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The Slaughterhouse
The Smallness of Saul
A loving look at Barack Obama’s community organizer supreme.
Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky
By Nicholas von Hoffman
(Nation Books, 214 pages, $26.95)
“Although Alinsky is described as some kind of liberal left-winger in actuality big government worried him,” writes Saul Alinsky protégé Nicholas von Hoffman in his gossamer memoir, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky. “He feared the gigantism of government, corporation and even labor union.”
Von Hoffman is trying to recast Alinsky as a government-fearing libertarian in order to make his communistic beliefs more marketable. It’s a project doomed to failure.
Alinsky’s right-hand man 50 years ago, von Hoffman paints an almost unrecognizable portrait of the Industrial Areas Foundation founder, depicting him as an idealistic fighter for the little guy, a champion of democracy. This is a Sisyphean task because Alinsky’s thuggish tactics, which Americans rightly regard as outside the legitimate political process, provide incontrovertible evidence of his small-c communism. Nonetheless, von Hoffman deems it necessary to downplay Alinsky’s ugly real-life views because they call into question the legitimacy of community organizing and today’s political leaders who emerged from that radical, un-American tradition. Today’s most famous community organizer, of course, and the reason for the recent surge in interest in Alinsky, lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Von Hoffman is an accomplished journalist who wrote Citizen Cohn, a brutal, nasty biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s counsel Roy Cohn. Cohn’s prosecutorial skills sent Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Von Hoffman, like so many Communist sympathizers, assumes falsely that the Rosenbergs were innocent and crucifies Cohn for doing his job.
Von Hoffman is mightily peeved that the right dared to discover Alinsky. He invokes the fifth rule of “power tactics” in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals — “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” — heaping scorn on the “right-wingers” and “tea baggers” who have discovered the power of Alinsky’s agitation techniques. “They are buying Rules by the thousands, which should be making Saul happy wherever he is, and are using it as their ‘playbook’ after adjuring each other to skip the parts containing its nonexistent Marxism.”
A few months before von Hoffman’s book came out, Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker bought into von Hoffman’s fantasy. He seemed to suggest that if Alinsky, who died in 1972, were alive today he might even have had a soft spot for the Tea Party movement. “Alinsky, after all, was always a decentralist at heart.” He “distrusted government planners, and while he was by no means opposed to redistribution in itself he was an acute critic of the welfare state as it functioned in practice.” Perhaps reading Alinsky’s writings would disabuse Walker of this notion. Yes, Alinsky was uncomfortable with aspects of the welfare state apparatus but only because he saw the welfare state as a half-measure. He wanted a complete reorganization of society and didn’t trust bureaucrats — “buttinskies” in von Hoffman’s words — to carry it out.
Alinsky’s biographer also closes his eyes to his subject’s ideological infatuations. Sanford D. Horwitt claims Alinsky disavowed Marxist-style “class analysis.” It is true the master said he didn’t join the Communist Party USA because he had a sense of humor. But just because he was too independent to submit to party discipline doesn’t change the fact he agreed with the Communists. “Radicals want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization,” Alinsky wrote. “They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.” (Emphasis added.) Walker, Horwitt, and von Hoffman must have missed this textbook definition of socialism.
In Rules for Radicals Alinsky lays out his communistic catechism, which happens to include the precise Marxist-style class analysis Horwitt claimed Alinsky rejected. Alinsky’s trinity consists of what he calls the “Haves,” the “Have-Nots,” and the “Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” Madison Avenue couldn’t have done a better job putting an American gloss on the ruling class, the working class, and the middle class, or bourgeoisie. It’s the Communist Manifesto American-style.
Alinsky didn’t worry about the grave existential threat Communism posed to the United States during the Cold War. Like radical pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal, who absurdly compares conservatives to the Taliban, Alinsky claimed “certain Fascist mentalities” were a greater threat to America than “the damn nuisance of Communism.”
ALINSKY CHEERED ON CLASS WARFARE, urged government-enforced wealth redistribution, and worked with Communists. He associated both with Communist Party USA members and Marxists who didn’t belong to the party. “I don’t think he ever remotely thought of joining the Communist Party [but] emotionally he aligned very strongly with it,” said Chicago alderman Leon Despres, a party member and college classmate of Alinsky. Horwitt wrote Alinsky was “broadly sympathetic” with the politics of Herb March, a friend who was an organizer for the Young Communist League.
