Stuff The Genie Of Political Ridicule Back In Its Bottle

The escalating war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump
and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent Asian markets tumbling
as the region braced for more provocations from his regime
next week. Photo: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: The headlines are turning ever more virulent.

Is there a prime mover of the nastiness of our national, and international, heated rhetoric? Dinesh D’Souza proposes to pin the nastiness of modern politics on the iconic community organizer Saul Alinsky. D'Souza, ever a partisan propagandist, presents a narrative in which only the left has serious corruption or nastiness. (While not exonerating the intolerant progressives, color me incredulous as to the innate purity and virtue of the GOP.)

Alinsky is a favorite whipping boy of the right (in which I am counted and proudly count myself) but which mostly shows little evidence of having read, rather than sampled, Alinsky's books or grasped his life’s work and example. D'Souza displays ignorance of his subject in spades. But then, most of the left, while ritualistically extolling Alinsky, also shows almost no awareness of Alinsky’s classical liberal, deeply humane, and, as it happens, anti-big-government/anti-corrupt-corporatists ethics.

Last month I had the obscure honor of debating D’Souza at FreedomFest, a debate broadcast by (and archived at) C-SPAN 2. The topic? Saul Alinsky.

The debate was moderated by enfant terrible James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, himself something of an Alinsky aficionado. I, as president of The Alinsky Center, warmed up the crowd for Alinsky Center chairman David Alinsky, Saul’s son. Mark Skousen, FreedomFest’s “community organizer,” reported afterward that this debate was the 2017 Fest’s second most popular event.

D'Souza admitted to being somewhat unnerved, as well he should have been in debating someone as far to his right as me. D’Souza then portrayed Alinsky as the fountainhead of evil in modern politics. (Note that in the Official D’Souzaland Version of Reality evil reposes exclusively on the left. He really should get out more.) D'Souza:"I think the simple answer is it [the modern Democratic Party, and, by D’Souza’s derivation, all that is wrong in the modern political world] got that way not entirely but largely through the influence of one man, Saul Alinsky, and the influence he exercised independently over Obama and over Hillary. So another key link in my chain is that Hillary and Obama were both at a formative time in life shaped by Alinsky. Obama kept going back to Chicago. Why? To study under the Alinsky-ites. I am suggesting he learned his scamming techniques from the Alinsky Way. Hilary met Alinsky in High School, had a close relationship with Alinsky, brought him to Wellesley College where she was a student and later offered a job by Alinsky.  Both Obama and Hillary at, I think, a key time of life imbibed the Alinsky Kool Aid. I want to talk about the Kool Aid to see if was the destructive force behind the America we live in now."D’Souza, at his website, thereafter bragged that he “mopped the floor” with David Alinsky. That, of course, is a confabulation and an assessment not shared by very many who watched the debate, as evidenced by this piece in the libertarian Daily Sheeple: The Case For Saul Alinsky. (A Champion of Liberty?).  D'Souza's bizarre prosecutorial scenario is also a confabulation. Every significant link in the chain of evidence he offered into evidence is discredited and broken. It is ironic that D’Souza seems himself to have fallen prey to and is perpetuating a leftist Big Lie (the subject and title of his latest book).

Lest we forget, I, like Barack Obama and Dinesh D'Souza, never met Saul Alinsky, who would surely have given D’Souza’s phony indictment at least an over-the-shoulder loud chortle.  As contained in a long interview published in Playboy shortly before Alinsky’s death:"Perhaps the one achievement of [Alinsky’s] life that has drawn almost universally favorable response was the publication of his new book, "Rules for Radicals," which has received glowing reviews in practically every newspaper and magazine in the country. To show his staff exactly how he felt about all this unaccustomed approbation, he called them in to say, 'Don't worry, boys, we'll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as ever.'"Alinsky indeed was a provocateur, with a wonderfully wicked sense of humor. In the debate itself, the only weird allegation for which I was entirely unprepared was D’Souza’s novel charge that Alinsky learned community organizing from the Capone gang. This, of course, is not merely wrong but wrongheaded. While without basis it serves D’Souza’s purpose to attribute to Alinsky (and from him Clinton, Obama, and the modern Democratic Party) “shakedown” techniques learned from the Mob.

The biggest defect in D’Souza’s allegation is that there is zero evidence that Alinsky ever employed shakedown techniques, either for his own enrichment or that of his organization. He died with a very modest estate indeed, likely smaller than D'Souza's, and never begrudged anyone honest success.

Another defect is that even a cursory reading of Sandford Horwitt’s definitive Alinsky biography, Let Them Call Me Rebel, shows that Alinsky learned his organizing techniques from United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, founder of the CIO, and, as it happens, a Republican. Alinsky wrote an unauthorized biography of John L. Lewis, dedicating it to his daughter Katherine and son David (Lewis’s godson).

As for Capone, Alinsky possessed inveterate curiosity about the way the world really works. He went to see for himself because he was studying criminology and deemed the textbooks inane.  Nobody -- not even, to be charitable, D’Souza -- has ever even implied that Alinsky was mobbed up.

