The opening paragraph of the book makes it perfectly clear who his readers are: From the 30s to the 70s, he organized poor, working people in Chicago and other cities and addressed countercultural and civil rights activists nationwide. (See Alinsky court his Luciferian comparisons in the 1966 interview above.)īut Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals for his demographic.
As one thoughtful, eloquent pundit recently wrote, “the Right has taken Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and shoved it up where #TheResistance don’t shine.” Not long before this charming appropriation, Alinsky’s 1971 manual of political warfare found its way into the hands of some of the same Tea Party organizers who had made his name synonymous with everything they despised about the left. Spoken of by many on the right as a servant of the devil, “ American Joseph Goebbels,” and “ dangerous harbinger of insurrection,” Alinsky developed a reputation for insidiousness that may exceed his influence, considerable though it may be.īut liberals and leftists have no special purchase on Alinsky’s legacy. But many feverish screeds on social media, talk radio, and YouTube might have made one think he lurked behind these politicians like Rasputin. Saul David Alinsky died 36 years before the election of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton’s first attempt for the presidency.