RANDOM THOTS

RULES for RADICALS by SAUL ALINSKY – THE WAY AHEAD

Today we add Commentary to the final chapter of Rules for Radical

If you have read the full review you have gained insights that few others have into an important part of the political world as it is played out in America today.  You will grasp the political element behind Republican ridicules of Obama and his teleprompter and Joe Biden’s antics.  It becomes clear why the Democrats came up with the slogan “Republican War on Women”.  You understand that compromise is difficult because it is a solution.  And solutions deprive one or both sides of an issue that could be used to their advantage as long as it remains unresolved.  Rules for Radicals is a simple book but a highly enlightening one when you see how the author’s teachings are manifested time and again in current events.

Synopsis of the chapter entitled The Way Ahead
The middle class is the largest group in America. The focus, now and in the future, must be on winning the middle class.

These “are a fearful people, who feel threatened on all sides:”. “Seeking some meaning in life, they turn to an extreme chauvinism and become defenders of the ‘American’ faith”. “They don’t know what, if anything, they can do. This is the job for today’s radical – to fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame to fight”.

Students who come to college from middle class backgrounds must be taught to reject their parent’s values and way of life as “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt”. No one is better equipped to organize, agitate and convert the middle class than those who have escaped it.

Commentary
How could this college professor possibly have developed such a dismally incorrect perception of the vast middle class? Psychological projection would account for it. According to Sigmund Freud, projection is a defense mechanism where a person “projects” their own unwanted motivations, desires, fears, feelings and opinions onto someone else – if most everyone else feels and acts with the same fears and emotions that I have then there can be nothing wrong with me.

Also note the lightly veiled contempt for American ideals expressed by adding cynical quotation marks around the words American faith. The author has no faith in this, his country. In fact, disdain for America is a theme that recurs again and again throughout the book. It should not be surprising to see the same attitude toward America coming from Barack and Michelle Obama because it was the Alinsky model of community organizing that Barack followed and briefly taught to ACORN activists in Chicago.

There many things very sad about this closing chapter. The author ends his work with the same hopeless view that he began it. The professor’s only vision for the way ahead is to the drag America’s youth down into the same hellhole he has created for himself. Presumably, then they would fight for…, fight for what? The author never says. I submit they would fight for those very things they so soundly rejected. But they would fight the opportunity to take them, not for the opportunity to earn them.