Did he learn some useful things? You bet he did! Just not the “shakedown” techniques for which D’Souza indicts him."ALINSKY : I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities, although I joined their social life of food, drink and women: Boy, I sure participated in that side of things -- it was heaven. And let me tell you something, I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.  … Capone didn't create the corruption, he just grew fat on it, as did the political parties, the police and the overall municipal economy."Alinsky used and taught his community organizing techniques to guide oppressed communities in fighting back against pernicious injustices such as racial discrimination. And, yes, it must have come in very handy for him, in his many battles with corruption, to learn how political parties -- and others -- grew fat on it. He never exploited the system for his own gain.

So, D'Souza's allegations about Saul Alinsky are damning on their surface but false.  The charges are unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by massive amounts of evidence. Every link in D’Souza’s chain of indictment of Alinsky for corruption of the modern Democratic Party is broken. Alinsky was no shakedown artist and never taught others to engage in such practices.

Nor did Alinsky materially shape Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham. Barack Obama, as reported by Alinsky IAF successor Arnie Graf, explicitly turned away from Alinsky and his prescription of community organizing. Hillary Rodham turned away too, respectfully but unequivocally. Yes, young Hillary Rodham admired Alinsky. That said, she devoted 88 words in her 562 page memoir, Living History, to him and chose not to follow him. D'Souza's claim of influence is beyond precarious.

Finally, the modern Democratic Party, much of whose platform I oppose on policy grounds, does not strike me as significantly more corrupt than the modern Republican Party. D'Souza relies on disprovable inferences (and innuendos) and simply fails to make his case that Saul Alinsky is "the destructive force behind the America we live in now."

That said, something else is going on that deserves our attention.

Saul Alinsky did not invent political ridicule.

But he codified it.

And it's gotten out of hand.

Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals contains, among other things, 13 powerful tactical “rules.” The fifth: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Ridicule has become pervasive in our political culture. Saul encouraged its use, although strictly for good causes, such as fighting invidious racial discrimination. His own high ethics, however, may not fully exonerate him for the abuse of his rules by those who came after.

Progressive activists heap ridicule on President Trump and his team to a point where they become indistinguishable from a Saturday Night Live skit. Conservative celebrities such as HUD Secretary Ben Carson and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, using Alinsky’s tactics, turn “Alinsky” into an epithet. President Trump, with gusto, returns the ridicule heaped on him.

And then some.

Politics is getting, well, ridiculous.

Recent events suggest that politics is rapidly devolving into something even worse than ridiculous.

Time to put the genie back into its bottle.

Rules for Radicals also teaches us why and how to do so. Follow along.

Saul Alinsky, well before the provocateur Dinesh D’Souza was born, himself was a provocateur. Alinsky also was much more than that. He was a radical humanitarian, a scourge of Big Government and its corrupt Corporate Cronies. The great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain extolled Alinsky as a truly great man.

Alinsky’s message and example is poorly understood by both the left and the right.

Alinsky’s tactical rules have become notorious. His rigorous ethics are widely ignored. When Alinsky states that "In war, the end justifies almost any mean" he means that literally and states, explicitly, that absent war, one has to carefully weigh the means against the ends.

One person who clearly did grasp Alinsky’s ethics, was the young Wellesley prodigy Hillary Rodham, who wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on his work. Therein she indicts the New Left:"[S]ome New Left strategists …, although, disenchanted with Alinsky-like faith in individuals, apply many of his tactics in confrontation politics.

"The problems inherent in such an approach, including elitist arrogance and repressive intolerance, have become evident during recent university crises."Did she later drift into a more mercenary stance? I leave that for others to decide.

Alinsky, because of his heroic commitment to social justice, is often thought of as a man of the left. That’s fair insofar as the right has shamefully defaulted on its pledge to stand for “liberty and justice for all.” Yet Alinsky was not a communist nor even socialist. He was an open-minded humanitarian with a healthy appreciation for capitalism. As his son, David, Chairman of the Alinsky Center, observes:“[W]hat THE GREAT MAJORITY of people who criticize [my Dad] fail to understand is that Rules was NEVER written for the left... or the right, but for all groups or communities of ALL political, religious and social persuasions on how to think about the underlying tactics and motivations for obtaining some measure of political power. He was working with slum neighborhoods, ghettos, who had no control or say in what ‘the powers that be’ were and could do to them and so he taught them what to do. At the end of his life, he had turned his attention toward the middle class because he realized that soon, they too would be forced away from the political table. I believe that Rules is becoming and will continue to become one of the great political classics for many many years to come just as The Prince and Sun Tzu’s Art of War have become."So what is to be done?

Alinsky’s fourth tactical rule states: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. The fourth rule was the bottle in which the genie slept: “The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.”

To rebottle the ridicule genie let's resurrect Rule 4 and demand higher standards from our adversaries (or, as Alinsky more provocatively termed it, enemies). It would be even more powerful for both left and right to make themselves, rather than “the enemy,” live up to their own book of rules, whether Rules for Radicals or The Wealth of Nations. And a refreshing change!

Hyperpartisanship, of which ridicule is but a tactic, has long been, and been recognized, as a problem. President George Washington said in his farewell address:"[T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

"It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. ...

"A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."Saul Alinsky, echoing Washington’s sentiments, held that “no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.’”

Political ridicule -- and worse -- has grown much too virulent. Living up to the ethics, as well as the tactics, of Rules for Radicals -- and exemplified by the life of Saul Alinsky -- would be a giant leap toward making America both good and great again.
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

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