Radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, Chicago, 1966.
And that’s what politicians will tell you is how it all works. They’re telling you that they have the power, and they’re going to do the right thing, and that’s all you need. And what we are doing by saying, “All we’ve gotta do is have a demonstration and let people know we’re upset,” is we’re saying that’s right. That this is how it works.
–Boots Riley, 100 Years of the Left in Five Minutes
(Vox Interview, July 2018)A new kind of president demands a new kind of citizen.
–Trump: A Resisters Guide (Harper’s, February 2017)
The Campfire of Our Dread
In the opening section of the first installment of this post, I attempted to see if I could use my “despair about liberal despair” as a means to propel myself down a path toward a significant self-radicalization.
I described how I had attended a recent (extremely tepid) street demonstration over immigrant family separations, and how I had started thinking about the silent assumption I share (along with a lot of other liberal-progressives) that the object of the current froth of anti-Trump passion and mobilization is all about making sure the Democrats “take back the House in November.”
Realizing full well that this hope might end up being dashed, I found myself conducting a kind of a thought experiment: what if I were to imaginatively fast forward three months to November, and once there be compelled to ask: “what do we do–now that we’ve lost the midterms?”
I’m not suggesting that there is no hope in the prospect of “winning back the House” and then slowing or even thwarting aspects of the Trump agenda for the final two years of the presidential term. Nor am I denying that there are lots of people who have become organized this summer to make sure that separated families are reunited, and their circumstances resolved into a rational and humane policy. I’m hopeful that these pressure tactics will have an impact.
Instead, what I’m trying to do is to come to grips with why an actual majority of Americans (those with progressive attitudes concerning social change) can be so engaged, and passionately opposed to everything about the Trump-captured GOP, and yet still feel so consistently bereft and powerless. Truth to tell, it’s actually even worse than this. When you are powerless, there is some prospect of acquiring power—liberals act like we are literally helpless, and as such actually unable to defend ourselves.
It’s eminently worht pointing out that Goldwater was simply wrong on both points. Extremism IS a vice, and moderation IS a virtue.
Since the GOP first began to move ever closer to the raggedy outside edge of the shared politically liberal consensus in the 1980s, Democrats have snoozed, safe in their belief that essential democratic values are embedded in the norms and practices of our institutions, and our basic constitutional contract presents an impenetrable bulwark against out-and-out illiberalism.
No wonder direct attacks upon the framework and its supporting norms are met continually with shocked silence, and why we continue to argue with these people even though we know they are committed to gaslighting us in a game of winner take all. We seem to silently ask: Don’t these people understand that, all other things being equal, this is the best possible socio-political arrangement we can hope to find? Can’t we just let our withered political party and its elected representatives remain the captive of special interests who make deals with similar on the other side so that the work of administration can go on, even under condition of divided government, until the next election?
The long-held expectation that we don’t have to “do politics” very much if at all because “political compromise is already built into the framework of our political institutions” is a partial explanation of why the center-left is so consistently hapless when it comes to articulating and defending common values, principles and ideas, and why there is a continual failure to offer a compelling alternative vision of America and the world in the twenty-first century.
But we know that these are really just excuses. Where is the transformative vision of a multiracial social democracy? Put another way, why is it that even in this state of emergency, there is still no tangible political Left in America? What really stands between ourselves and the emergence of a compelling center-left power coalition under present conditions of Republican minority rule?
By asking these questions, I’m not setting up to write some sort of history of Democratic politics in the twentieth century, focusing especially on Bill Clinton and the so-called New Democrats, even though the manner in which “establishment Democrats” have consistently cowed and disempowered the progressive wing in order to “ensure that the win” is not in question.
Recently, my friend and co-editor Steve Heikkila has been writing here on IDT about divisions and revisions among Old Left, New Left, and “Neoliberal Left,” and this is also eminently worth doing in the interest of sorting out the conditions for effective Left coalition politics.