Von Hoffman soft-pedals the damage that Alinsky-style organizing does to the body politic, claiming Alinsky was sounding “the trumpet blast for democracy.” If democracy includes “conking” picket line crossers on the head — something he admits Alinsky favored — then he’s right. Alinsky shied away from praising violence in public but in private “he would say that violence has its uses.”
Like a drug dealer trolling for new customers, Alinsky taught organizers to sell members of the community on big government by bribing them with other people’s money. “The fact is that self-interest can be a most potent weapon in the development of co-operation and identification of the group welfare as being of greater importance than personal welfare,” he said. This appeal to inner-city residents’ short-term avarice was a valuable recruiting tool that helped win converts to statist collectivism.
Alinsky also helped to engineer the disastrous War on Poverty and taught a generation of ACORN-wannabe groups how to terrorize appeasement-minded corporate lackeys and government agency officials. During the 1960s the federal government was laying the foundation for ACORN and similar groups. Government gave taxpayers’ money to community organizations to encourage them to agitate against the status quo. In a sense, America declared war on itself and hired leftist mercenaries like Alinsky and his comrades Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven to do the fighting.
Former Office of Economic Opportunity director Howard Phillips told me recently that Alinsky was also “a huge influence on OEO and its key employees.” The agency Phillips ran came out of President Johnson’s antipoverty program. Phillips gave copies of Rules for Radicals “to a great many people so that they would understand what I was up against, and I pointed out that he dedicated the book to Lucifer whose ideology was akin to that of Mr. Alinsky.” Alinsky groups eagerly accepted OEO funding.
Although Alinsky did not live to see ACORN come to fruition and played no direct role in creating the group, von Hoffman is certain the master would have approved of ACORN’s approach to agitation. The group’s “cheekiness, truculence and imaginative tactical tropes,” he writes, “have an Alinskyan touch.”
Perhaps for von Hoffman it really was all fun and games, and this explains why much of this memoir entertains while it reads like a lovely afternoon stroll through fantasyland. We learn that Alinsky had enough pull with President Franklin Roosevelt to arrange a White House meeting for an associate. We learn that Alinsky agreed to deliver a $50,000 bribe to the Vatican. We learn he was fascinated by King Tut and mummies. We also learn that for his own amusement Alinsky anonymously wrote an exam for doctoral candidates studying community organizations. Three of the questions were on him. He flunked two of them.
About the Author
Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative journalist at a conservative watchdog group in Washington, D.C. Vadum is also author of Subversion Inc: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (26) | Leave a comment
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Booger | 10.29.10 @ 6:08AM
A Best of Booger Reprint:
From the desk of S. Alinsky:
Dear President Obama,
For reasons which are beyond my ken, I have been allowed to pen this brief letter to you. I hope you find it helpful in your ongoing mission on behalf of my Grand Host. It may be that he has allowed me to pen this to you as gratitude for my humble dedication of my life's great work to him (although gratitude is not something we really see very much of down here) or because he is concerned that you are having difficulty carrying out his plan on Earth. I suppose I have been brought in as a consultant, for want of a better term. At any rate, here are a few pointers which, having studied my work as much as you have, you should already have come up with on your own.
First of all, please remember that power is what the enemy thinks you have. You have, I suspect, attributed great power to the "Tea Party" movement of the opposition. In doing so you have caused fear amongst your followers and emboldened the enemy. Quite frankly, when you attributed power to them you de facto gave power to them. This was an error. Now that your followers believe the "Tea Party" crowd has power, it has become so. You should have known this would happen.
This naturally leads to my next point. You have gone entirely outside the experience of your people. Why do you have that clown as press secretary, anyway? He's clearly in over his head. Unfortunately, you have very few people with any military or law enforcement experience at your disposal, and it's beginning to show. Confusion and fear are spreading among your camp. I understand that many (most?) of your staff are retreating, even abandoning you. You really need to get some experienced people in there who will be sympathetic to you. I hear Colin Powell might still be available. Just think about it.
