Америка, мои товарищи

This year we commemorate the 90th birthday of Saul Alinsky.  He is generally credited as the father of community organizing, a quasi-profession that received a lot of attention but not a lot of analysis when candidate Barack Obama touted his experience as a community organizer in his run for president.

Last week my brother emailed me some of the wit and wisdom of Saul Alinsky. In 1971, shortly before he died,  Alinsky wrote a primer on community organizing called Rules for Radicals--a legacy to leave college and high school students at the time to carry on his work. He left them gems such as this: "The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."

Here are some of his rules for community organizing:

• Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point. The idea that judgment is relative, based on current events, is at the heart of the judicial activism  which leftists love to embrace, and which gave us Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court justice.

• In war the end justifies almost any means. This is the philosophy that brought us Lenin and Stalin. But it was taught to a generation of students 38 years ago.

• You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.  The idea that morality is relative and only useful to accomplish some other agenda is the backbone of modern liberalism.



Saul Alinsky believed that America was  a zero-sum game--that one man's gain must be another
man's loss. He was sightless to the vision of America. He failed to see that in this country there are no guarantees, just a lot of opportunity. He walked past and ignored the objective standards that hold us together as a nation. Worst of all, he failed to see the unbounded capacity for goodness in America and all its people. 



He was the New American Bolshevik. Someone for whom morality was relative. Someone who believed not in a nation of laws, but in the law of relativism--that the law meant whatever you needed it to mean at a particular point in time. 


Because of this he believed the political end justified the means for getting there.

 I bring this up as we wait for September and the final act of our national healthcare debate. Many of the old liberal "bulls" in Congress--the Waxmans, the Nadlers, the Millers the Pelosis--came of age in the 1960s  and 1970s at a time when Alinsky passed the torch to a new generation of radicals. Largely white, middle class, well educated radicals.  People who for 15 years tore at the fabric of this country until conservatives slowly regained a balance in government, a balance that lasted for 20 years. 



For these old bulls, stamping healthcare with the mark of socialism will be their crowning achievement, a return to the glory days. But for America it will mark more than a step back in time. It will begin a descent into a place from which there is no return. A place of moral relativism repugnant to both gods and laws. A place of pessimism, defeatism and division. For if a small minority can take away our right of medical privacy and independence, it can take away most other rights as well. 

Gerald Ford said a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything you  have. 

That's the America of Saul Alinsky and the old bulls.

Just thought you might like to know.