Civil unrest is President Barack Obama’s crutch, his comfort
zone, and his trump card. That’s why he has encouraged the “Occupy
Wall Street” protest and its progeny across the country, despite
significant political
dangers to him for
doing so. Closer looks at Obama’s career roots and at the
protesters’ behaviors help explain both why the protests are
worrisome developments and why the president actually likes
them.
First, it helps to understand just how radical most of
these protesters are — and just how obscene. Clearly, they are
mostly
socialist or communist in
orientation. And
reports are rampant about the lewdness, vileness, and
illegality that has marked the Wall Street “occupation” zone,
including plenteous drugs, public nudity and sex, and defecation on
police cars. A lot of this isn’t free speech; it’s open
law-breaking.
So why does Obama applaud it, when he repeatedly
castigated Tea Party demonstrators who lawfully secured permits,
usually behaved with remarkable decorum, and cleaned up after
themselves?
The answer is easy: This is Obama’s milieu. This is how he
was trained. As Ryan Lizza
explained in a definitive piece in the
New Republic — a liberal magazine, not a right-wing/anti-Obama
hit factory — Obama’s intellectual roots and career choices made
him a student of, and later actually an instructor in, the
particular mass-movement methods taught by the late, radical, Saul
Alinsky. The sort of unrest seen in the anti-Wall Street movement
comes directly out of Alinsky’s secular bible called Rules for
Radicals.
“The first step in community organization is community
disorganization,” wrote Alinsky. “The disruption of the present
organization is the first step toward community organization…. The
organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community
must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community….
When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an
‘agitator’ they are completely correct, for that is, on one word,
your function — to agitate to the point of conflict.”
Alinsky hardly was squeamish about using filth to get his
way. “If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the
place.” Later, he gave a fictitious but oh-so-literal example of
one way to do it: He suggested that protesters gorge on beans
before occupying a public building so that their — uh, their
natural emissions — would literally create a stench. “In a fight
almost anything goes,” he wrote. “It almost reaches the point where
you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the
belt.” Alinsky openly and exuberantly belittled the notion of
ethics. All that mattered, he said, was whether your side is losing
or winning. Only afterwards do you try to find an excuse for your
illicit behavior: “The tenth rule of the ethics of means and ends
is that you do what you can with what you have and [then] clothe it
with moral garments.”
To be clear, nobody suggests Obama is personally
orchestrating the various “Occupy” demonstrations. Then again, he
doesn’t need to. The Occupiers are receiving financial help or
organizational muscle from many of his associates or major
supporters, including several union bosses of the
sort who just weeks ago pledged to “take these [SOBs] out” of
commission. Despite Obama’s eloquent words earlier this year
demanding milder rhetoric and more carefully calibrated political
actions, he has not uttered a peep in admonishment of the
increasingly virulent language, not to mention lawless
actions such as attempting to physically “take over” public
buildings.
Critics have noted that the protesters often can’t even
define what they are protesting, or that their “issues” are such a
diverse hodgepodge as to be unintelligible. Again, this is straight
from Alinsky’s playbook. The organizer, he wrote, “should search
for and use the wrong reasons to achieve the right goals. He should
be able, with skill and calculation, to use irrationality in his
attempts to progress to a rational world. For a variety of reasons
the organizer must develop multiple issues…. Multiple issues mean
constant action and life.”
What Obama particularly likes about this disruptive
movement is that its only universally acknowledged target is the
one he himself provided: Wall Street. He’s the one who repeatedly
gave the marching order against corporate bogeymen. As Alinsky
wrote in his most famous rule of all: “Pick the target, freeze it,
personalize it, and polarize it.” This is exactly what Obama
himself tried to do as a community organizer in Chicago. It is what
he has done every step of the way as campaigner and as president,
always finding someone to blame or be against: George W. Bush,
greedy corporations, millionaires, Republican congressmen, or
people who “cling to guns or religion.”
The problem with Saul Alinsky — and for the protesters
who still, knowingly or unknowingly, do his work — was that
nothing was sacred. Rules for Radicals is, in Alinsky’s
own words, officially dedicated to “the first radical known to man
who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively
that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
Alinsky seemed to mean the dedication to be funny. But
it’s no laughing matter, and neither are protests that violate
common decency.