For this contribution to the “Survival Guide,” the practical section of In Dark Times, I’m seeking to address something much more ephemeral–the mass phenomenon of a deeply felt liberal-progressive passion and conviction that nevertheless cannot seem to find a clear path from despair to impactful collective action. Somehow overcoming this impasse (whatever its complete set of causes) is a critical precondition that has to be met if a ruling center-left coalition is someday ever to become a reality in this country–something that can no longer be allowed to float across the imagination from time-to-time like a mere idle wish.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater famously said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. In doing so, he set the pattern for the extremism of the modern conservative movement. At the level of tactics, however, “the radical right” only came into being by the adoption of what had previously been pages from a radically leftist playbook.
It is eminently worth pointing out that Goldwater was simply wrong on both points. Extremism IS a vice, and moderation IS a virtue. Radicalism by contrast, is all about power and tactics–as such, it is not tied to any particular ideological commitment. Once conservatives had lost their “good old days,” the job at hand became finding some way to get them back again. As reactionaries turned revanchists, therefore, they had to become radicals. But one can become a radical at the level of tactics without becoming an ideological extremist.
For effective and sustainable center-left coalitions to emerge, by contrast, traditional liberals have to learn to be willing to defend the conditions for their own moderation in the face of right-wing extremism. They have to find a way to get comfortable (however paradoxically) with radicalism, with the use of political power tactics.
What these works have in common is that they all have Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their DNA.
In a short article written for Harper’s last year, political scientist Corey Robin remarked that it is “easier to huddle around the campfire of our dread than to mass and march toward a distant light.” This statement captures what I am interested in exploring here. What if there is something deeply ingrained in our collective center-left attitude toward political power tactics that is actually causing us to lose a political argument we ought to be winning? What notion of power, once internalized, overcomes this sort of powerlessness?
It was Goethe who famously said, “impotent hatred is the most horrible of all emotions; one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.” There is a very hard, realist truth about power contained in this remark. It is my contention that the way out of liberal despair is to learn such hard truths, and in so doing, to come to embrace a more radical Left agenda. One shouldn’t forget that the present set of dominant Trumpian-GOP ideas spent the last sixty years in the political wilderness, and this did not deter its wild-eyed vanguard in their long march to power. The prospects for another realignment in the near term really ought to be far less daunting.
The New Tough Love Literature
Two years before Obama’s first term, journalist Paul Waldman wrote a much-discussed book called Being Right is not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success. Waldman raised serious alarm bells about the long-term prospects for liberals and progressives if they didn’t change their ways and learn to be better at political tactics. Early in the introduction, Waldman says that the book is not about why progressives are right and conservatives are wrong. Instead, he explains, the book is about what progressives need to do in order to be successful— “the problem isn’t liberal ideas; the problem is liberals.”
There are some things about Waldman’s book that don’t really hold up that well these many years later, especially the parts about conservative discipline around their principles, the messaging around “what they stand for.” However, the parts about how liberals excel at “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” are more resonant than ever. The concluding chapter called “Time to Get Tough” which discusses the role of relative perceptions of strength and weakness about Democrats and Republicans respectively is especially rousing.
Since the election last year, there has been a raft of new books and articles that continue in a similar vein, along with other associated pieces exhorting us not to despair, and reminding us that authoritarianism thrives on demoralization. For example, In April 2017, Sam Adler-Bell wrote a piece in New Republic called “A Tough Love Letter to the Left” in which he quotes Bertolt Brecht saying, “It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.” Reviewing Jonathan Matthew Smucker’s book, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, Adler-Bell quotes Smucker saying, “I take no solace in the prospect of history listing me among the righteous few who denounced the captain of a ship that sank” adding that those of us who aspire to a socially just world “must conspire to take the helm.”
Adler-Bell goes on to describe Smucker’s book is as a “defense of power and a polemic against the left’s crippling ambivalence about contesting for it and wielding it.” Other recent works of the same stripe include Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond and Zack Exley, and Mark and Paul Engler’s This is an Uprising.
