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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: 240 is Back on October 16, 2015, 07:33:49 PM
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Conservatives just can’t seem to make up their mind about Saul Alinsky.
Was he a tactical genius to be imitated, an agitator whose teachings will undercut the right’s goals, a devil-worshiper leading young conservatives down the path to damnation, or some combination of all three?
The modern right harbors an “almost schizophrenic view of what they can use and learn from Alinsky, and yet he is this totally evil guy,” said Sanford D. Horwitt, author of “Let Them Call Me Rebel,” a biography of Alinsky.
And the debate among conservatives, most of whom had never heard of Alinsky until recently, is only picking up steam nearly four decades after his death in 1972.
Often described as the father of modern community organizing, Alinsky helped poor and working class urban communities around the country push for improved living and working conditions by confronting, satirizing or negotiating with the establishment, as well as by building diverse coalitions including small businesses, labor unions and religious groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church.
He’s long been a hero on the left, but the right’s fascination with him dates to the 2008 presidential campaign, when lots of attention was paid to Alinsky’s impact on leading Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton, who wrote her college thesis about him, and Barack Obama, who trained in — and utilized — his community organizing techniques.
Alinsky strictly resisted political labels and affiliations, once explaining “if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated.” But conservatives began invoking his name as something of an epithet to sully the left’s tactics as sneaky, underhanded, unethical — or Marxist.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Alinsky taking a place alongside top contemporary conservative bogeymen like Michael Moore, George Soros and Jane Fonda. His seminal 1971 guide to organizing, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals,” became a must-read for a new wave of conservative activists who mobilized — many for the first time — in opposition to the ambitious, big-government agenda pushed by President Obama and the Democratic Congress.
In the opening lines of “Rules,” Alinsky described its mission — and his approach — thus: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. '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."
Suddenly, the book was being touted as a way to beat the left at its own game by everyone from 69-year-old former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose nonprofit group FreedomWorks has emerged as a leading Washington bulwark for the tea party movement, to 25-year-old James O’Keefe, the self-styled activist investigative journalist who last year became a conservative hero for secretly recording employees of the liberal community-organizing group ACORN apparently offering advice on how to set up a brothel, to tea party leaders seeking to disrupt congressional town halls.
But in the last couple months, there’s been something of a backlash on the right, both as a result of the arrest of O’Keefe and three colleagues during a botched plot to embarrass Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, and because some conservatives are questioning whether Alinsky’s ideas and tactics — and, to some extent, the tea party movement as a whole — are intellectually consistent with American conservatism.
David Brooks, The New York Times’s leading conservative columnist, this month cited the tea party crowd’s embrace of Alinksy in blasting the movement’s “self-righteousness and naïve radicalism” and declaring it “radically anticonservative.”
Veteran Republican operative John Feehery then declared that when conservatives adopt Alinsky’s tactics, “they help further the cause of the left, which is social instability.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2010/03/right-loves-to-hate-imitate-alinsky-034751#ixzz3omvi64iU
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POLITICO NAILED IT!
They said Repubs can WIN in 2016 by employing Saul Alinsky tactics... and now, TRUMP IS USING THEM.
Very interesting. I hope all the getbiggers yelling about Obama using these will be equally loud in condemning Trump for using them.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2015/09/13/debate-prep-donald-trumps-12-radical-campaign-secrets/#5c6854f3f802
Trump is employing twelve of the thirteen tactics Saul Alinsky set forth in his classic work Rules for Radicals.
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You're a man in the know. Not trolling, but do you keep track of the times you're wrong as well?
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You're a man in the know. Not trolling, but do you keep track of the times you're wrong as well?
You're not trolling but he sure the hell is. He all but admitted in another thread he was a communist or at least believed in communism.
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You're not trolling but he sure the hell is. He all but admitted in another thread he was a communist or at least believed in communism.
swear on your foot that I said that.
I said it's not my place to judge if the people of Iowa choose a communist. I said "making a man vote against his beliefs" could be an example of communism.
I do NOT believe in communism - I think it's fatally flawed by definition - people have no inherent desire to work, therefore in EVERY society, past or modern, communism FAILS every time. I've said it before. Just like socialism, people just don't work when 1) they don't have to 2) once they earn big, the lazy people get it anyway.
I do take offense to "he was a communist or at least believed in communism." I love to debate but shit, man, I'm not a communist, and not because of any political party bullshit. Communism does not work. It's a fairly tale told by people who want to take wealth from the masses and distribute to govt-dependent serfs, addicted to the teet of a massive beaucracy govt.