::::::::
PLAYBOY: The assumption behind the Administration's Silent Majority thesis is that most of the middle class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful organizational tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?ALINSKY: Conservative? That's a crock of crap. Right now they're nowhere. But they can and will go either of two ways in the coming years -- to a native American fascism or toward radical social change. Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:" They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of status and security has become a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels have sprouted prison bars and their disillusionment is becoming terminal.
They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.
Alinsky got it as did others, they saw the coming class war and his mention of "a native American fascism" or what author Kevin Phillips (who will be featured later in this series) referred to as "Apple Pie Authoritarianism". With the relentless siege on the working class by the rapacious looters who both offshore our jobs to third world sweatshop Meccas as well as throw open our borders to illegal aliens in order to flood the labor market with cheap workers and thereby depress wages where is this generation's Saul Alinsky and why is Rules For Radicals not a staple in every progressive's personal library?
Alinsky was from the real left, not the tepid fakes and frauds who have discarded the values and ideals that were once the cornerstone of the pro-labor, pro-American Democratic Party that has sadly been reduced to a shell of itself by corporatist hacks content to wallow in nonsensical wedge issues and Wall Street money while America rots on the vine, sold down the river for pennies on the dollar. Chump Change!
So out of the ashes of the 'New Democrats' ...Must arise a resurgence of the real left for it is the only way that America will be able to turn back the tide of fascism and corporatism that has resulted in globalism, imperialism and a thorough dumbing down of the masses to lifeless blobs of protoplasm on their petri dish sofas.
Look at all of this crap with Paris Hilton today, it's the biggest fucking story out there and will be exploited to the hilt for it's full distractive value.
Now Alinsky and the real left would exploit it as a perfect example of the decadence of the elites and the two Americas. I just drove home from work and turned on the Ed Schultz show and they were trying to spin this as though it is some travesty and were teeing off on Al Sharpton and the 'two Americas' implications but that is what shills do.
The DLC needs to be taken down, dismantled and a rise of a unified, working class, populist backlash against the rotten fuckers who run this system needs to stick a giant enema hose into Washington and Wall Street and give the bulb a nice big squeeze.
Of course the elitists will cry "CLASS WAR" but that is exactly what they have been waging on the working people for the past fifty fucking years.
Time to open up a front on this war that always seems to be played down by the Republicrats and their ringers.
It's like a race where the local mob owns the track and every goddamned horse along with the officials.
The link to the aforementioned Playboy Interview with Saul Alinsky: HERE
