The Lucifer Refererence

Last night, Ben Carson said at the GOP Convention:

One of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors, was Saul Alinsky [CROWD BOOES]. Her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky. This was someone that she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently. Now, interestingly enough, let me tell you something about Saul Alinsky. He wrote a book called “Rules For Radicals”. On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, the original radical who gained his own kingdom. Now think about that. This is a nation where our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, talks about certain inalienable rights that come from our creator. This is a nation where our Pledge of Allegiance says we are “one nation, under God”. This is a nation where every coin in our pocket and every bill in our wallet says “In God We Trust”. So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that.

Where does this reference come from?  The opening pages of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals includes this epigraph from Alinsky himself:

“Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer.”

(Other epigraphs on the page are from Hillel and Thomas Paine.)

A 2014 survey found that Republicans were significantly more likely to say that Satan causes most evil in the world, a reflection of religiosity in the GOP

Troubled Agencies Will Carry Out the Executive Action

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will be carrying out the president's executive action on immigration.  According to a new survey by the Partnership for Public Service, which ranked federal bureaucracies by employee satisfaction and commitment, DHS is the worst large agency.  (NASA is the best.)

The Partnership also ranked 314 agency subcomponents.  US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which will have much of the responsibility within DHS, ranks 91st.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ties for last place, at 314th.

Alinsky Tactics

Alinsky's 13 Rules of Power Tactics:

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.   

NY Times report on Christian Coalition (8/2/99):

 And now even its prior assertions to such widespread strength are in doubt. Former national leaders who have recently left the group said in interviews that the coalition, as critics have long suspected, never commanded the numbers it claimed. The former leaders, who said they spoke because they were resentful that their work had been undermined, revealed some of the techniques that they said were used to inflate the coalition's power and reach.

The coalition, these former leaders say, distorted the size of its base by keeping thousands of names of dead people, wrong addresses and duplicates on its list of supporters; printed millions of voter guides that the coalition leaders expected would never be distributed, and hired temporary workers to look busy in the mail room and phone banks to impress reporters and camera crews.

In tours of coalition headquarters, in Chesapeake, Va., for news people, former staff members say, a roving group of employees leapfrogged ahead of reporters to fill empty offices and telephones.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.   

Consider the fate of Occupy Wall Street. 

 Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through to its counterside. According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame. 

Richard M. Nixon: 

 Politics is battle, and the best way to fire up your troops is to rally them against a visible opponent on the other side of the field. If a loyal supporter will fight hard for you, he will fight twice as hard against your enemies

A caution from St. Thomas More:

Another Fake Quotation

In Rules for Radicals (p. 54 of Vintage edition), Saul Alinsky wrote:

In all the reasoning found in The Federalist Papers, no point is so central and agreed upon as "Rich and poor alike are prone to act upon impulse rather than pure reason and to narrow conceptions of self-interest . . ." To question the force of self-interest that pervades all areas of political life is to refuse to see man as he is, to see him only as we would like him to be.

Search the Federalist Papers.  There is no such passage. Alinsky either made it up or mistook his own paraphrase for a direct quotation.

It is true that Madison emphasized the importance of interest as a political motive.  From Federalist 10:

• As  long as the connection subsists between his reason and his  self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal  influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which  the latter will attach themselves. 
• But  the most common and durable source of factions has been the various  and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who  are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

But Madison thought that there was much more to human nature.  From Federalist 55:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.

RETURN TO ALINSKY INTRODUCTION 

Alinsky: An Introduction

In an interview, Alinsky discussed his early life.

Hillary Rodham (Clinton) thesis.



Relativism and Interest -- From Rules for Radicals:

• An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth -- truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.  He is a political relativist (pp. 10-11).
• All great leaders, including Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln and Jefferson, always invoked "moral principles" to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of "freedom," "equality of mankind," "a law higher than man-made law," and so on. This even held under circumstances of national crises when it was universally assumed that the end justified any means. All effective actions require the passport of morality (p. 43-44).
• The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 percent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 percent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust. Our cause had to be all shining justice, allied with the angels; theirs had to be all evil, tied to the Devil; in no war has the enemy or the cause ever been gray. Therefore, from one point of view the omission was justified; from the other, it was deliberate deceit (p. 28).
• In all the reasoning found in The Federalist Papers, no point is so central and agreed upon as "Rich and poor alike are prone to act upon impulse rather than pure reason and to narrow conceptions of self-interest . . ." To question the force of self-interest that pervades all areas of political life is to refuse to see man as he is, to see him only as we would like him to be (p. 54).  Where did this Federalist quotation come from?

