Roy Edroso does everyone a public service by wading through the mud of the right-wing-nutjob attack on President Obama’s speech to school kids. I’m almost sorry I clicked through to any of the blogs he cites: the stupid, it burns.
It is difficult to overstate the amount of ignorance permeating the discussions and essays on these blogs. The discussions of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, for example, suggest that few have actually read the book. Click over from WikiPedia to Amazon, folks, and order it. Read it.
James Lewis, who may be an American but is not much of a thinker (he thinks socialists are “deeply committed” to the “Internationalist Ruling Class!”), asserts that Alinsky’s prescription to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” has something to do with scapegoating groups:
“That slogan defines mob scapegoating, of course. It is an exact prescription for whipping up mobs — by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by religion.”
This makes, of course, very little sense. Personalizing and polarizing the target is about putting an individual, and preferably evil, face on class oppression, not about blaming rich white mortgage lenders for the problems caused by all those lazy poor people who bought houses they couldn’t pay for.
But what about Alinsky? Lewis wants to paint him as a dangerous radical who means to bring down capitalism and the American way of life with the help of his protege, President Obama. Capitalism has, of course, quite effectively begun the process of destroying itself without Alinsky’s help, thank you very much.
Lewis is bent out of shape because President Obama is scapegoating the “capitalists who run General Motors and Wall Street,” and some B-list comedienne thinks the tea partiers are racist, don’t you see. Never mind that the executives who brought down our economy by mismanaging both its industrial and financial sectors sort of brought the blame upon themselves.
Saul Alinsky wrote Rules to show the politically weak how they could effect social change despite the efforts of the powerful to hold their priveleged economic and political positions. He compared the book to The Prince:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Alinsky suggested that organizers identify privileged individuals and personalize social injustice–that is, show exactly who benefits from the perceived class differences they had organized to fight. Lewis does not support his claim that the President has decided to use this technique to demonize groups rather than individuals except by assertion: he just knows they are doing this, because this is what the Dixiecrats did to blacks, don’t you see. But the evidence suggests that people who wish to curb the excesses of Capitalism and capitalists have followed Alinsky’s lead by targeting the individual executives who made corporate decisions on things like bonuses.
This article, for example, targets Edward Liddy, the CEO of AiG, not capitalists in general. Other discussion of Wall Street bonuses challenge them on capitalist grounds by making the credible claim that the poor performance of financial wizards should preclude bonuses–they should not be rewarded for destroying their companies.
“These bonuses should be zero,” wrote one poster on the firedoglake.com blog. “Not down 44%. Zero. These banks should be using their profits to reinvest in the shoring up of their capital reserves, so that they [can] start underwriting and lending again, not paying discretionary bonuses. It’s not about keeping the “best and the brightest”…if they were that sharp, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we now?”
Janeane Garafalo’s assertion that racism pervades the Tea Party movement also has merit–at least StormFront thinks so. They have asked members to join the Tea Parties, and along with other white supremacist groups believe they would find a fertile recruiting ground at such meetings.
In no sense can anyone characterize either as scapegoating. Neither Wall Street bonus babies nor teabaggers are taking blame for others. To the extent liberals use Alinsky’s methods to effect social change, they target the actual malefactors of wealth and privelege–along with the rubes who support an unjust system. They do not blame innocent individuals or groups for the sins of others.
Indeed, it is arguably the right that favors Alinsky’s techniques. They make a din that creates the impression of a larger movement at boisiterous town hall forums. They force rules of civil conduct on liberals even while violating them. They bully and ridicule, and attract activists who enjoy using these methods. They use any event as a reason to attack, and offer no constructive alternatives. And they picked, froze, personalized, and polarized Obama.
They also scapegoat amorphous groups–the liberal media, academic or Hollywood elites, unions, socialists, communists, and all those welfare mothers who think rich people owe them a Cadillac.
We should of course expect reactionaries–capitalists, corporatists, and religious leaders who see their base of political and economic power crumbling before changing social norms, demographics, and economic and scientific realities–to protect the foundations of their power. They have to demonize cultural, political, economic and demographic changes as socialist in order to hold the support of uninformed masses who fear out groups, “socialism,” “secularism,” and “liberal elites” more than they fear losing everything when some corporation sends their job overseas or refuses to pay for the cancer treatment because they had acne ten years ago. This is how they preserve the every-man-for-himself system that allows a small group of wealthy patriarchs to control the vast majority of US wealth. But they have no stronger a claim to America, and what it means to be an American, than liberals who believe that we can improve society by acting collectively.
And if they believe that socialism is about commitment to the “International Ruling Class,” they come to the intellectual gun fight without a good understanding of what bullets are.