What these works have in common, Adler-Bell writes, “is that all of them have Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their DNA.”
Return to Normalcy / Normalcy is Over
The most notable recent book on liberals and power, however, is David Faris’s It’s Time to Fight Dirty. Faris goes further than Waldman, who continually points out how the conservatives built a movement over a long period of time, with careful planning and strategizing and untold hours spent crafting a unified master narrative, while Democrats won the presidency twice, and both times ended up leaving office almost completely shut out of power at both state and national levels.
Writing in 2018, Faris can see something that Waldman, writing in 2006, cannot—that the Democrats were not on the losing end of a policy fight, but rather had just finished losing a procedural war that has been going on since the early 1990s. In 2016, as is well known, Democrats won the election by millions of votes, but still lost because of the electoral college; they scored 11 million more votes in the US Senate, but ended up with a 52-48 chamber; and millions of voters were disenfranchised by voter ID laws and other state level voter suppression techniques.
Violating an essential norm about power in a democratic society, the GOP has crafted legislation, policy, and strategy with the goal of securing a lasting partisan advantage. Through these just mentioned examples and many others (including attacks on the union movement) Conservatives haven’t set out just to win elections—they’ve set out to permanently destroy the viability of liberalism.
So while both Waldman and Faris are focused on what it will take for Democrats to build lasting power, his position isn’t just that liberals need to learn how to craft winning messages and understand power in order to win campaigns. Because the GOP has waged a relentless war on Democrats, and worked the Constitution’s omissions, flaws, and shortcomings, Democrats would be wise, Faris writes, “to learn from their adversaries” and also fight dirty (while of course clinging to a certain set of minimal behavioral standards). If you want to win, you can’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
How then, to fight back? Democrats have watched meekly while their opponents pass laws designed to deliberatively destroy their coalition or to make it harder for people to vote or develops policy designed to undermine sectors of society that align against powerful corporate interests. Faris’s book is all about what (radical things) need to be done once Democrats retake power. The things he has in mind have to do with unrigging the playing field, or perhaps even rigging it in the other direction to ensure the persistence of a liberal consensus. What he doesn’t say, interestingly enough, is how to retake power, who we need to be, and what we need to do, in order to win in the first place.
In this piece, I’ve been trying to reflect on power and politics in order to chart a course beyond my liberal despair.
In his July 4th, 2018 article in Politico called “Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair is for Suckers,” Rob Goodman echoes Faris, saying that Democrats should embrace Trump’s demonstration that there no longer are any unwritten rules in American politics. What is not expressly forbidden is permitted. As the Warner Bros. cartoon umpire says defiantly in Gone Batty (1954), “There’s nothing in the rule book that says an elephant can’t pitch! Play ball!”
In this political context, Goodman writes, a norm is a tacit and mutual agreement that certain exercises of power, while lawful, are also unthinkable. Where a sitting president can be denied a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee, it becomes evident that a willingness to think the unthinkable is itself a source of power. This is why, as Goodman writes, Trump and his enablers eat norms for breakfast.
As for the Return to Normalcy camp, we find exponents of it among establishment Democrats and among the ruin of moderate Conservatives. Recently, for example, none other than James Comey told Democrats to paint the country blue in November, but added via Twitter on July 22nd “please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist Left.” And former Bush speechwriter David Frum exhorted Democrats to “become an Eisenhower party of the broad center.”
…Ah, the stuff that dreams are made of!
We Have to Arm Our Critiques with Power
In this multi-part piece, I have been trying to reflect on power and politics in order to chart a course beyond my own liberal despair. In doing so, I realized from the outset that one has to be careful when going down this road of thinking about acting–there’s a reason why books about power and politics are written specifically about action from a practical point of view.
Machiavelli offers advice about political tactics to Lorenzo de’ Medici. He does not fill his slim volume with some sort of philosophical critique, e.g., a set of rational reflections on metaphysical biology, theology or ethics. That he did not, was of course a lasting scandal. But the same set of concerns that led him to think and write in this fashion are also the reasons why we generally see books on power and politics with words like “handbook,” “How to,” “practical guide,” “realist” and “primer” in their titles.
