The Guardian
Saul Alinsky: who is he and why does Newt Gingrich keep mentioning him?
An obscure, long-dead community organiser has been a constant presence in the GOP debates thanks to Gingrich
By Richard Adams
Unless you've been paying close attention to the undercurrents of right-wing US politics over the last five years, you might have missed an obscure name from the 1960s who has been hoisted into a hate figure: Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky died nearly 30 years ago but thanks to a tenuous link to Barack Obama, his name has been raised as evidence of Obama's radical roots. Newt Gingrich, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, repeatedly denounces Obama as "a classic Saul Alinsky radical" on the campaign trail.
When Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, his victory speech sought to distinguish what he called "American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky" of Obama.
Gingrich has merely tapped into a fulmination against Alinsky – who was what passes for a left-wing radical in American politics, agitating for better living conditions for the poor in the slums of Chicago and New York – that has been filtered through the likes of right-wing talkshow hosts such as Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.
The connection with Obama is that his career as a community organiser included work for an Alinsky-inspired group in Chicago, while a profile of Obama by Ryan Lizza in the New Republic in 2007 said Obama "taught Alinsky's concepts and methods":
Born in 1909 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alinsky had prowled the same neighborhoods that Obama now worked and internalized many of the same lessons. As a University of Chicago criminology graduate student, he ingratiated himself with Al Capone's mobsters to learn all he could about the dynamics of the city's underworld, an experience that helped foster a lifelong appreciation for seeing the world as it actually exists, rather than through the academic's idealized prism.... Alinsky was deeply influenced by the great social science insight of his times, one developed by his professors at Chicago: that the pathologies of the urban poor were not hereditary but environmental.
Rather than the far-left figure that Gingrich and others would paint him, Alinsky appears in his writings – including Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 – to be more concerned with the nuts and bolts of grassroots organisation in effecting change. "Dogma is the enemy of human freedom," Alinsky once observed, and said he never considered joining the Communist party.
In Rules for Radicals, for example, he responds to the demands by youth frustrated at the continuation of the Vietnam war by the Democratic party after the political battles and riots of 1968:
It hurt me to see the American army with bayonets advancing on American boys and girls. But the answer I gave to the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: "Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing – but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organise, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.
Much of Alinsky's advice about to bring about change in modern political climate is now so mainstream that it would hardly be recognised as radical. Although his aims were sometimes grandiose – "We are talking about a mass power organisation that will turn the world into a place where all men and women walk erect.... This means Revolution," he once wrote – Alinsky's legacy in the US is in the techniques he pioneered in creating support for change in America's ghettos.
In an interview with Studs Terkel – part of which can be heard here – Alinsky describes his method in a nutshell, sketching a dialogue with the tenant of poverty-ridden, cockroach-infested housing:
What would happen if you didn't pay your rent? 'What would happen? They'd throw me out, my kids and everybody else. What do you mean?' What would happen if no-one paid their rent over there? 'Well they'd – Jesus, they'd have a lot of trouble throwing us all out, wouldn't they?'
Saul Alinsky did say one thing that even Newt Gingrich would agree with: "Last guys don't finish nice."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2012/jan/24/republican-presidential-nomination-2012-newt-gingrich
No comments:
Post a Comment