Now, early on you did a fine job of making the enemy play be their own rules. The problem now is that you are the one in charge of the rule book, and you have made far too many promises. You promised free health care to everyone, with no increase in spending. You promised to end the wars and close Gitmo. You promised no new taxes (oh, like we've never seen that mistake before) for the middle class. Now the enemy is holding you to your rule book. It hurts when they use it against you, I know. Believe me, I've had several years down here to think about it, with no end in sight. Maybe you should just ditch the rule book altogether. I hear one of your guys had an idea about just admitting "the Constitution is wrong". Couldn't have said it better myself. Lets you ditch the rule book and do whatever you want. Might be worth a try.
It seems that of late you have ceded the ridicule rule to the enemy. I know, the whole "tea-bagger" thing seemed like a good idea, but it was really a one-time shot that you've hung onto way to long. Of late you and your comrades are the ones on the receiving end. Our good friend M. Dowd tried to help you out, but quite frankly I think she needs to get back on her meds. You've definitely let the other side get the other hand with ridicule. Maybe John Stewart would make a good press secretary? Just a thought.
Now remember, if it's a good tactic, your people enjoy it. I have to ask you this as a friend, are your people in Congress enjoying themselves right now? Why not? Maybe, just maybe, you need to re-consider some of your tactical decisions. We all have to reconsider from time to time. Take it from me, I haven't had a choice to do anything else for quite a while now.
Finally, and this is the most important point for us to discuss at our present juncture, I have to ask you this: Did you break through and take power without a constructive alternative to what the other side is doing? You ran against the war, the deficits, and unemployment. Looks to me like they're all still there. You almost make it seem like the other side was right about your lack of experience. I've almost grown wistful thinking about what Hilary might have done. Oh well, no use in regrets, is there? You'll have plenty of time for that once we're here together in retirement.
At any rate, I hope some of this may have been helpful. If so, I don't suppose that as the most powerful man on Earth you could arrange a little something for me? Maybe just a nice glass of tea. Or water. Or even just dip your finger in some and put it on the tip of my tongue. It is just devilishly hot here right now.
Your adviser and admirer,
S. Alinsky
Alan Brooks| 10.30.10 @ 5:28PM
Alinsky is preferable to the reptilian/porcine Karl Rove.
AvengingAngel| 10.30.10 @ 9:26PM
QUOTES FROM ALAN BROOKS
“But am so glad McCain isn't president, I wish Obama would get both the Peace Prize and his likeness on Mt. Rushmore. I mean it.”
“But you are doing the correct thing-- fight the Muslims, and we will fight Christian fundamentalists.”
“God is a woman, and Jesus is Her daughter.”
“God is a necessary fiction, because most people are superstitious.”
“God was a woman, and Jesus was gay: he hung out with male disciples, he wore a gown, and he said to forgive thine enemies.
Now, if that's not being a metro, then what is?”
Alan Brooks| 10.31.10 @ 12:19AM
"Avenging" is correct; '
'Angel' is not.
Alan Brooks| 10.31.10 @ 8:09PM
I want to be relevant, pay attention to me!
Yosemeti Sam| 10.29.10 @ 6:58AM
" ... Saul Alinsky protégé Nicholas von Hoffman in his gossamer memoir, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky...."
NVH, P.T. Barnum Alinskys' - barker.
IOW - "There's a sucker born every minute"
Make efficient use of them.
Howard| 10.29.10 @ 8:52AM
I remember Alinsky from the Sixties a bit. Far from being a Chamber of Commerce type; he was a radical. He could work with both the Old Left and the New Left. He was looking for a transformation into a Socialist type system. His techniques were not violent, but, his goals were Socialism of some kind. Obama has followed the Master well. I remember Von Hoffman from 60 Minutes days. He was an obnoxious, sniveling jerk. I wouldn't put ant credence in his spin.
Vaemar| 10.29.10 @ 9:21AM
Anyone inclined to doubt Hoffman is a mouthpiece for the hard left should read his old articles on US politics in the British Spectator.
Anthony| 10.29.10 @ 9:41AM
So von Hoffman still walks the earth, eh? Howard's memories are spot on. Snivel'n Nick was the precurser to tingly legs Matthews and around the bend Olberman.
Poor Nicky, if he's peeved now, just wait till Tuesday. And Nicky, wherever Saul is, you'll be joining him soon. Bon Voyage.
Citizen Jerry| 10.29.10 @ 10:24AM
"They are buying Rules by the thousands, which should be making Saul happy wherever he is ..."