Organizing

• Lincoln was an organizer
• Obama's commandments

Alinsky's ideal elements (pp. 72-80):

• Curiosity
• Irreverence. Curiosity and irreverence go together...
• Imagination..
• A sense of humor. 
• A bit of a blurred vision of a better world.
• An organized personality. 
• A well-integrated political schizoid.
• Ego.
• A free and open mind, and political relativity.
• Ability to create the new out of the old.

The Town Hall Dearth

No Labels reports:

Is your representative holding a public town hall meeting this August recess? No Labels called every office, and only 40% are scheduling open town hall meetings. It’s a sad sign of the state of affairs when our elected officials don’t have time to meet with their constituents.

No Labels activists spoke to all 430 current members of the House of Representatives to find that only 175* of them scheduled meetings. The results of the phone survey also reveal that members of both parties share the blame, with 67% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans stating they had no town hall meetings scheduled for the recess period.

*UPDATE: Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) is holding town hall meetings this month, as is Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

Last week, USA Today provided some background:

The 2009 protests over health care not only pushed the Tea Party activism to the front lines of American politics, it also changed how members of Congress interact with their constituents. And it put the sleepy August recess on the political calendar, transforming town hall meetings into made-for-YouTube events.

Matt Kibbe, the director of the Tea Party umbrella group FreedomWorks, had been organizing protests at town hall-style meetings since the mid-1990s. What made the 2009 protests possible, he said, was the ease of alerting volunteers by e-mail.

This year, a website promoted by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck gives location information, talking points and advice: "Make sure that a Tea Partier is the first person to the microphone ," the "August Action" kit says.

Even liberal groups begrudgingly admire the Tea Party tactic, and are replicating it.

"The Tea Party managed to really spook Congress with a really smart, organized effort. After a week of aggressive town-hall disruptions, they managed to create a narrative about the health care law that stuck," said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group launched in 1998.

The forums have the ability to show a depth of passion on an issue that e-mail petitions — once the staple of MoveOn's organizing — can't convey, he said.

...

Now, town-hall-style meetings are less publicized, Kibbe said. He worries his town-hall strategy may become a victim of its own success. It awakened opponents to the power of the strategy, and may discourage some members from holding open meetings. Telephone town halls, webcasts and business luncheons allow members of Congress to control the audience and the questions.

"If that's a fact, it's too bad, because it's one of the few ways I could use to know what ordinary people in my district thought," said former representative Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who heads the Center on Congress at Indiana University. "So much of the problem with our politics today is that politicians tend to interact with homogenous groups, and they therefore misinterpret a mandate."

Protesters on the left and right have drawn inspiration from Saul Alinsky. But so have their targets. Alinsky wrote:

Once a specific tactic is used, it ceases to be outside the experience of the enemy. Before long he devises countermeasures that void the previous effective tactic. Recently the head of a corporation showed me the blueprint of a new plant and pointed to a large ground-floor area: “Boy, have we got an architect who is with it!” he chuckled. “See that big hall? That’s our sit-in room! When the sit-inners come they’ll be shown in and there will be coffee, T.V., and good toilet facilities — they can sit here until hell freezes over.

Saul Alinsky

Today would have been Saul Alinsky's 101st birthday. Alinsky was a community organizer whose followers left a major impact on urban politics. President Obama received his early training in community organizing from Alinsky disciples. An article in The New Republic describes the Alinsky connection. Although Alinsky identified with the political left, some conservatives have been taking their cue from him.

Alinsky taught very effective political tactics, but his philosophy of politics was incomplete. He argued that politics rested entirely on self-interest, but his own career was a dramatic example of someone acting on his own vision of the public good.