Revolutionary Ancestors: Sidney & Alinsky Part II

Subtitle: A Science of Revolution.

Don’t look for fundamental principles in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. You won’t find them. To the Left, Alinsky is akin to the crazy uncle locked up in the attic; everyone in the family knows he’s there, yet the family does its best to pretend he doesn’t exist. In her 1969 college thesis, Hillary Rodham admitted frustration in trying to make sense of his inconsistencies. So, as the title implies, Alinsky’s Rules don’t expound on philosophical nostrums, but rather delivers tactics with which to tear down institutions.

The danger of adherence to principles of any sort is that they typically harden into the straightjacket of dogma, and dogma is counter-productive to change. Dogmatic ideology locks its adherents into an unchanging course of thought in a rapidly changing world. Ideology stifles free thought and the creative mind of man. Alinsky was so opposed to dogma, he denied allegiance to, or membership in the communities he organized!

To Alinsky, there is no objective truth. Those who believe they have the truth darken the outside world with cruelty, pain, and injustice.

As opposed to the enduring and timeless principles in our Declaration of Independence, Alinsky’s philosophy goes little further than optimism in change, in revolution. He finds change for the sake of change in an unlikely clause from the Preamble to our Constitution, “to promote the general welfare.” This radical is expert at pulling quotes and phrases from the Bible and Founding era, and then twisting them into dangerous social justice nonsense. As a spellbound Hillary wrote, “His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them.” Just as the best deceptions are built around kernels of truth, Alinsky skillfully warped the tenets of our founding into justification for societal destruction.

Within his framework of revolution is a “future with a purpose,” and a fight “for a better world.” Barf. In Progressive lingo, his is the call for the social justice that pollutes academe, culture, entertainment, and the highest reaches of government. Today, his revolutionary progeny Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, and Susan Rice are generals in a social justice war against America. Despite Hillary’s electoral defeat in 2016, make no mistake; an Alinsky-inspired revolution remains under way. While 2016 slowed it down, its revolutionaries only modified and sharpened their tactics. Instead of advancing the globalist policy goals set forth in her presidential campaign, a defeated Clinton and her cohorts strive to upset, if not stop, the normal workings of a government charged by the people to turn things around, to Make America Great Again.

Where our Founders itemized their grievances against George III in a list of hard indictments, Alinsky’s problems with America were fuzzy, generalized accusations largely against society when he wrote Rules in 1971. They often come across as whining rants from a spoiled child. The radical has the job of organizing people, especially the poor, to move ahead in their eternal search for ill-defined equality, justice, freedom, and peace.

Having, since 1971, corrupted our major institutions, especially K-16 education, America was ready by 2008 to embrace a fellow Chicago street organizer by the name of Barack Hussein Obama. Who can forget his promise (one of the few he kept) to “fundamentally transform America?” While patriotic Americans wondered what in the heck he was talking about, Progressives recognized a perfectly clear promise to institute social justice. What is social justice? To the rational mind, that is a logical question. To the Progressive, it must remain undefined; to do otherwise would establish a dogma, which is the number one no-no for radicals. Radicals strive for social justice, and are comfortable knowing it can never be defined or achieved.

In addition to avoiding dogma, the radical Alinsky community organizer doesn’t have an ideology because ideology requires a prime truth, and the quest for social justice change isn’t a primal truth. Unlike Christianity and Marxism ideologies which changed past societies by building on fundamental truths, the Alinsky radical believes everything is relative and changing. He “is ever on the hunt for the causes of man’s plight,” in an effort “to make sense of an irrational world.” He must constantly examine life, including his own, “to get some idea of what it is all about.” Rather than strive to find God’s plan for him, the compass-less radical subjects himself to never ending distrust of all he sees and understands. Being without an intellectual sheet-anchor, relativism renders the radical perpetually angry and prone to violence.

We cannot underestimate the damage done by Alinsky’s relativism. Sixteen years after the publication of Rules, professor Allan Bloom penned The Closing of the American Mind. As I wrote in a blog post last year, nearly all of Bloom’s freshman students believed truth is relative. No matter their backgrounds, they were unified in their relativism and allegiance to equality. These have replaced the traditional unalienable natural rights that used to be the American basis for a free society. This isn’t the equality of our Framers before God and the Law. Patriots, those stuck in the dogma of America’s founding principles are dangerous. Bloom’s students believed history proved the world was mad. Men were so mad they thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecution, slavery, etc. Don’t bother to correct mistakes. Rather, don’t think about being right at all. Bloom’s college kids of 1987 are the 2017 leftover administrators from the Obama era that stymie and thwart President Trump.

Since everything is relative and the radical’s purpose is continual change, progressives cannot be embarrassed or faulted for changing their minds as circumstances require. For instance, both Senators Clinton and Obama opposed homosexual marriage. At the time, it served their political needs.

In a final confusing note, despite his advocacy of continual revolution, Alinsky opposed violence. He viewed violence as counterproductive. Peaceful protests that disrupt and feature TV footage of police carrying away protesters is the way to change minds. So, the Antifa movement isn’t Alinsky, while the organized verbal confrontations with Senators over the Fourth of July recess are.

In Part III we’ll look at the key to social justice: subversion of the middle-class.

We are the many; our oppressors are the few. Government is the playground of politicians, but the Constitution is ours. Be proactive. Be a Re-Founder. Join Convention of States. Sign our COS Petition.

Sources:
Alinsky, S. (1971). Rules for Radicals – A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Random House.
Bloom, A. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind – How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks.