Reprising Saul Alinsky

This year marks the centennial of the birth of the Chicago community organizer, Saul Alinsky. Perhaps you have heard his name in the past year or so in regard to the mentoring of Barack Obama, another Chicago community organizer. Alinksy's name is rarely heard these days, but it wasn't always that way. Beginning in the 1930s, and well into the 1970s, he was the nation's foremost power organizer, almost always associating himself with "progressive" movements. As a radical from the youth rebellion of the 1960s, I have a first edition of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971). It's been read more than once, a bit yellow here and there, and the dust jacket has a few small tears and scuffs; otherwise, it's in excellent condition. What's inside is excellent, as well, though I never thought I'd be pulling the book from the library in order to educate my readers on the political experience we're living through. In effect, I thought the radical days were behind us. I was wrong because the actions we're seeing from the White House have been taken straight from Saul Alinsky's play book. Obviously, Barack Obama learned his lessons well.

Knowing the rules and understanding them as they are administered by the Obama White House is the first step to countering what seems to be a great leap to the left cloaked in terms of economic rescue. What follows are Alinky's thirteen rules of power tactics, with his elaborations, as they appeared in Rules for Radicals:

Rules of Power Tactics

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. Power has always derived from two main sources, money and people. Lacking money, the Have-Nots must build power from their own flesh and blood.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication . . . .

3. Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than Christians can live up to Christianity.

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it become a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on a Sunday morning.

8. Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right - we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." When you "freeze the target," you disregard [arguments of why you have chosen one target and not another] . . .and as you zero in on your target . . . and carry out your attack, all the "others" come out of the woodwork very soon. The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification . . . . With this focus comes a polarization. The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: "He that is not with me is against me" (Luke 11:23).


Perhaps you have heard or read the pundits on the use of Rule 13 in reference to the recent White House attack on Rush Limbaugh, who has himself commented about it. Given time, I think we'll be hearing about more than one or two of the rules because there is powerful and time-tested advice here. Some of it is rather obvious, some a bit fresher, but all of it vital to understanding the administration's tactics as they lurch ever leftward on the road to serfdom.