selfless,” Alinsky says elsewhere in Reveille for Radicals, standing above all the victories and defeats, the ordinary hopes and fears of the local community leaders. Here Alinsky quotes Schiller: “Know this, a mind sublime puts greatness into life, yet seeks it not therein.”9 Organizers are not, and must not be, caught up in the ordinary life of the community. They are outside it, above it.
That is a rather peculiar view of democratic leadership—yet the outside organizer is both leader and not leader. Like a movie cowboy he rides into a troubled town alone, reconstructs legitimate authority, and then rides out again; he never stays to become sheriff or mayor. This is a view of politics that has attracted any number of talented, ambitious, would-be American political heroes, including many of the founding fathers of the New Left who were so audacious in their conception of themselves as “new” that they could not acknowledge their debt to Alinsky. Not just New Leftists but all sorts of young people—especially men, and often religious ones—fell victim to this particular siren’s call. The future journalist Nicholas von Hoffman captured the essence of Alinsky’s challenge and romantic allure:
You drive up in a car, and you know nobody, and you’ve got to organize it into something that it’s never been before. You know, you’re not a Democrat or Republican. You don’t have much going for you. You don’t have prestige, you don’t have muscle, you’ve got no money to give away. All you have are your wits. You’ve just got your wits, charm, and whatever you can put together. So you [had] better form a very accurate picture of what’s going on, and you had better not bring in too many a priori maps [because] if you do, you’re just not going to get anywhere.10
No fast six gun, no maps, just your wits and charm. So how is it done? By what magic does the organizer transform people who are divided among themselves by ethnic and other rivalries, as well as by their own self-interested scheming designs on power, into the united leadership of the People’s Organization? Alinsky’s particular kind of political knowledge is the answer to this question, and he delivers it through a series of stories that illustrate his hard-headed, practical political art. Hard-headed because it accepts self-interest as the basic human motivator and does not wish it away into what Alinsky considers the mushy-headed idea that people will do good because they believe in the good. Practical because, although it might do violence to some too-easy ethical standards of action, it actually works.
The hero-organizer is also a trickster. Alinsky gives the reader a series of small deceptions, little lies through which the organizer uses his knowledge of human psychology and his understanding of society to maneuver the local leadership into the newly formed PO. He tells two rival leaders that the other one has joined the PO, and thereby tricks them both into joining; he gives one leader a letter to deliver knowing that he will open it and read the contents; he and a few other people spend a whole day with a crucial but recalcitrant leader, acting out a complicated charade about their supposed important but secret business, which forces the confused victim to join the PO so he will know what’s going on. Pretty mild stuff, and used almost exclusively at the beginning of the organizer’s work within a neighborhood.
Later, tricks become less necessary because the divided neighborhood changes after a few early political victories. These victories, no matter how small, teach the local leaders and their followers that they all need each other, and that united political action is in the self-interest of all. That precept helps explain why Alinsky, a self-described “revolutionary,” would attract support from some distinctly nonrevolutionary figures and institutions: Alinsky didn’t just promise a non-Communist radicalism during the fifties and an “orderly” revolution during the disorderly sixties. In addition, in his plain-talking and deceptively simple theorizing, competing interests are manipulated in such a way that they create community, and thus the “radical democrat” solves a main paradox of interest-based liberal pluralism.
But not without some sleight of hand. Alinsky recognizes that he is in the middle of a dilemma of ends and means, and he faces it straight on. He has little patience with moral compunction about his tricks. The People’s Organization is in a permanent war, and must operate in a world of “smashing forces, clashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, seeming chaos.”11 Go into such a world without your bag of tricks and you are sure to lose. And early defeats will doom the organization. This was so obvious to Alinsky that he spent little time arguing the point in Reveille for Radicals. But twenty-six years later it became the dominant theme of Alinsky’s second political handbook, Rules for Radicals, which was directed toward what he considered the overly moralistic New Left.
Alinsky’s disdain for “moral quibbling” is perhaps responsible for his failure to consider in either work one of the most elementary problems of the ends-versus-means debate: Is there any difference between the tactics that can be used among friends and the tactics that can be used against enemies? After Alinsky demonstrates how the organizer uses questionable techniques among friends to put the PO together, he then shows how to use a whole arsenal of dirty tricks against the community’s external enemies. Do both set of techniques come out of the same bag? Alinsky ignored this question, as did Chavez, who would eventually dissolve all doubts about ends and means into rituals of religious faith, while allowing his lieutenants to use all manner of dirty tricks both inside and outside the UFW.
But one of the corollaries of the ends and means debate did interest both Alinsky and Chavez. They knew that political knowledge was dangerous stuff. What was to prevent a person from using Alinskyite tactics to pursue “undemocratic objectives”? Since the successful organizer must use an arsenal of dirty tricks to achieve the good, why wouldn’t such a person (one who can trick, cheat, and steal) use those techniques for some ultimately dirty end?
Alinsky’s answer is based on the hero’s democratic faith. Behind the petty, dirty tactics of the organizer is a bigger, nobler one: “The fundamental tactic is the organizer’s own complete faith in people and his complete devotion to that faith.”12 The organizer cannot fake it, Alinsky says. If he has the faith, the people will know it; if he doesn’t, the people will know that, too. Therefore, Alinsky’s tactics cannot be used by an undemocratic politician, as people cannot be tricked into doing things by someone who they know doesn’t believe in them.
Chavez was not so sure. In his early political career, in the midst of being trained by Ross and Alinsky, he worried that people could be organized for anything, even the worst of causes. He also believed that some very bad people had been very good organizers. He read Goebbels, and told colleagues on several occasions that the Nazi propagandist was, after all, a good organizer.13 In this case, as in many others, Chavez seems to have looked a little deeper into the face of evil than did his mentors, and his answer would have to be tougher, harder.
Alinsky has been accused of lacking a coherent ideology, but this charge misses the point. Alinsky’s ideas may not explain everything that happens in the world; he does not have a total system such as Catholicism or some closed versions of Marxism, yet Alinskyism certainly meets the first requirement of a political ideology: it provides a guide to action. Moreover, the main reason that Alinsky appears nonideological is because so many of his ideas are taken straight from the almost invisible ideology that we live and breathe: the ideology of American democracy. The dilemmas of Alinskyism, then, are similar to the problems of the whole American political tradition, where the core confusion resides in the various vague, often conflicting ideas of what democracy is.
This is not just a popular misunderstanding, a confusion among the folk. It goes as far back as the founding of the country and is as deep as our political roots. We are originally a mixture of two contradictory Old World impulses: the political optimism of the European Enlightenment, which culminated in the French Revolution, and the political pessimism of English liberalism as it defined itself against the radical implications of the English revolution. Theoretical revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries mixed together in the New World. It was a true blend in which each tradition was changed by the encounter, and then reformulated over the course of American history.
