By Jim Taylor
Another icon bit the dust recently.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I worked among people who revered Saul Alinski. They took the side of the underdog—any underdog, it seemed. For 40 years, Alinski made a name for himself organizing those underdogs, particularly among the working-class areas of Chicago.
Alinski summed up his ideology in a book called Rules for Radicals. He offered 13 rules. They included these:
• Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
• Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.
• Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
• Ridicule is your most potent weapon.
• The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
• Develop operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
• Pick a target, personalize it, and polarize it.
I got prodded into taking a second look at Alinski’s principles by a blog from Seth Godin. Godin’s goal is marketing, not opposition or organization.
Godin noted that Alinski’s single-minded focus was “to discourage and defeat enemies.” Indeed, with the wisdom of hindsight, I can see now that Alinski’s underlying principle was to create an enemy. He recognized that people will unite against a common enemy. All an organizer has to do is to find and define that enemy—the people will do the rest.
But there’s an inherent flaw in that process.
In Godin’s words, “This approach tears away at civil discourse. When you’re so sure you’re right that you’re willing to burn things down, it turns out that everyone is standing in a burning building sooner or later.”
Uniting for a common goal is good. But when that common goal is to defeat an enemy, what do you do after? What now is your goal, your purpose?
Chances are, you don’t have one.
As a marketing guru, Godin has no interest in creating enemies. He would rather create friends. Even if he calls them clients or customers. He offered his own 13 principles. Among them:
• Challenge people to explore, to learn, and to get comfortable with uncertainty.
• Don’t criticize for fun. Do it when it helps educate, even if it’s not entertaining.
• Don’t make threats. Do or don’t do.
• Disagree with institutions, not with people.
• Treat others the way you’d want to be treated.
Now where have I heard that before?
Alinski died in 1972, a year after Rules for Radicals was published. But his ideology lives on after him.
He started out as the darling of the leftists who wanted to raise the underdogs. In the strange ways that social change evolves, he ended up as the darling of conservatives who wanted to keep the underdogs under. The Tea Party distributed Rules for Radicals to its members. Donald Trump built his entire presidential campaign on personalizing an enemy. Or enemies.
What the left initiates, the right will eventually co-opt.
While I may now question Alinski’s tactics, I think he got it right in his prologue: “We are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”
Alinski’s greatness was his ability to get people to unite in a common cause. His tragedy was that the common cause had to be an enemy.
Author Jim Taylor lives in Lake Country: rewrite@shaw.ca
To report a typo, email:
newstips@kelownacapnews.com.
@KelownaCapNews
newstips@kelownacapnews.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
