But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. Later, he offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school. Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within. Based on what she has actually said and written about Saul Alinsky, to characterize Hillary Clinton as a starry-eyed acolyte of the Rules for Radicals author is a stretch.
Fact Checks. Questionable Quotes. Mostly False About this rating. Organizing begins with the premise that 1 the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; 2 that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and the money [they raise] around a common vision; and 3 that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership—and not one or two charismatic leaders—can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions [and "grassroots" people].
The key to community organizing is that it's not about winning on any one issue. It's about creating broad coalitions, and training community members to conduct hardball campaigns that let them win on lots of issues. One of Alinsky's insights was to realize how many stakeholders there were to organize. He saw that the same grievances connected ordinary citizens, labor unions, churches, small businesses, and more — and if you could somehow get all those groups together, they were almost unstoppable.
And he did get them together. Alinsky didn't just theorize about organizing. He was, himself, an organizer.
A criminologist by training, Alinsky lived in Chicago, and began his work in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in the s. He created the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, a group bringing together unions, religious leaders, and other stakeholders in that area. At its first meeting, Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt writes , the council passed resolutions calling for a new recreation facility, for child nutrition and disease prevention programs, and to ask the Armour meatpacking company to compromise with the nascent meatpackers' union.
The council took on a permanent role in the community, and still exists. Alinsky then scaled up his model: he formed the Industrial Areas Foundation , a still-extant group that helps local groups like the Back of the Yards council organize and conducts trainings for organizers-to-be.
IAF helped spread Alinsky's tactics far beyond Chicago. Alinsky was perhaps best known outside Chicago for his writings, including his first book, Reveille for Radicals , first published in , and Rules for Radicals , which was published shortly before his death. In recent years, however, he's emerged as a central figure in conservative fears about the true beliefs of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Alinsky never identified as a socialist or Communist, but he was a self-professed radical, and a man of the left.
The difference between leftism and liberalism is often elided in American political discussion, but it matters. The fact that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both seriously engaged with his ideas — and that Clinton knew him personally — makes it possible to connect them with an American political tradition well to the left of the mainline, Democratic-party liberalism.
The first wave of conservative criticism of Alinsky, and anxiety over the influence he may have had over Democratic politicians, occurred during the Clinton administration, when Hillary Clinton first rose to prominence.
Clinton wrote her senior thesis about Alinsky, interviewing him in the process. He offered her an organizing job, which she declined in favor of going to Yale Law School, but they stayed in touch afterwards, as the recently revealed letters confirmed.
David Brock — then a prominent conservative journalist, now a key Clinton ally — examined Clinton's ties to Alinsky in some depth in his biography of her, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. He memorably dubbed her "Alinsky's daughter.
The conspiracy theories were supercharged when Clinton asked Wellesley to seal her thesis for the duration of her husband's presidency, which it did. In , access was restored; you can read the thesis through interlibrary loan with Wellesley, at the Wellesley library directly, or on any number of websites to which it's been passed around.
As Barack Obama's candidacy gained strength, and eventually defeated Clinton's, attention shifted to his ties to Alinsky — or, more precisely, to Alinsky-trained organizers. See, for instance:. He was hardly the only conservative host to invoke Alinsky to explain Obama; Monica Crowley, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh also began bringing up Alinsky , with the latter asking, "Has [Obama] ever had an original idea — by that, I mean something not found in The Communist Manifesto?
Has he? Has he simply had an idea not found in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals? The late Andrew Breitbart also promoted the idea that Alinsky laid the blueprint for Obama's presidency, notably attacking the president for appearing on a panel after a play about Alinsky in in the last piece he wrote before passing away.
Before long the criticism spread to presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich, who declared that "Saul Alinsky radicalism is the heart of Obama.
One particularly pervasive theme in conservative criticism of Alinsky is a faulty claim that he dedicated Rules for Radicals to "Lucifer. This tongue-in-cheek riff on Christian mythology is repeated in an interview he granted to Playboy shortly before his death:. His strategy was emulated by the Federal Government in its antipoverty and model-cities programs: the poor have been encouraged to participate in measures for their relief instead of just accepting handouts.
A sharing of power, thinks Alinsky, is what democracy is all about. Where power is lacking, so are hope and happiness. Alinsky seeks power for others, not for himself. His goal is to build the kind of organization that can dispense with his services as soon as possible. Nor does he confine his tactics to the traditionally underprivileged. Although he has largely helped the very poor, he has begun to teach members of the alienated middle classes how to use power to combat increasingly burdensome taxes and pollution.
The Biblical figure is described as "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer. Can't expect Ben Carson to recognize irony or humor. The Clinton campaign has not commented on Carson referencing her ties to Alinsky. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.
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