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Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A New Playbook for Newt Gingrich?

By Jeff Alexander Be the first to comment

During the brief surge of popularity Newt Gingrich enjoyed after his successful South Carolina primary performance — including two feisty debates in which he thrilled conservative audiences with his attacks on the “elite media” and Obama, “the food stamp president” — those who were paying attention began to notice the frequent appearance of a particular name in the candidate’s speeches. “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” Gingrich said, going on to mention Alinsky’s name twice more during his South Carolina victory speech. Who is this “Saul Alinsky,” reporters began to ask, and why does Gingrich seem so obsessed with him? In fact, Alinsky’s experiences during a long life of activism inform his impassioned and instructive classic Rules for Radicals, which was published shortly before he died in 1972.

Community and political organizers, students of 1960’s radicalism, and not a few Tea Party activists using some of Alinsky’s organizational techniques were already familiar with his life and work. The child of Russian immigrants, Alinsky worked his way up from humble beginnings to the University of Chicago, where he abandoned an academic career for social activism after becoming radicalized by the plight of coal workers in southern Illinois. From there his career as a “pragmatic radical” took him from organizing working-class people in Chicago to developing strategies for the civil rights and anti-war movements in the ’60s. His role as a leader and tactician in some of the revolutionary events of the ’50s and ’60s won him few friends among the establishment, but even his enemies acknowledged his influence. He is “very close to being an organizational genius,” wrote William F. Buckley.

The subtitle of Alinsky’s book, A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, is crucial to understand his project: He lays out strategies about how to achieve realistic and effective change, advocates for the building of strong and broad coalitions, and insists that activists should work within a system to achieve their aims. Alinsky’s advice is eminently practical, and a far cry from his caricature as a fire-breathing, bomb-throwing subversive radical. He actually had little patience for political parties, despised dogma, and had no sympathy for the empty and self-destructive activities of violent radicals like the Weathermen. “As an organizer,” he wrote, “I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.”

Rules for Radicals, then, is a practical guidebook, a manual on how to channel the frustrated energies of people dissatisfied with the status quo toward effective change. With all of the anger and frustration toward the government and the banks these days, it is ironic, if not all too shocking, that much of Gingrich’s political tactics and rhetoric — designed to appeal to frustrated and angry members of the Republican Party — seems ripped from Alinsky’s playbook. All of this makes Rules for Radicals an excellent book for readers who want to understand political campaigns in general, and this one in particular.