Rules For The Radical Right? An Interview With Alinsky’s Biographer

M: Buckley was an admirer of his work — you know, there are those famous Buckley quotes about [Alinsky’s] being an organizational genius and kicking behinds. Do you see any of this fascination with Alinsky as stretching back before the ’08 election?

I think there have always been conservatives who have been attracted to a part of what Alinsky is really about. And at the core, it’s to help people as an organizer. That’s what the Alinsky style does. And there’s always been an element of populism [on the right], including not only anti-establishment, but anti-political class, anger that’s certainly relevant today. If you read a lot of the current right-wing commentary, they’re angry not only at liberal Democrats, they’re angry at all the insiders, including Republicans and including Republican benefactors such as big business.

It’s pretty clear — I don’t know if you know this little book that came out in September which is kind of a knock off of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that has the exact same cover and style and color, including not only the red-and-black, but the same kind of font, and it’s called Rules for Conservative Radicals. It sort of reminded me of those ten-dollar Rolex watches that you can buy in Times Square.

It’s pretty clear that at the heart of a lot of the tea party protests is this real anger at all of the insiders, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, of feeling that if you don’t have the right connections in power, you are just out of the game.

M: Just looking at specifics that have popped up over this past year — how successful would you say things like the tea party movement, the town hall disruptions, the 9/12 movement, arguably — how much do you think they’re in line with Alinsky’s teachings, and how effective do you think they’ve been overall?

I think they haven’t been very effective. They attracted attention, but it’s a real motley stew of a lot of things. The stuff about Obama’s origin of birth, the so-called ‘birthers’ part of this, the fire David Letterman website — these are all kind of very kooky things and I don’t think most are paying attention to this. These are not things Alinsky ever would have raised. These kind of things discredit what you’re trying to do, and what you’re inevitably trying to do is to reach a larger audience.

I think the town halls — I want to be careful with the town halls, because my sense is a lot of people came to the town halls who you know share the anger of some of the insiders who are the more prominent face of this movement of the last 6 to 10 months. So there are people who have legitimate gripes about various things having to do with government, and this terrible economy, and really being hurt, especially by the economy. And I’m very sympathetic with that.

But there’s this other piece of what we’ve seen in the last 6 to 10 months which is just self-defeating, ultimately, because it does not have a wide appeal. Alinsky was always very careful about the selection of issues and those issues being well researched and grounded in reality, and would never do anything that would really discredit one of the community organizations that he was helping put together.

On the one hand, it’s impressive that the turnout to a lot of these [events] has been sizeable. On the other hand, as organizers say, “you brought out 1000 people this time, but can you do it again?” That’s the test of potency of what we see a little bit of in the last year. The important thing is what this will look like a year from now. But my sense is that it’s pretty limited at the moment in spite of some good turnouts and some good energy at these gatherings.

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Helen Zhang helped transcribe this interview.