Saul Alinsky Shocks Us Like an Electric Eel, Targeted Middle Class
Communist fellow traveler Saul Alinsky was in interviewed in 1972 by Playboy Magazine:
PLAYBOY: Mobilizing middle-class America would seem quite a departure for you after years of working with poverty-stricken black and white slum dwellers. Do you expect suburbia to prove fertile ground for your organizational talents?
ALINSKY: Yes, and it’s shaping up as the most challenging fight of my career, and certainly the one with the highest stakes. Remember, people are people whether they’re living in ghettos, reservations or barrios, and the suburbs are just another kind of reservation — a gilded ghetto. One thing I’ve come to realize is that any positive action for radical social change will have to be focused on the white middle class, for the simple reason that this is where the real power lies. Today, three fourths of our population is middle class, either through actual earning power or through value identification. Take the lower-lower middle class, the blue-collar or hard-hat group; there you’ve got over 70,000,000 people earning between $5000 and $10,000 a year, people who don’t consider themselves poor or lower class at all and who espouse the dominant middle class ethos even more fiercely than the rich do. For the first time in history, you have a country where the poor are in the minority, where the majority are dieting while the have-nots are going to bed hungry every night.
Christ, even if we could manage to organize all the exploited low-income groups — all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto Ricans, poor whites — and then, through some kind of organizational miracle, weld them all together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At the most optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade — but by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the overwhelming majority will be middle class. This is the so-called Silent Majority that our great Greek philosopher in Washington is trying to galvanize, and it’s here that the die will be cast and this country’s future decided for the next 50 years. Pragmatically, the only hope for genuine minority progress is to seek out allies within the majority and to organize that majority itself as part of a national movement for change. If we just give up and let the middle classes go to the likes of Agnew and Nixon by default, then you might as well call the whole ball game. But they’re still up for grabs — and we’re gonna grab ‘em.
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“Shock Me Like an Electric Eel†is a NewsReal feature highlighting shockingly stupid, misguided, offensive, and Anti-American quotes from various figures in the political culture.
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In 1972, says Alinksy: “For the first time in history, you have a country where the poor are in the minority, where the majority are dieting while the have-nots are going to bed hungry every night.”
The poor are in the minority. Not a good thing for him, is it?
Obviously, he had to change his tactics and rile up the middle class.
Can’t have LESS of the poor, can we?
@ Elaine: “The poor are in the minority. Not a good thing for him, is it?”
Not to be deterred. The poor won’t be in the minority much longer and the middle class will disappear. Thanks to the efforts of the brave band of subversive bastards that Alinsky inspired on the left, and other assorted morons, crooks and shortsighted cowards – our dollar is about to fall through the floorboards… on top of all the other liberal generated problems we bear.
Soon, you will have more poor people than you could fill an ocean with. And unlike the rest of the world, the American poor won’t have a benevolent superpower benefactor across the ocean to send boatloads of cash.
And it’s worked! So many people now view themselves as underprivledged. I witnessed the transformation in VT. Circa 1972 the “Office of Economic Opportunity” opened on Main St in my small town. Per 2008 form 990, it’s a multi-million dollar (mostly gov funded) org that pays it’s top 2 employees more than $20K above the avg salary for Vermonters!
Who says socialism isn’t good…{Good for whom?}
I’m grateful as hell that people like Glenn Beck and David Horowitz are talking about and exposing the evil “Rules for Radicals” that have so destroyed our national fabric. Alinsky’s methods and dogmetic determination have probably done more harm than any other one individual, when you realize that “the power of ideas” can work just as well for evil as for good.
And now we know more about what a certain young woman from Ohio experienced when she entered Wellesley in the mid-1960s as a Goldwater Republican, but then made a sharp left turn and emerged, Far Stage Left, as a budding radical. Yes, Hillary Clinton wrote her top-graded senior thesis on Alinsky and his major contribution to the would-be destruction of our republic. Then, coming from a totally different background & another direction – but molded as was Clinton by Leftist & radical/progressive professors – Obama, too, was a discliple. Good grief! The two leading Democrat candidates in the 2008 election were both groomed in this tyrannical philosophy and both have been lobotomized by Radical Left politics. Is it any wonder that our country in general – and our body politic in particular – is/are in such rotten shape? WE on the Right certainly have our work cut out for us! Freedom, individual liberty and patriotism have taken both a beating and a backseat to all this crap; but it’s still not too late to begin the MASSIVE rescue effort!
Right on, Joy. The socialist/communist left hs nothing to offer but lies and destruction to advance its own phony caretaker agenda. It’s like Michael Savage correctly stated, “Liberalism is a mental disorder”. It’s really just that simple and we foolishly give them more credit than that of a certified nut case.