David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

Saul Alinsky was the great “community organizer” of midcentury America.

His was the philosophy (and, I believe, the organization) in which President Obama matriculated on his appearance in Hyde Park. Alinsky and his “organizers” were, supposedly, involved in bringing “social justice” to the community—in redressing wrongs through what might be called, depending upon one’s political bent, Street Theatre and Civil Disobedience, or thuggery.

His tactics involved picketing the homes of directors of institutions whose practices he and his organization found uncongenial, clogging the floors of a department store with nonbuyers who would, at the end of the day, place orders COD for purchases they had no intention of accepting, and so on.

I take these examples from his own book Rules for Radicals (1971). Also to be found in his book is his threat, to the City of Chicago, of “a shit-in”—a clogging of all lavatories onboard planes and in the concourses of O’Hare Airport: “It would be a source of great mortification and embarrassment to the city administration. It might even create the kind of emergency in which planes would have to be held up while passengers got back aboard to use the plane’s toilet facilities.”

What did he hope to gain? Power.

Here is this Twelfth Rule of Power Tactics: “ The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative .” (Italics his.) “You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand, and saying ‘you’re right—we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now tell us.’ ”

A “community organizer,” then, is one who seeks power. To do what? Whatever he wants. In the service of whom? Of those he designates as “within his community.” He may (Alinsky and his cohorts did) seek to force banks to issue mortgages to those unable to pay—his community being the recipients of these “low income mortgages.” But in forcing the banks to risk and waste the money of their depositors, he was, finally, not “bringing about social justice,” but rationing poverty.

Who did he think he was? He thought he was a fellow who had learned a good trick. And he used it to further what he called “his ideals” but which might at least as accurately be characterized as his “agenda”—for who can know, finally, what were his ideals? Perhaps he just liked causing disruption. Indeed, there is no doubt about it. “It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgiveable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes an irrational anger.” (Ibid.)

So, “the enemy’s” anger is “irrational,” but Alinsky’s furor over “social injustice” is somehow brave and laudable.

Hard cases make Bad Law; and hard situations make bad precedent.

That the Freedom Marchers succeeded in the passage of the Civil Rights Act is moot. That they succeeded in changing the nature of our country is undeniable.

Dr. King, the SCLC, and the host of organizations and individuals who risked their lives changed America vastly for the better.

One legacy of their bravery is a penchant, among the well-meaning, to “do good,” “march for,” and so on, in supposed aid of causes whose worth may be questionable, and whose goals impossible—an example of the first, opponents of Global Warming, and of the second, World Peace.

These well-meaning citizens and celebrities do not risk the maiming and death risked by Freedom marchers, they risk nothing—merely aggrandizing their own self-image, and rewarding themselves for engaging in actions which as they may be superficially like those of the Freedom Marchers, can be felt as deserving of merit.

Environmentalists have stopped water to the Central Valley of California, as the flow endangered, they said, some fish. And they got a judge to agree with them. Is this just? To whom? To some fish? To the farmer? Finally, it may or may not be just, but it is grateful to the self-image of the judge.

How wonderful to think of ourselves as heroes, and how often is such a fantasy the result of a feeling of powerlessness. The Left offers the ever-attractive suggestion that one, knowing himself to be (like you and me) a biddable, often confused, flawed human being, may rise above his knowledge by merely announcing his capacity for Herohood.

Candidate Obama said “Selma belongs to me, too.” Well, the benefits do (as they accrue to us all), and, certainly, the pride-o-frace does—as might also the pride of country, patriotism, for being a citizen of a country whose citizens displayed such heroism— but the credit does not.

Neither does credit accrue to those espousing whatever causes, who risk nothing in their prosecution; and for the inspired to indulge in extralegal or borderline actions of either civil disobedience or judicial activism is to seek credit for breaking laws whose transgression (in contrast to those at Selma) cost them nothing. Such is a cost-free exercise in self-aggrandizement similar to my “nostalgia” for not having served—it is arrogation of that which belongs to another. This is the essence of the philosophy of the Left.

We may be inspired to break the laws, discard the customs, and to destroy the culture which allowed us the freedom and leisure to so engage ourselves; and I, growing up in the sixties, thought it a grand idea: to bring about Social Justice.

That such actions, whatever their supposed intention, caused havoc and that we who espoused them were responsible for the same, was to me a difficult perception. It still is.

The embrace of Conservatism, my own, and that of anyone coming to it in maturity, necessitates a deep and rigorous survey and evaluation of thoughts and actions, and their honest assessment.

The ability to honestly assess actions and consequences (morality) is not limited to Conservatives, nor are we as individuals more likely than Liberals to make such decisions—save in the political realm.

Given a perception that the greater possibility of happiness for the greatest number lies in Conservative rather than Liberal principles, why is the transition to the first from the second difficult?

One may reason (as I, and many readers have) with honest, intelligent, moral Liberal friends, who may, in one instance after another, grant the validity of one’s Conservative theses, and acknowledge the discrepancy between their own actions, and their voting habits, but yet not only vote Democratic, but proclaim that nothing on earth could induce them to do otherwise. Why?

It means leaving the group.

It is not difficult to endure, but it is painful to recognize the incredulity and scorn which one encounters from one’s native Group (the Liberals) on announcing a change of philosophy. It is shocking. And it is sobering, for it reveals this truth: that the Left functions, primarily, through its power as a primitive society or religion, dedicated above all to solidarity, and not only to acceptance but to constant promulgation of its principles, however inchoate, as “self-evident” and therefore beyond question. But, as Hayek points out, that something is beyond question most often means that its investigation has been forbidden. Why? Because it was untrue.

How does the Left draw and maintain its unthinking allegiance from people of intelligence, compassion, and goodwill? By offering an illusion. Here is Whittaker Chambers, speaking of the Communism from which he wrenched himself in the 1940s: “Its vision points the way to the future: its faith labors to turn the future into present reality. It says to every man who joins it: the vision is a practical problem of history; the way to achieve it is a practical problem in politics, which is the present tense of history. Have you the moral strength to take upon yourself the crimes of history so that man at last may close his chronicle of age-old senseless suffering, and replace it with a purpose and a plan? . . . The answer is the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.” 106