Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., John Sweeney, Leo Gerard, Wade Rathke, Heather Booth, Ron Bloom and Daniel De Leon.
For conservatives accustomed to left-wing bogeymen falling neatly into either the “Marxist” or “sixties radical” box, Saul Alinsky can make for a bewildering figure.
Alinsky significantly never joined the Communist Party during the Red Decade. He later reflected, “I didn’t join because I had a sense of humor.” As a Roosevelt-era apparatchik of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Alinsky defended union reliance on Communists to organize workers but also oversaw a touring beat-down crew targeting troublemaking Communists at the behest of the CIO. This reappearing hypocrisy, which Alinsky’s critics decried as a vice, Alinksy himself celebratd as a virtue. Flexibility to changing tactics, rather than rigid adherence to principle, was the Alinskyite hallmark of successful activism.
His sixties were very much like his thirties. Alinsky sat out the civil rights and anti-war movements, derided the Peace Corps as the “Piss Corps,” and frequented barbers and donned business attire when the fashion called for tie-dye, beads, and long hair. “When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnappings and killings as ‘revolutionary acts,’” Alinsky reflected, “then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”
A leftist against the tide of leftism in two of the last century’s most radical decades, Alinsky ironically emerged as one of the Left’s most enduring idea men. Perhaps a richer paradox involves the man of action finding lasting significance as a theorist. One would be hard pressed to name a single community that the organizer extraordinaire even marginally improved. But his book Rules for Radicals is more popular than ever forty years after its publication.
The book’s popularity has much to do with ties of long-dead Alinsky to two of today’s most powerful political leaders, who heeded his advice to remain within the system.
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