methods if it pitched a tent in their front yard. They didn’t know how to think on the fly. They had all the creative intelligence of a set of wind-up dolls. Dullards.
Now being the establishment tends to create this kind of insufferable mentality anyhow — the kind Alinsky was up against in his corporate and political foes — but it appears that a bunch of his people were insufferable to begin with. Like Obama. Like Hillary. Like the people in the world’s richest civil rights organization. These people are the establishment now, and they clearly have a running start on being able to act with all the epistemic humility of the northern end of a south-bound mule.
I recognized the smell and feel of the late sixties and early seventies throughout this book. Yeah, it was like that. But somewhere between then and now someone went and switched all the jerseys. This actually promises to be fun.
“It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule” — Saul Alinsky