This desire to try to focus on political power tactics per se actually led me, in the first installment of this post, to an early digression on role that Michel Foucault’s account of “power/knowledge” had played for political activists (myself included) in the 80s and 90s. I concluded by rejecting the seducements of Foucauldian genealogical historiography and by taking exception to Foucault’s claim that (in his style of philosophizing) “theory IS practice” and that his ideas constituted a “tool box” for those who struggle by “revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious.” Cultural criticism is all well and good. But as Sam Adler-Bell writes in “Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair is for Suckers,” we still need to arm our critiques with power. This hold true even where power itself is the subject of our critiques, as with Foucault.
Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Realistic Radicals
The common thread in the “new tough love” literature coming from the “Normal is Over camp,” Sam Adler-Bell tells us, is that “they all have Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their DNA.” Yet David Faris, the most prominent representative of this genre, focuses his It’s Time to Fight Dirty on a set of tactics to be employed AFTER liberals return to power in the electoral process. It is my contention that before we can actually get there, following Jonathan Matthew Smucker, we need to first address “the left’s crippling ambivalence about contesting for it and wielding it.” With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting some aspects of Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realist Radicals in order to grasp the requisite attitude toward power needed for successful organizing.
A few first comments about what Rules for Radicals is and is not: RfR is not a philosophical treatise; Alinsky does not really make arguments, and he is not offering up a proper theory of action or of society. As for power, Alinsky relies on a Webster’s unabridged definition, such that power is simply the ability to act. Additionally, Alinsky (along with most other men and women of the vita activa) doesn’t have much to say about the sources of his own normative commitments. In fact, throughout the book, he offers a blistering attack upon the idealist prohibition concerning ends and means (that ends never justify means). He describes himself repeatedly as a realist and as a pragmatist, insisting that moral or otherwise rational commitments presented as motivations are always masks for some underlying self-interest. To the extent that revolutionaries ever take the time to develop a philosophy, Alinsky writes, they should do it while they are in jail, where they are emancipated from the compulsions of action!
RfR is not a detailed handbook for direct action and civil disobedience tactics and techniques. The work is written as a set of pragmatic principles that stem from a lifetime of reflecting on conflict and confrontation and motive of action, and it resolves to a set of rule lists, a set of Dos and Don’ts. The book is meant to provide a set of rules and principles for developing tactics to fit new and unique situations. For Alinsky, this is how you provide inspiration to political realists.
But despite all this realism about power, RfR nonetheless offers a challenging and strangely moving account of political power and social change, about how communities that otherwise feel powerless can find their power and prevail against the powerful through collective action. Alinsky is a committed “little d democrat,” has a reverence for the founding fathers of the American Revolution and the Constitution, and he is an unreserved champion of the suffering masses of the poor and the marginalized in their quest for dignity and equality of treatment and opportunity.
The sense of irreducible complexity here has to do with the difficulty of talking about realism and cynicism across a class divide.
Lastly, it is important to remember that Rules for Radicals is addressed specifically to the would-be professional community organizer, and not to the issue-oriented community leader per se. The organizer, Alinsky writes, unlike the leader, “does not want power for himself but finds his goal in the creation of power for others to use.” The point of the book is thus to “educate” would-be organizers, those who would like to bring about change, but whom Alinsky thinks have “plenty of illusions about the way to change the world.” Put another way, it is important to recognize that where there is already a goal, Alinsky wants to show how to go about achieving it. RfR is a realist/pragmatic rumination about “how to organize for power.” Concerning his core beliefs (why he thinks social injustice should be set right) he does not say. As an organizer, he writes, “I start from where the world is—as it is—not as I would like it to be.”
