Rules For Radicals-The Left’s Playbook

“There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.”

Do you know who said this?  Here’s a hint:  his teachings influenced Barack Obama in his early days of community organizing, as Obama used and taught this man’s methods for community organizing.

His name was Saul Alinsky, and he wrote Rules For Radicals,  a little book containing, well, rules for radicals.  These rules are now used as tactics for training new community organizers and were also used by Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Here are the rules.

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.

I plan on reading this book soon, so that I’ll “know it when I see it.”  I encourage all liberty-loving people to become familiar with this book, as it has been used for decades by the radical left in this country and throughout the world.

Lots to do folks, let’s get busy!

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Tagged as: Barack Obama, Community organizing, conservativism, liberty, Rules For Radicals, Saul Alinsky