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.
