Who was Saul Alinsky, and why should we still care? We should care because his organizing for revolution tactics are being used by activists and groups all over our country today!
From Discover the Networks:
[Saul Alinsky] Identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power.
Created a blueprint for revolution under the banner of "social change".
Two of his most notable modern-day disciples are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Born to Russian-Jewish parents in Chicago in 1909, Saul Alinsky was a
Communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the tactics of infiltration - coupled with a measure of confrontation - that have been central to revolutionary political movements in the United States in recent decades. He never joined the Communist Party but instead, as David Horowitz puts it,
became an avatar of the post-modern left. Chicago alderman Leon Despres, a
Communist Party member and a college classmate of Alinsky, once
said: "I don't think he [Alinsky] ever remotely thought of joining the Communist Party, [but] emotionally he aligned very strongly with it." And Alinsky biographer Sanford D. Horwitt
wrote that Alinsky was "broadly sympathetic" with the politics of his friend Herb March, who worked as an organizer for the
Young Communist League.
Though Alinsky is rightfully understood to have been a leftist, his legacy is more
methodological than ideological.
He identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power. His motto was, "The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results."
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