The Issue is Never the Issue

From the New Patriot Journal:

Who is this Alinsky guy that Glen Beck keeps working himself into a frenzy over and what is all the brouhaha? Saul Alinsky was a radical community organizer in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Alinsky was first and foremost a revolutionary. To Alinsky, the goal always was social revolution, but he rejected the failed revolutionary strategies of the old left communists and the new left anarchists. He perfected the art of community organizing as a means to the end; the end being social revolution.


Alinsky was a mastermind in his realm. He was perhaps the most well known revolutionary agitator since the Adams boys mounted soap boxes on the Boston Common. He taught radicals that “the issue is never the issue”. It is simply one means to the end result, revolution. He preached that issues were for liberals, self serving moralists and useful idiots. The only thing that mattered was what successfully contributed to the final goal. It isn’t so much that “the end justifies the means” as the means only have value if they contribute to the end.

Near the end of his life Alinsky attempted to explain to Weatherman type radicals in the sixties why running around screaming ‘Off the pig’ was an exercise in movement suicide and eventually would end in some self righteous proclamation of “At least I tried” before they retreated back into the system to become stockbrokers, which is pretty much what the left did in the seventies. There were exceptions that eventually adopted the Alinsky methodology like the terrorist bombers William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, ex Weatherman Jeff Jones of the Apollo Alliance, Van Jones – the self proclaimed green communist and various new left deserters that settled in to academia in the seventies to radicalize youth from the bully pulpit of a tenured professorship like SDS Founder, Todd Gitlin at Columbia University, the infamous fake Indian and plagiarist, Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado and ex Communist Party members, Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker at UC Santa Cruz.

The “Global Warming Movement” is a perfect example of “the issue is never the issue”. The movement has nothing to do with ending global warming and everything to do with organizing and radicalizing the masses toward the end goal, social revolution; as does the feminist movement, the gay liberation movement and the black liberation movement. Alinsky writes in Rules for Radicals.

“Remember, once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it is a short natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.”

What Alinsky is saying is that the issue (global warming - nuclear winter - healthcare as a human right) is irrelevant. Just get them moving. Once they are in motion, it is then a simpler task to direct that motion toward the ultimate goal, revolution.

Americans did not understand how fully enveloped Obama and his political machine were in the Alinsky philosophy. Many of them were Alinsky disciples. Obama taught Alinsky theory at the college level. He taught ACORN trainees how to organize people using Alinsky principles. The Alinsky method of attack was the driving reason Obama and his machine were so much better organized than the Clintons and the republicans. Early on in the primary season when Hillary was a consensus shoe in for the nomination, people had no real experience with and understanding of the explosive like growth and power of a grassroots movement. Ultimately everyone did.

One could make that same claim about the tea party movement. Beware the political wildfire. It can, overnight, shift from organizing bus brigades for town hall meetings to a dynamic force for historical change. This young movement isn’t there yet, but a small wind can push a campfire into a wildfire in an eye blinking instant. Even without a centrally focused apparatus, look at what this movement has accomplished already in barely a year. Whether this movement has staying power depends upon it developing leadership and the character and politics of that leadership.

The upper west side elitists that write for the NY Times treat the tea party movement like a cold sore, inconvenient but temporary and curable. I am always amazed at the arrogance of intellectuals, particularly progressive intellectuals. Liberals, by their nature, believe that an enlightened government can solve social and economic issues better than the populace can on their own, which is why they believe in nanny state social engineering, but intellectuals exclusively believe only they can unravel the vast quandaries of the day. They operate on the belief you are too stupid to understand complicated political tribulations and should leave such complex dilemmas for them to resolve and they wear that arrogance like drug store cologne. Intellectuals stare down their noses at anyone who oppose their views and treat them as not even worthy of a response. We have all heard the phrase “The science is in” from the global warming gurus, which is nothing more than a cowardly rejection of debate. They gleefully proclaim Sara Palin an incompetent bimbo. They couldn’t be more wrong. Her rebuff of inbred republican party politics wasn’t an act of suicide, it was an act of genius. She is simply mimicking Obama and without realizing it, adopting the Alinsky model. You see you can get bigger using the republican party apparatus, but if you want to be BIG, you need a movement. And there it is right in front of everyone’s noses, that pesky tea party thing. Of course, the intellectual dilettantes on the left dismiss it as a bunch of red neck flag waiving, war mongering, gun toting McCarthyite Neanderthals and many professional republican party politicians are so scared of these citizen soldiers they avoid them like pit bulls on the sidewalk.

My advise to Citizen Palin and the tea party movement is don’t get complacent. Now is not the time to sit on your laurels. Now is the time to ramp it up.

yb…

(Neal Grover is a free lance political contributor and in the sixties and seventies was an anti war radical, grassroots organizer, communist revolutionary and union agitator. He writes under the name Young Brigham and can be reached at ybthepatriot@gmail.com