The Ghost of Saul Alinsky

Last August I attended a dinner with the CEO's of a number of major US corporations who unsurprisingly were staunchly Republican but in the main had not yet jumped on the Trump bandwagon with one vocal exception.

She was rabidly for Trump and equally ferocious in her denunciation of Obama, roundly criticizing him as a disciple of Saul Alinsky.

To be fair I did not know Mr Alinsky. When I questioned just what it was about him that she objected to she accused him of being a radical organizer. When pushed, she could not substantiate her accusations as she had never read anything written by him and it was obvious she was just parroting what someone else had said.

Given the setting I decided not to indulge in what would certainly be a difficult discussion about someone that neither of us had read and chose instead to purchase one of his books and try and understand what all the fuss was about. The next day I duly went to the bookstore and bought a copy of the "Rules for Radicals", published in 1971.

He is essentially a community organizer with a Marxist/socialist bent believing that our society could be transformed for the better. This of course explains why he is on the receiving end of so much abuse.


For the record the book was a great read. It had a list of 12 rules which Glen Beck thought so powerful he put them on his website.

His rules are not left or right wing. They are simply how to go about achieving your goals. They are opportunistic. They believe the end is more important than the means. They are harshly realistic and yet simple. But most importantly they require that the leaders of a movement understand what they want to achieve and how to mobilize a constituency in reaching their targets.

Glen Beck, annoying as he might be understood what Alinsky was about. He also understood how dangerous these rules for radicals could be in the wrong hands. Bizarrely I would posit that Beck was equally distraught that Obama had used the rules so effectively to get elected twice, and that Trump, or at least his advisers had also read the rules and appeared to understand how to apply them.

Obama, like most left of center politicians/democrats, had focused on the demographic shifts taking place in the USA and was able to mobilize the myriad minorities into a coherent block paving the way to the presidency as well as a democratic election the first time round.

But that is where Obama made his gravest error. The single largest "minority" in the USA are women. But women are not monolithic. And just as the largest group in the USA are ethnically white, approximately 50% of that majority are women.

And when push comes to shove white women vote with white men. The Tea Party saw this.

Alinsky foresaw it in 1971.

He realized that the middle class college radicals were rebelling against their parents, taking up the banner of the minorities in confrontation with the "silent majority". That backlash brought us Nixon, Reagan and eventually Trump.

But I get ahead of myself.

Throw into the mix the decline of the middle class towards working class at the same time that the captains of industry and their lieutenants are busy feathering their nests and you suddenly find the white "majority" circling their wagons against the encroaching minorities and the economic and political elites. Trump understood this. He understood that the silent majority had lost faith in the economic and political elites. They felt threatened that they were being squeezed in the middle and that no one had their (white American) interest at heart.

Of course neither does Trump. But that is irrelevant.

The liberal establishment thought demographics would win the day. The populists knew to exploit the (in part valid) concerns of the white middle/working class knowing full well that they would not be able to make good on half of what they promised. Indeed, an analysis of Trump's campaign by the German Public News agency found that 70% of his rhetoric was untrue, although they failed to recognize that this was irrelevant.

While the liberal elites focused on the inanity of Trump, belittling his support base, Trump happily followed one of the main tenets of Alinsky- the end justifies the means.

If your lies feed into the desires of the electorate you need to win an election, why tell them the truth?

We can't castigate every Trump supporter as an uneducated white racist. Some are. But many are truly filled with existential fear.

Trump believes it is a zero sum game and so has embraced the white majority at the expense of basically every minority.

The challenge is to create a policy that understands there is enough room in the boat for everyone and minorities are not the problem....