President Obama will hold a town hall meeting on health care in Portsmouth, NH, this afternoon. Will we see a civil and reasoned debate or the typical thuggery to which we've become accustomed of late? I'm betting on (and hoping for; the iconography could be pretty revealing) the latter. Speaking of which, the Washington Independent's David Wiegel has a great piece on the patron saint of the Republican "Just Shout No" movement. Turns out, it's radical organizer Saul Alinsky!
Alinsky has found a thriving and surprising fan club in the modern conservative movement. Leahy is one of many "Tea Party" activists who have latched onto "Rules for Radicals" as a blueprint for a counter-revolution, a campaign of robust challenges to President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress that is playing out nearly every day of the August recess in noisy town hall meetings. "Alinsky-cons" have taken the union organizer's "13 rules for power tactics" and "11 rules to test whether power tactics are ethical" and found a strategy that, they believe, is chipping away at the momentum for national health care reform. When they flummox representatives with chants, or laugh out loud at their attempts to explain their votes, many "Tea Party" activists say they're cribbing from Alinsky.The ironies here are thick and rich. Obama himself was famously trained in the methods of Alinsky during his days as a community organizer. The idea that conservatives are associating themselves with the tactics of a longtime boogeyman to the right is yet another example of the party's lack of ideas. And besides, Alinsky disciple Gregory Galluzzo tells Wiegel, they're doing it wrong. If you just go around calling people assholes," he says, "you're not going to get anything done." Which is pretty much what they want, no?
The quote from Galluzzo shows why leftish community organizing has accomplished approximately nothing over the decades. Daley isn't a fascist, but he *is* the enemy, and you're not going to get anywhere by working "with" him. Force him to do the right thing, maybe. But as soon as you see him as something of an ally, he's won in the long term.
In related news, I think that Ralph Reed learned a lot from Gramsci.
Maybe I could make some money selling out and consulting with the right on other left-wing literature. "Notes on Class Struggle from Above, after Karl Marx."
Republicans have a stranglehold on irony. Their anti-health care icon, Kenneth Gladney, is uninsured and seeking donations to pay for care for injuries he sustained while he protested against health care reform.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/10/gladney-uninsured/
*bangs head against desk.
Also: conservative radicals = LOL.
I'm not surprised; I always saw Karl Rove as a very unpleasant sort of Leninist (seeing Leninism as a methodology of power attainment and not a set of ideological beliefs as I do).
Matt Taibbi has an excellent bit in his book Flogging the Donkeys or whatever it's called, all about seeing soviet propaganda recreated in the US. Having lived in china, back when it was more commie, I totally agree. The military pageantry, the throw-away colloquial use of terms like "patriotism" and "freedom." The flag iconography repeated everywhere from special edition license plates to the fox news backdrop to lapel pins on all politicians. the fervor of the people for all things pageantry, like 2 returned journalists deplaning, over substantive hard-to-understand things like health care...
Except that is backwards. The US was the first state founded solely on ideology. Both the Soviet Union and Maoist China were attempts at imposing an ideological state on old nations. The USA is the real thing, an ideology without a nation. Pat Buchanan asked whether we're a nation or an economy. But the answer has always been that we're an economy, and have never been a nation. The USA is a more radical invention than most people suppose.
(By an ideological state, I mean one whose form is deduced from first principles.)
Very interesting point. And I agree about the economy part (if more people saw the US this way things would make more sense). I think though of the comparison that the US didn;t think about itself as a cohesive nation for years after its founding and it didn't really have a tradition of jingoistic "patriotic" for-show nationalism at the national level until very recently, like the cold war. Even during the "unite the nation" civil war period, individual states were still seen by the people as the main forms of government.. with militias fighting reporting to a Union leader but still identifying as a state org.. kinda like a modern UN action.
Had Napoleon not been ready to sell, the US would have forced the French out, as it later did the Mexicans. The idea of manifest destiny was already in action by then.
It seems to me that the USA has always been fairly obsessed with enemies, which is remarkable given the fact that it has no experience of devastation by enemy invasion. If I were the speculating type, I'd guess that we share that obsession with the other ideological states.
I mean more the focus, the arithmetic, the refusal to compromise because one has already run the numbers and knows exactly how many people one needs to win, the redefinition of reality, before and after the fact, the politicization of every lever at hand...
The fooferaw, bunting, and rhetoric, that's eternal!
I agree we are a country unaware of the conditions of our own birth.
"The most obvious beneficiary of the surge of interest in Alinsky has been Random House..."
ha!
You have to outdumb these fuckers.
Will Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn PLEASE join this movement?
Also ironic (self-defeating, really) is that CNN is now airing townhalls live, surely in the hope of catching some wingnut claque action, but the result is that the network is accidentally doing a public service.
I've heard (OTM/Ryan Lizza) the implication that use of Alinsky's book constitutes some kind of equivalency -- "GOP disrupts Town Halls, but they're using LEFTY tactics!" Which claim falls somewhere between spurious and bullshit.
There are conservatives who use Alinsky tactics, including several members of the Industrial Areas Foundation, which Alinsky founded. It's a loose confederation of community orgs, some lefty and some righty. Most of right-leaners are interfaith orgs, but not the nutjob social conservatives that have been manufacturing rage around apocryphal death panels. They're religious people who simply provide social services in areas where the public sector falls short--organized care for the elderly, lobbying for infrastructure improvements in poor neighborhoods, etc.
But it's worth noting that even in cases where social conservatives use Alinsky tactics successfully, the organizers tend to come out of poor working class neighborhoods and most of their work focuses on social justice issues. Their efforts are community-oriented, outward facing, and not representative of the what-about-me selfishness of the middle class, predominantly white, lunatic fringe you see here--which will never really get community organizing as long as they fail to see themselves as part of a larger community that might include who aren't just like them.
So well put. It should just be called "organizing" and drop the "community" since as these tactics are being used in this debate there is no "community" (except, maybe, the community of perpetually angry white people with persecution complexes.)
"All power comes from the barrel of a gun."
-- Chairman Mao
Oh jeez, conservative hatchet men have been misreading and half-assedly applying Alinsky since Gary Aldrich of THERE ARE CONDOMS ON THE WHITE HOUSE X-MAS TREE movement fame.
Anderson Baldwin Carter Choate Clemente Gonzalez Gravel Kaptur Kucinich McKinney Nader Paul Perot Sheehan Ventura
Future of a Nation that can not trust the Government & Propaganda Media?
DNC & RNC have sold out the country in order to enrich themselves
Chronic lying as career path, intellectual prostitution for paycheck
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me
Does the Government & Propaganda Media lie to you?
Wall Street Bailout Bill: Bush McCain Obama et al.
AIPAC 9/11 Bankers Extortion Blackmail Bribery
Independents agree on more than we disagree
Elite Ruling Class Greed or public servants?
Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil
Honesty compassion conscience guts
Both parties are corrupt to the core
Beware the divide and conquer
Whistle-Blower leaks multiply
A very RawStory on PressTV
InfoWars on a PrisonPlanet
Israel-first dual-nationals
Gung-ho Chickenhawks
JFK RFK MLK Malcolm
Anthrax Intimidation
GGreenwald
Left and rights of passage
Black and whites of youth
Who can face the knowledge
That the truth is not the truth?
Obsolete
Absolute
Single payer?
Medicare for all?
Off the table?
Just like Impeachment was...