Alinsky and the 'un-American' activities of Gingrich and Obama

Newt Gingrich’s remarks about Saul Alinsky have sparked a wave of interest in the infamous community organiser.  Much quoted are Gingrich’s statements from the South Carolina primaries that contrast "American exceptionalism” with “the radicalism of Saul Alinsky." His comments in the New Hampshire primaries clarify what he is getting at: “We have a President who is probably the most radical President in American history. … I think if you look at his background he is really a lot more Saul Alinsky radicalism than he is anything to do with traditional American models.  I think that makes this the most important election of modern times because eight years of Barack Obama will fundamentally change the nature of America.” 

Gingrich is echoing Glen Beck and other commentators who use the figure of Alinsky to portray the Obama administration as subversive radicals bent on destroying American decency and democracy. One quote from Beck in 2009 illustrates the tenor of these comments: ‘I could not care less who Saul Alinsky was a year ago … I just thought he was a loser from the ancient days that taught a bunch of people in the 60s how to be loser Marxists but now you had better pay attention to Saul Alinsky because they are in full effect.’

While Beck directly portrays Alinsky (and thereby Obama) as a Marxist, Gingrich takes a subtler route.  Gingrich is invoking the spectre of McCarthy and the search for un-American activities.  The implication being that in ages past Americans rooted out Marxists and other undesirable elements but now we make them President – look how bad things have got!  But the use of Alinsky to make this insinuation is not just historically inaccurate it reveals Gingrich’s profound disdain for a great American political tradition.

Despite working alongside Communists in the 1930s, Alinsky was never investigated by McCarthy or thought to be a threat by the ever-suspicious FBI.  Rather he was seen by many as an asset in combating both Communist and Fascist influences not only in America but also in Europe. For example, Cardinal Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI, when he was Archbishop of Milan was concerned about the influence of the Communists in that city.  So in 1958, through an introduction by Alinsky’s friend and confident, the Roman Catholic philosopher and founding father of Christian Democracy, Jacques Maritain, Montini brought Alinsky to Italy to help the church address the situation.

The genius of Alinsky’s approach to community organising was its broad-based character.  For Alinsky the interests of the poor were not intrinsically opposed to those of the rich.  His concern was the identification and pursuit of a genuinely common good.  Paradoxically, he used confrontational tactics to do achieve this end. 

Alinsky was equally critical of the sectarian interest group politics pursued by organized labor and business, and the identity politics pursued by religious groups and the Black Power movement, all of which denied the possibility of a common good. Through his approach he was able to draws together Clergy and Communists, blacks and whites, new migrants and established citizens, believers and non-believers, and the low paid and the well paid to form a broad-based coalition.  In the contemporary political climate that really is radical.  Yet it is a radical approach that is still practiced today by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which Alinsky founded in 1940.

The Living Wage campaigns run by contemporary IAF organisers illustrate Alinsky’s politics of the common good.  They do not assume a class war between managers and workers.  Rather they locate the need for better pay and working conditions in the need for families to have enough to live on so parents are not having to work several jobs and can be back home to look after their kids, so the kids don’t seek surrogate families in gangs and so the surrounding area is a better place to live for both managers and workers.  All have a mutual interest in building up the common life of that place and pay and working conditions are intrinsically related to the strength or weakness of that common life. 

Alinsky and the IAF stand in the tradition of American populism, a tradition they share with the Tea Party. Yet it is a tradition routinely despised by Washington insiders like Gingrich.  It is a tradition that harks back to Jefferson and Jackson. It is anti-elites and opposes over-concentrations of power.  This means it can be both anti-corporate, refusing to believe that what is good for General Motors or any other conglomeration is necessarily good for America, and anti-Washington, being suspicious of technocratic, top-down solutions whether proposed by Republicans or Democrats.  It sees a place for the market and the state but also wants both the market and the state to know their place.  It combines religious and economic concerns as indicated in the excerpt from an 1895 speech by the populist Milford Howard: ‘The spirit of avarice is devouring the great heart of this nation.  The greed for gain gets such possession of men’s souls that they become demons.  They rush into the maelstrom of money-getting, and soon lose all fear of God and love for their Fellow-men.’  Not a bad analysis of the roots of the contemporary financial crisis.

Populism always confuses political and financial elites because it is simultaneously ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’.  But we can contrast its approach to the top-down solutions proposed by the likes of Gingrich and Obama.  While they are portrayed as entirely different, Gingrich’s proposed tax cuts and Obama’s proposed tax credits are both impersonal, complex, technocratic interventions designed to stimulate the economy from a bureau in Washington.  Neither reflects ‘authentic’ American traditions of self-organised, bottom up civic and economic renewal.  To see these we would do better to look at work currently undertaken by the IAF.

Gingrich and Obama both focus on the distribution of economic resources.  Where they differ is on who should have more and who should have less in order to kick-start the economy.  But neither tax cuts nor tax credits will affect the power imbalances in economic relations and the lack of accountability that was at the heart of the current financial crisis.  The IAF, and populism more generally, is concerned with the distribution of power and seeks measures that either inhibit or rebalance economic and political power so that people can act for themselves.  Instead of tax cuts or tax credits, the IAF calls for a restitution of anti-usury legislation so that there is a limit to how much trouble poor people in debt can get into and a curtailing of the power unaccountable and unelected bankers have over the lives of others.