How many guesses do I get?
Seek| 10.29.10 @ 11:31AM
Nick von Hoffman is a classic Left-libertarian, a sensibility he shares with Kirkpatrick Sale, Abbie Hoffman, Camille Paglia, Paul Goodman and Frank Zappa. I can dig the fact that he, like Alinsky, never liked the Communist Party or any other Leftie group demanding subordination of individual will. But in the end, like his mentor, his ulterior motive is socialist.
The irony is that the libertarian faction of the Left gets cast aside as soon as the Lenins of this world seize power. As the late Frankfurt Marxist political philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, stated some 40 years ago: "We will use the anarchists."
Margie| 10.29.10 @ 6:25PM
Interesting and informative post, Seek.
scythe| 10.29.10 @ 11:56AM
Count FDR as a pre-Saul Alinskyite. The Father of American Fascism realized early on in the game that he could conscript earnings and use them to bribe constituencies to eternal allegiance for the left wing power grab. Once people got a taste of other people's money, there would be no turning the ship of state rightward again, he observed. It has grown bigger and bigger in the ensuing decades to the point where yes, the Republicans have become the tax collector for the Welfare State. We all dream of returning the Fed to its constitutional boundaries but FDR set in motion the idea that government had the right to effectively steal from some to give to others, unleashing the primitive instincts of greed and envy. And there's no slamming the lid on that Pandora's Box. Why we even have a President now who slurs the Tea Party as retrograde, while trying to recapture the glory days of the 1930's. Alinskyite tactics have been around for as long as there have been people who wanted to steal and plunder their neighbors' possessions. Alinsky would have right at home sitting next to Madame Defarge. Why he might have even been helping her keep the skeins untangled. The wonder of it all is that Saul has been given so much credit for inventing street violence, ridicule, duplicity, and plunder. Compared to a few in history, he was just a piker.
Sheila| 10.29.10 @ 12:09PM
Well said. I particularly like the image of Obama siting alongside Madam Defarge.
My Girl Friday| 10.29.10 @ 3:22PM
More revisionist slop and just in time for the 2012 elections. Perhaps Nicholas Hoffman von Alinski should be addressing how President Obama is now "a dead mouse on America's kitchen floor."
mames| 10.29.10 @ 7:36PM
Alinsky was a child of the father of lies. Lying is the sole tactic in his demented world view. We were supposed to believe Obama was a centrist democrat when he was a lying liberal theological, social justice, Marxist, Alinskite. It is not at all funny and he is the leader of lies among liars. Give me an old fashioned up front communist any day.
Ralph Benko | 10.30.10 @ 11:13AM
Sorry, but my own reading (and my reading in all things Alinsky is exceptionally deep), leads me to agree with Jesse Walker about Alinsky, a view which I have presented at length elsewhere: http://www.parcbench.com/2009/.....alinskys/. Alinsky's writings are suffused with sentiments such as this:
In the end he [the organizer] has one conviction–a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions. The alternative to this would be rule by the elite–either a dictatorship or some form of a political aristocracy.
Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition.”
— Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971, Vintage Books edition, 1989, pp. 11-12
He also abjured Communism, more than casually and very courageously, and as for more Fabian socialism called Lyndon Johnson's Poverty Program "a prize piece of political pornography. It's a huge political pork barrel, and a feeding trough for the welfare industry, surrounded by sanctimonious, hypocritical, phony, moralistic crap."
You might not like Alinsky (I do, very much), but I would ask brother Matt to go back for a longer, closer rereading both of his works and Horwitt's biography before submitting an indictment.
Alinsky is a very interesting cat and he's a lot closer to where the Right, and the populist forces exemplified by the Tea Party, stands, today, than he is to the ultra-elitist Center for American Progress types who I suggest Alinksy would find detestable.
Matthew Vadum | 11.8.10 @ 4:39PM
You make some good points, Ralph, and I'm not saying one cannot learn some valuable things from reading Alinsky but you also assume he was a truthful communicator. He was not. Many statements he made contradicted his stated core principles. If Leo Strauss were still alive I am sure he would have a lot to say about Alinsky, and I'm equally sure not all of it would be bad. It may be that Alinsky was what Stalinists would have called an ultra-leftist or a communist-anarchist. It appears "radical" was about the most in-your-face descriptor Alinsky thought he could get away with.
