From Creation Myths:What Barack Obama won’t tell you about his community organizing past [h/t Instapundit]:
Kellman had hired Obama to organize residents of Chicago’s South Side…Roseland and the northern edge of Riverdale, the neighborhoods to which he was assigned, had been decimated by the collapse of the steel industry… “His assignment was to operate in the classic style,”…
Community-Organizers come from outside of the community. An outside organization hires,trains and dispatches (assigns) them to a community in order to mobilize the community to seek the kind of solutions that the organization wants. Communities don’t ask for these people to be sent, they show up and start taking over. Ultimately, the organization seeks to harness the political power of a community for the elitists’ own ends.
The article sugarcoats Alinsky’s ideology and methodology. Alinsky advocated a ruthlessly pragmatic model which sent “community organizers”, modeled on the communist concept of agitators, into local communities to exploit local concerns to build a political movement that would eventually destroy the old order.
Even without Alinsky’s philosophy, it’s clear that community organizers represent a foreign influence on a community. They do not represent the people of a community coming together to solve problems or petition the government. They represent a tool by which a radical elite harvests votes and power from vulnerable communities.
They represent the antithesis of traditional American bottom-upward political actions.
And this article makes something else very clear: Obama failed at all his goals as a community organizer. He started with grandiose ideas, kept cutting back, got nowhere, then quit and went to law school.
Why are we supposed to respect or applaud this resume item again?
Lexington Green,
I think we’re supposed to view his time as a community organizer as indicative of his idealism and willingness to self sacrifice. It’s his version of McCain’s Hanio Hilton. As with most things on the left, were suppose to judge him based on his intentions, not his practical results.
Their intentions are oh so noble and their hearts are pure–all in the name of “the people.” They mean well, that’s all that counts, right? Sort of same same the slack the left has always cut the Communists, n’cest pas?
In their own minds their intentions may be noble and their hearts pure but reality is a different kettle of fish. They are ruthless, violent bloody totalitarians who would sacrifice millions of those who “don’t get it” to their utopian nightmare. Obama is an empty suit Marxist and Hilliary is a Stalin in skirts. Both wouldn’t hesitate to get their hands dirty and bloody if they could get away with it.
Yup, just another “proverty pimp” like Jesse Jackson or Bobbie Rush.
The job (and salary from the NGO) is the thing. As Obama’s community boss said last week, “we accomplished little” but they sure did spend private and government cash on administrative expenses (those salaries again).
The party centre sends in a comrade to make the community politically conscious. A well known scenario.
Implicit it their goal is that people should not leave to find better opportunity.
As I have noted at my blog, Obama was not very successful at community organizing (nor was he very successful at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge).
A successful Community Organizer would seem to be reasonably useful (at least he can get things done), an unseuccessful one rather less so.
FrancisT,
A successful Community Organizer would seem to be reasonably useful (at least he can get things done)…
Depends on what they get done. We certainly would not regard a successful fascist community organizer as “useful”. Likewise, an organizer who works from a far left perspective that seeks to increase dependence on the state and elevate the power of a leftist political class would not be “useful”.
Reading the article, which I thought was good, brought to mind what killed Alinskyite organizing.
In a parenthetical, Judis wrote: “Indeed, Alinsky’s first group, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, had become a bastion of support for segregationist George Wallace in the 1960s.”
This lead everyone in Chicago in that era to understand that Alinsky did not have all of the answers.
In a certain sense, the entire history of leftism is an attempt to find the path to true socialism. Marx proposed that his science of history showed that capitalism would collapse and that the proletariat, organized by their experience of working in the capitalist’s manufactories, would then seize power and create communism. By the end of the 19th century it was clear that was not going to happen. Sorrel advanced the idea of syndicalism and the general strike to replace it. His disciples such as Mussolini and Lenin, based their systems on his theories, but things quickly got ugly.
In the US, Alinsky hoped to use community organization to build the infra-structure for socialism. That became untenable when Back of the Yards turned out to be “objectively reactionary” The bloom really came off the rose for BHO in the 80’s:
“Joravsky kicked off the discussion by recounting Alinsky’s core principles. Green then brought up a controversial organization, Save our Neighborhoods/Save our City (SON/SOC), that had launched in February 1984 in response to fears that Harold Washington would promote public housing in certain white neighborhoods–leading to an influx of black residents. As Green noted, SON/SOC was organized by Alinsky disciples who were following their mentor’s principle of basing demands on self-interest.”
Obama drew the correct conclusion. Alinskyism was unworkable and would not create socialism. He then followed the same path (although I have no idea how much history he knows) as Mussolini and Lenin. He set out to use the leadership principle (Fuhrerprinzip) to create socialism. He had determined to become the ONE.
Folks: we have got to stop him.