Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
I loved it in my teens (not long after Alinsky died) and my twenties. In my thirties, I thought he was too manipulative—too secretive about his methods and goals from those he was recruiting. But he was right about a hell of a lot of things, and entertaining to read.
The wingnut blogosphere has been trying to trash Obama for months by claiming Obama's political lineage if from Alinsky and Alinsky was a Communist. Well, Alinsky wasn't quite a Communist; he valued a state that supported political freedom.
More to the point, Obama's not a radical, at least not in the sense that most wingnuts mean or in the sense that Alinsky was. And if he views radicalism as imprudent in the particular situations he is given to act in, his policies will never show what radical side he may have. He is a principled pragmatist. And like any person of principles and courage, some of his beliefs will be outside the very narrow constraints of political orthodoxy.
But he is Alinsky's political grandson. That manifests not in his positions on issues, but in his approach to organizing. It will result in the Democratic Party, for the first time since 1968 truly being a political party on the national scale, rather than a collection of loosely aligned politicians, interest groups, activists, and Clintonista intelligentsia who pretended that they were the whole of the intelligentsia interested in and needed by the party.
In fact, since major parties in the past were more local in their essential power than they are now and the national parties were largely coalitions those local parties, this election will leave the Democratic Party as a more cohesive movement than it has ever been.
The need for such a movement has been brought to attention for several years by some bloggers, with Kos being the most effective voice. Aspects of the movement itself have been brought into being by various people and groups, with Move On probably being the best example. But it's taken a man of unusual talent from the Chicago school of community organizing to bring it all together.
I hope that we are now headed into a decades-long progressive era, as we had from 1933-1978. And I hope that in due time, history recognizes the seeds that Saul Alinsky planted to make it happen.
For details of the movement-building that I'm talking about, see the article by Zach Exley that Kos already linked to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...