Tim*| 10.30.10 @ 11:53AM
Alinsky Was A Punk & Obama Is A Punk.
"I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music would be relatively quiet. The hundred blacks who would be given tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; them the people would go to the symphony hall--with obvious consequences."
— Saul D. Alinsky (Reveille for Radicals)
"To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life."
— Saul D. Alinsky (Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals)
"In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems."
— Saul D. Alinsky (Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals)
skip| 10.30.10 @ 1:25PM
Satan is still pissed he has to put up with Alinsky.
Charles Kadlec | 10.30.10 @ 5:52PM
Alinsky's book, "Rules for Radicals" provides strategies and tactics for any would be political or community organizer -- whether of the left, center, or right. No where in this book does he advocate soliciting the use of government power to achieve the goals of any community organizer. Instead, he advocates empowering individuals in the community itself through democratic means.
In my view, it is doubtful that Alinsky would support giving the "Have's" of government even more power by seeking government funds and using the coercive power of government to organize a community. For example, he was an early, and prescient, critic of "The War on Poverty"
correctly anticipating it would do far more harm than good.
Alinksy worked his entire life to create voluntary organizations to address the social issues of his time. He writes: "To give people help, while denying them a significant part in the action, contributes nothing to the development of the individual. In the deepest sense it is not giving but taking--taking their dignity. Denial of the opportunity for participation is the denial of human dignity and democracy. It will not work."
To a great extent, the success of the left in dominating the politics of community organization can be laid at the feet of the right, who failed to see the usefulness of many of Alinsky's strategies, and who abandoned the field of play to their opponents.
Bottom line, whether or not you agree with Alinksy's goals, or the causes he supported, his book, "Rules for Radicals," is a must read for anyone who aspires to organize a community or to be an astute observer of the game of politics. See my article on Forbes.com: "Saul Alinsky: An Advocate Of Living In Liberty: The famous community organizer was no statist. Indeed, his book anticipated the Tea Party movement by 30 years."
(http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/19/saul-alinsky-tea-party-labor-opinions-contributors-charles-kadlec.html)
Jack Olson| 10.31.10 @ 12:20PM
Von Hoffman described his book, in that book, as an "homage" to Alinsky. So, you needn't look for objectivity in it. Vadum is wrong about Cohn in the Rosenberg case. Cohn bragged about using unethical ex parte communication with the judge to obtain death sentences. That is unethical because it gives the prosecutor the chance to argue his case without giving the defense the chance to rebut him. That isn't "doing his job" unless you think Cohn's job was disgracing the legal profession, something he was conspicuously skillful at.
geronl| 10.31.10 @ 6:14PM
We need to ban government from funding non-government entities, period.
That is where the left gets its funding.
jstwndring| 10.31.10 @ 10:37PM
I find it rather amusing, and ironic, that those of you defending Saul Alinsky don't see the folly of his views toward "social justice", and "equality" and where those views must inevitably lead us without fail. You don't seem to understand that human nature at its core, seeks to control and manipulate others. We always organise ourselves one way or another, and your utter naivete on this matter is what makes you dangerous. Collectivism must, by necessity, decend into tyranny. If you can't see that, then you will continue to fall for the same lie over, and over, and over again. If it only affected you, I would just sit back and laugh. But, since it also affects me and my personal freedom, well, i'm sorry, but we will always be enemies. So, go ahead and embrace the rallying cry that encompasses the "greater good" at the expense of the individual. I'll stick with the Constitution and the real freedoms it guarantees individuals through LIMITED government.
Vic| 11.1.10 @ 2:49PM
It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who would rather be a yard dog than a wolf. The yard dog has all his needs met. He has free food, free housing, and free medical care. But all this comes at the price of a collar and chain that destroys his ability to roam as he pleases. He will do his masters bidding or be subject to beatings, or even excommunication.
The wolf may have to work for his meat, but he is free to roam as he pleases, and his meat is always fresh. No one will beat him if he gets in the mood to howl in the night. He would rather starve than eat the artificial meat handed him by a master.
Which type of canine are you?
Christian Louboutin | 6.23.11 @ 5:38AM
Von Hoffman is trying to recast Alinsky as a government-fearing libertarian in order to make his communistic beliefs more marketable. It's a project doomed to failure.