Where the world is, in Alinsky’s estimation, is a place where human beings must contest for power (“It is impossible to conceive of a world as devoid of power”) and do so ‘to win’ if they are to see something like ‘a piece of the action.’ This last phrase is mine, not Alinsky’s. But I use it here very intentionally. Alinsky’s worldview, as expressed in RfR, is more akin to that of a street fighter and rabble rouser than that of an ideological Marxist or even socialist, as he has been painted. ‘A piece of the action’ in my view, captures well what Alinsky means by equality.
Political Power Tactics on ‘The Firing Line’
In his 1967 appearance on conservative commentator William F. Buckley’s TV show Firing Line, Buckley and Alinsky feint and parry, and when they have an opening, accuse each other of not really meaning the things that they are saying. In Buckley’s case, the charge is that Alinsky is some sort of ‘cynic,’ because Alinsky offers various versions of his claim that “people always do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” In reply, Alinsky repeatedly protests that he is in earnest, and that he is in actuality a realist, not a cynic. For his part, Alinsky sees Buckley as a moral hypocrite and a sophist, someone who has found clever ways, through appeals to morality and subtle reason, to both conceal and promote a baser set of class interests.
If I understand him correctly, while Alinsky is indeed saying that human beings always act primarily out of their self-interest (and their other motivations are masks) he is also seeking to confine this characterization specifically to the field of political action per se. Hence his oft repeated claim that as an organizer, he must take the world as it is, and not as he would like it to be.
Not surprisingly, some of the hottest exchanges between Buckley and Alinsky occur on the terrain of religion (Buckley was a devout Catholic). One such gets to the heart of the point I am trying to make about the complex and muddy terrain that exists between claims of realism and counter-claims of cynicism. At one point in the exchange about five minutes in, Buckley is questioning Alinsky about his remark that Sargent Shriver’s anti-poverty program (Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty) was a piece of political pornography; and Alinsky starts to have recourse to an example—he says “Let’s put it this way: I don’t object to a minister getting up on the altar and giving a sermon against adultery, because I think that’s part of his racket, and everybody sitting there assumes that.” Before we can get to the point of the example, Buckley breaks in, and says, “Why do you say racket…are you using racket in an invidious way?” And Alinsky replies, “No, I’m not.” And Buckley says, “I see…as part of his profession…part of his belief, part of his ideals.” And Alinsky signals concurrence by echoing Buckley, “part of his profession…” But he’s smiling, and he pauses, and he laughs.
The sense of irreducible complexity here has to do with the difficulty of talking about realism versus cynicism across a class divide. Buckley is checking to see if Alinsky is cynical about ministers per se—but the answer is no, he isn’t, and Buckley realizes it. For Alinsky, saying that ‘the minister has his racket’ is not meant to be offensive, because for Alinsky, everybody has a racket, so he does not begrudge the minister having his. But on the other hand, in universalizing rackets, Alinsky is not exactly using racket as a neutral synonym for ‘profession.’ This is why he bursts out laughing when Buckley says, “…part of his profession, his beliefs, his ideals.”
Incidentally, the whole thing reminds me of something from the first season of the Sopranos: the scene where Tony confesses to his horrible, black-hearted mafia mother that he is seeing a psychiatrist. In response, she wails, “Psychiatry??!! That’s a racket for the Jews!” The emotion she feels is not that of a mother worried about his mental health, or even about the social stigma of seeking treatment—it’s the shame she feels at the spectacle of a wise guy falling for a con.
Fighting Words: Rules for Power Tactics
Perhaps I have overly belabored this last point in trying to get it across–there is of course quite a bit more to say about the spirit of Alinsky’s attitudes concerning power and effective action, and the role of the community organizer that flows from it. As one might expect, there are a number of ‘lists of rules’ that appear in the book. The first set are a series of “rules of the ethics of means and ends” that seek to tenderize and relativize any residual moral reservations on the part of the organizer (this is about revolution, not revelation, he says) while still avoiding the unwarranted conclusion that ‘anything goes at any time.’ His purpose in doing this is thus not literally to demoralize. Alinsky is not a totally immoral character; if he were, he would not stand with the weak against the powerful. He just doesn’t think that morality has all that much to do with political tactics. Since it is impossible to conceive of a world as devoid of power, he writes, “to know power and not to fear it is essential to its constructive use and control.”
