The New Criterion: ‘Organized’ Crime

(h/t: Bumr50)

By Andrew C. McCarthy

On the President’s favorite philosopher, Saul Alinsky.

It is a matter of no small amusement for the journalist and agitator Nicholas von Hoffman that his beloved mentor, Saul Alinsky, learned the craft of “organizing” at the feet of Chicago’s most notorious mobsters. This was nearly eighty years before the self-proclaimed radical became a household name, having posthumously inspired an up-and-coming organizer who went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Alinsky’s entrée to the Al Capone gang (which, tellingly, he called a “public utility”) was neither his ruthlessness nor his penchant for rabble-rousing, though a surfeit of both qualities surely impressed his friend Frank (“the Enforcer”) Nitti. It was, instead, his academic credentials.

A freshly minted doctor of criminology from the University of Chicago, Alinsky sought out, bonded with, and closely studied anti-social types. His experience proved invaluable in his lifelong pursuit of “social justice,” the organizer’s panacea. Alinsky even found a Depression-era job at Joliet’s hard-knocks penitentiary, assessing the suitability of inmates for parole. Not every crook had the panache of the Enforcer, and the work soon bored Alinsky, whose promiscuous mind was easily given to boredom. Yet there was an oasis in this desert: the evaluation of an occasional con man. In an unintentionally hilarious vignette, von Hoffman relates that “one of the flim-flam men initiated Alinsky into the secrets of his trade.” We’re never told to which “his” the trade-secrets in question belonged—the flim-flammer or the organizer. It turns out not to matter. They’re both frauds.

Fraud is, in fact, the leitmotif of Radical, von Hoffman’s adoring portrait of Alinsky.[1] This oughtn’t be taken the wrong way: Radical is an enjoyable, sometimes even an endearing, read. Von Hoffman is an engaging writer, especially during the stretches when he manages to rein in his seething disdain for “teabaggers,” “the rich,” and other Americans who actually like America. There was a self-conscious coldness about Alinsky, who urged disciples to nurture what von Hoffman describes as the “cold anger that fosters calculated and measured action.” This “Alinsky aesthetic” held social workers and other idealistic progressives in nearly as low esteem as smug capitalists. It lauded the good sense of Saint Paul (a model organizer in the agnostic Alinsky’s eyes), for leaving “the poor to Jesus while he went after people with at least a little substance.” It’s a stripe of bloodless cynicism that will ring a bell for those who’ve closely watched the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Yet von Hoffman’s admiration for his subject illuminates the fire that burned within this “picador in the political corrida,” whose “irreverence was his banderilla.”

No, fraud is not a reason to take a pass on Radical but a cause to read it and be astonished. Even here, in this most affectionate of depictions, there can be no camouflaging that an “organizer” is a fraud through and through—in his tactics, in his motives, and in his carefully crafted self-image.

Take the organizer’s underlying premise: he presents himself as a builder of “small-d democracy.” “Democracy” is a codeword. To the unwary, it is drained of meaning, vaguely connoting a benign call to freedom and self-government. But for the revolutionary—and that’s what Alinsky’s radical is about, revolution—a democrat is the heroic Jacobin pitted in a fight to the finish against the evil, moneyed, ruling aristocrat. Life in America is a Manichean war in which the democrat inhabits the side of the angels.

Angels matter, by the way. Alinsky began Rules for Radicals—which was originally to be called Rules for the Revolution—with an “over the shoulder acknowledgment” of Lucifer as the “very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” Inconvenient, and thus glossed over by Alinsky and von Hoffman, is the minor detail that the kingdom “won” by the fallen angel was . . . hell—a trenchant observation from the former radical turned patriot, David Horowitz, who acidly adds, “Typical of radicals not to notice the ruin they have left behind.” [emphasis mine]

[…]

Once you understand the organizer’s game, everything else falls into place. He is in a duel to the death with unprecedented prosperity: a system in which the entrenched interests are formidable, in which the vast middle is more interested in being an entrenched interest than a revolutionary, and in which the riff-raff—with unemployment “insurance” now stretching 99 weeks and “poverty” measured by how few flat-screen TVs one can afford—have yet to realize how bad they have it. With the odds stacked against him, the organizer needs one thing and one thing alone: power. For organizing is not about improving the lives of the destitute. Saving them, von Hoffman observes, is a drain on the organizer’s sparse resources and energy. And for all the high-minded twaddle about democracy, it, too, turns out to be readily dispensable. “Democracy,” wrote Alinsky, “is not an end; it is the best political means available toward the achievement of [the organizer’s] values.” The organizer’s highest value is empowering the organizer.

Read the rest.

Evil for the sake of evil

Following in the footsteps of Faust, Saul Alinsky learned from the Underworld in more than one sense of that word. Alinsky, in turn, became a primary mentor and role model to Barack Hussein Obama.

I acknowledge that it is rather unusual for evildoers to boast so openly about this particular source of “inspiration.” Maybe they expect to garner a certain cachet in radical chic circles. Be that as it may, no matter how entertaining that book supposedly is, I do not plan to read Radical. Neither von Hofmann nor any other evil pseudointellectual of the radical left deserves a single penny of my hard-earned wages.