Saul Alinski is the author of Rules for Radicals, a manual filled with guerrilla tactics for the left. It is based on the assumption that power is almost entirely in the hands of the capitalist class and is projected on behalf of middle class values. The left, therefore, can use only a hit-and-run approach if it is to have any effect at all.

McCarthyism is the use of slander and fabricated evidence to take down an opponent. That there really were communists in the State Department, just as McCarthy said, is neither here nor there. That he was himself the victim of the tactics he never used but which have been associated with his name is one of history’s great ironies. The name is used by everyone, shamefully even by those on the conservative side of politics.

But as some kind of vengeance, “Alinski” is now becoming a term of abuse in the same way as “McCarthy”. This is from Steve Hayward at Powerline, The Alinksy Way of Governing. There he wrote:

My School of Public Policy colleague (and top statewide GOP vote-getter in California last November) Pete Peterson has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on “The Alinsky Way of Governing” that details the degrading effect Alinskyist politics is having on today’s generation of liberals. (Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on the greatness of Alinsky.)

The article at the WSJ is indeed called “The Alinsky Way of Governing” [reprinted here]. In the article he specifically recognises the crucial difference between the original and our perceptions today.

This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger.

The argument Peterson makes is that where the left is in a position of power, it should foresake the use of Alinsky tactics, which I’m afraid, is about as absurd as anything I have ever heard said. No one will ever give up what works. This is his final para:

What has happened is that a generation of American politicians who came of age during Saul Alinsky’s lifetime has moved into positions of institutional power that he so often derided as “the enemy.” They are showing an inability to leave behind Alinsky’s tactics that were intended for the weak against the strong. Civil discourse and academic freedom suffer while the “Prince” becomes more powerful.

It is indescribable how ridiculous I think this is. But what I do find encouraging is the metaphor that has now been exposed. Alinskyite tactics now have a meaning, not entirely in keeping with Alinsky’s own views, but very definite all the same.

Alinsky tactics were designed most importantly to make bourgeois society live up to its core values. This it could do because conservatives actually do have values. The left, however, has none, only tactics. The left stands for no specific moral virtues which are based on self-restraint and personal responsibility. Nothing the left ever seeks can be found, for example, in The Ten Commandments. Charity is a Judeo-Christian virtue, not a socialist virtue. Socialism seeks redistribution instead, which is theft and plunder, but pretends it is doing so in the name of equity and justice. It has no clue how to create value, nor does it have a set of values to base one’s life.

An Alinsky tactic is to lie on behalf of some socialist enterprise. The left should have this meaning of Alinsky tied to every pore of its misbegotten philosophy of hatred and destruction.