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, he says.
I must admit to not being overly fond of this set of rules. On the other hand, I have spent my life internalizing the ethos of the philosopher rather than that of a man of action. Philosophers are radicals of resignation. Faced with conditions that are mostly about winning and losing, and involve winning at any cost, the philosopher elects to drink the hemlock. Lately, however, I’ve grown tired of losing.
The effective organizer, Alinsky says, “does not communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue.” His goal is to maneuver and persuade the community toward an action or set of actions. Given the underlying attitude toward power and action, therefore, Alinsky says that the first step in community organization is community disorganization. It is necessary, he says to polarize opinions. Is this manipulation? Certainly, he says. But it is necessary to break through the rationalizations, the justifications as to why nothing has been done or can be done, to break through the habit of powerlessness.
After the discussion of how to communicate with various types of people, given his attitude toward power and action, Alinsky moves to the matter of tactics. Here too, his advice and pronouncements are rather Yoda-like. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, he says. Power is not what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. Etc.
It is also worth mentioning that while Alinsky makes no bones about the need to polarize people (“before men can act, an issue must be polarized”) at the same time, he says, the organizer must split himself into two parts, such that the other part knows when it is time to negotiate—what has been said to indicate that our cause is a hundred percent on the side of the angels, and the opposition is a hundred percent on the side of the devil, in reality there is usually about a ten percent difference, he writes.
As I have mentioned previously, Alinsky’s book is oddly affecting for someone such as myself, who has reached the limit of his despair about liberal despair, and is trying to write about power and political action. To understand Alinsky one has to give his “total gestalt” a kind of a hearing. In our present circumstances, this could mean being willing to become more of a realist about power and politics. Maybe this is necessary as a condition for effective resistance in the wake of a protracted failure of an electoral politics that has become unmoored from any rational account of human interests.
For Love of the World
Beyond liberal despair at Center-Left powerlessness then, perhaps, is a decision to actively resist, in some sense to fight. This decision underscores the fact that we are entering a stage of conflict where compromise, and the institutional mechanisms that normally support it, are superseded by the conditions of political struggle. With this recognition, then, there is a need for a different sort of solidarity to support a different sort of civic courage.
In her reflections on Amor Mundi (Love of the World), Hannah Arendt has written that love and politics don’t mix, and that Amor Mundi is all about the insistence upon critical thinking and understanding, and the world that exists (practically) between friends in a life of political dialogue. We have written about this a bit in the About Us section here on In Dark Times. When seeking to locate the appropriate basis for a politics of solidarity whereby one would be willing to fight and defend “for love of the world,” Arendt is preferential (to say the least) to the notion of friendship found in Lessing over the notion of naturalistic and passionate fraternity found in Rousseau (and Robespierre). Compassio and fraternitas are too particularistic, she thinks, too tribal, too hot–Arendt calls for a cooler form of solidarity, one that does not have recourse to family, ethnicity, race, nation, or religion.
By contrast, Cornel West has recently been running around saying that “justice is what love looks like in public.” I am still unsure what to think. Maybe in these dark times, Amor Mundi means risking getting your hands dirty after all.
I am also unsure about the muddy line between realism and cynicism when it comes to the tactics of power politics. A blogger I once read somewhere said “If the world were a somewhat less shitty place, maybe realists would be called optimists.”
This second installment in my awkwardly confessional reflections on power and politics has been about the attitude needed, as Alinsky writes, “in order to know power and not to fear it, so that one has what one needs for its constructive use and control.” In the final installment of this post, I turn to the work of Gene Sharp to take a step further, to try to internalize the theory of power and related tactics that support popular campaigns of nonviolent struggle to weaken and replace unpopular regimes or to win meaningful concessions in fights over specific community goals.
