Beware: 'Rules For Radicals'

[Shawn Swanson]

With this blog entry, I wanted to outline some of the tactics, techniques, and procedures that are commonly employed by your typical 'community organizers' and other politicians that find Alinsky and his writings to be an "inspiration."

Fantastic insight can be found in the following article excerpt concerning the Saul Alinsky playbook that's in full swing use with the present administration in D.C. on so many levels...


From Labor Unrest and Public Policy

http://www.psrf.org/issues/rules.jsp

What every public official should know about Saul Alinsky's:

Rules For Radicals

...Here, therefore, is a thumbnail sketch of some of Saul Alinsky's "Rules" taken from his book "Rules for Radicals" published in 1971 by Vintage Books.

Alinsky emphatically states that the end justifies the means but cautions that extreme means are only justified in certain situations. Here are Alinsky's rules to test whether the means are ethical.

1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.

2. In war the end justifies almost any means.

3.Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.

4. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.

5. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.

6. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.

7. The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.

8. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.

9. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.

10. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

Alinsky also had rules for what he called "power tactics" or the means used to "take." He described it as "how the Have Nots can take power away from the Haves."

Here are his rules of power tactics.

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people.

3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.

4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

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

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Even a cursory review of these rules for radicals reveals that an activist schooled in them will have no compunction about using almost any tactic in a conflict with a public agency. In fact, radicals must often create issues to stir up problems in order to radicalize their potential followers.

With careful forethought any of these tactics can be defeated, but in order to do so one must sometimes play by the same rules as the radicals.

For example, the tactic that seems to shock public officials the most is the personalization of the attack. For the radical, it is not sufficient to attack the "administration" or the "board" they must attack a particular administrator or board member. This is "outside their experience." They are not accustomed to having questions raised about their personal character because of differences of opinion on public policy questions.

Public officials may seem to be trapped by this tactic because personally attacking an individual is "against their rules." If they attack the "union," the organizer can then turn this around by telling his followers, or potential followers, that they have been attacked or insulted by the individual. Using the "pick it, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it" tactic, the reaction must be against a particular union activist, no matter how distasteful this might be.

Alinsky says that, even if the decision is a 48% to 52% one, once it is made, the opposition becomes "100 per cent devil." He calls any effort to be objective or fair about your opponent as "political idiocy."...