AlinskyDefeater's Blog

 

 

 

Perhaps no rule so clearly defines the Obama strategy as rule thirteen. It says,

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Barack Obama and his two chief strategists, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, are absolutely in love with rule thirteen. In fact, at times it seems they get so stuck on rules five and thirteen that they almost lose sight of the fact that it is consistent pressure that is the true goal, and that the other tactics only serve as methods to achieve that goal.

It’s no surprise really that anyone practicing Alinsky tactics would grow enamored with rules five and thirteen. After all, they are the simplest and the most fun to use.

Let ‘s begin with an explanation of just what each part of the rule means. You may recall that I wrote a previous article explaining each of these. I would encourage you to read Alinsky’s “freezing, polarizing, and personalizing” explained first and then come back to this one, but here I will attempt to explain the components of this rule in a slightly different way.

Why target and freeze your opponent? Alinsky says,

In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.” By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil.

Simply put, it is much easier to attack an organization or an idea if you can ‘put a face on it’. If you can find a single individual who both represents your opponent, and who, given the right spin, can be portrayed as the face of evil you can use this person as a proxy for your attacks on your adversary.

In Alinsky’s description of the rule, he cites an example of targeting a school district that consisted of all-white schools at a time when America was moving towards racially integrating the school system. Alinsky did not try to attack the idea of segregation, or the district. Instead, he singled out a single superintendent in the Chicago Public School System.

Why target and freeze an individual? Targeting and freezing allows you to concentrate your efforts on a single human being. It is much easier to pin down a person than an idea or an institution, because it is all too easy for individuals to push the blame on others. If the buck is passed, the attack is diluted and forcing change will require more effort, and be less likely to be successful.

Alinsky himself speaks of how he shuddered at the thought of facing a more sophisticated opponent in the school system effort. He muses that it would have been a simple matter for the superintendent to have claimed that it was not his fault. After all, his schools were only representative of the neighborhoods they served. Alinsky confesses that such a response would not only have been much more difficult to orchestrate, but that the superintendent’s argument would have actually not been without some merit.

While discussing the possibility that the superintendent could have argued that it was unfair to target him, and not the policies that allowed for all-white neighborhoods in the first place Alinsky laments,

I still shiver when I think of this possibility…

Had the superintendent had that level of confrontational sophistication, Alinsky and his supporters would have been stuck attacking a group of people passing blame, in Alinsky’s terms, in “a dog-chasing-his-tail pattern.” He repines that such a reaction would have led him into a protracted battle, a battle that he was not equipped to undertake. The reality however is that the superintendent did not confront Alinsky in this way. Instead he allowed himself to be targeted and frozen as the face of the injustices of the segregation in the Chicago Public School System.  As a result, Alinsky was able to demonize this man unjustly in order to accomplish his goal of integration.

We must be careful to avoid confusion here. As was often the case, Alinsky’s goals were laudable. It was his methods that leave anyone with a moral center chilled rather than frozen. The end justifying the means is a recurring theme in the Alinsky model, and I will address this in future articles and in more depth in the book.

Now… let’s race ahead to modern times. Do you remember the tactics employed shortly after Barack Obama first took office in 2009? Do you recall whom he targeted and froze as the leader of the Republican Party? The answer, as bizarre as it is true, is Rush Limbaugh. Yes, a radio personality with absolutely no tangible power in the Republican Party and who held no public office. Limbaugh did possess certain other attributes that made him an appealing figure to target and freeze.  He was viewed negatively by a majority of Americans, and he possessed still more qualities that made him the perfect person to target and freeze as the face of the GOP. He was and is a man who speaks in hyperbole, and embraces controversy.

Thus the strategy evolved to use Limbaugh as a sort of litmus test for every politician claiming to be a Conservative. Each was forced to decide publicly if they agreed or disagreed with anything controversial that Limbaugh said. If they agreed, they were labeled as extremists. If they disagreed with Limbaugh, they were labeled as being too spineless to stand up for what the really believe, and if possible they were forced to answer personally to Limbaugh for every dissimilarity.

Such a strategy would have been deemed too ridiculous to believe in a work of fiction, but this Alinsky tactic actually gained some traction with the American people who were not inclined to believe that their President would stoop to such tactics. America is still learning the hard lesson that this administration will use any Alinsky tactic necessary, and not think twice about the moral consequences or whether such methods befit the office of President of the United States of America.

With an economic crisis, a palpable sense that the President was claiming transparency while allowing none in his pursuit of Obamacare, a growing sense of war fatigue, a stimulus bill that seemed more like political paybacks than stimulus, and a general sense of unease with America’s enormous debt and it’s seeming decline as the world’s only remaining superpower it became nearly impossible for Obama to blame everything on George W. Bush, although God knows he tried and continues to try some three years later. So it was imperative that the Administration find some way to blame a Republican Party with virtually no real power for the failure of the Democratic Party to get the President’s agenda passed in a timely manner.

Using the derogatory moniker of “The Party of No” against the GOP had some success, but as Alinsky said,

…the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen”.

They didn’t stop at “Party of No” nor did magically elevating Rush Limbaugh to some imaginary position of power in the Republican Party end the cavalcade of targets for Obama and company to freeze. Even now Obama continues his attempts to find targets he can successfully freeze in his class warfare reelection campaign.  His frequent references to “fat cats on Wall Street”, “the rich” and, “corporate jet owners” are just a small sample of the Administration’s attempts to target and freeze the opposition.

With Obama’s plummeting poll numbers he is likely to unleash Plouffe and Axelrod to levels of Alinsky-style political warfare the likes of which we have never witnessed. All political battles get ugly, but this one is likely to supersede all the others, but you are forewarned and forearmed because now you understand their methods and you will not be taken by surprise. You know Alinsky, so you know Obama, and now you should be equipped to recognize and defeat these tactics. You can be the sophisticated school superintendent that would have caused Alinsky to shiver.

What is personalizing? Although I alluded to this in my description of targeting and freezing, personalizing is the process of taking something that is typically viewed as general and abstract, and personifying it through either an actual individual or a theoretical one. It is difficult to get people fired up about abstract and inanimate concepts, but tie an individual to those concepts and you can now muster the passion in the people.

Is it more likely that the Democrats can get people inspired to work and turn out by discussing abortion, and the place of Federal Government as a mechanism to provide services in people’s lives, or by making personal attacks on Sarah Palin?

As Alinsky puts it,

It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.

What is polarizing? The final step in practicing this rule is polarization. To illustrate this tactic, Alinsky actually quotes Jesus. This is not uncommon for Alinsky. He is equally comfortable quoting Mao, or giving  a portion of his book’s dedication to Lucifer as he is quoting Christ and Gandhi.

Alinsky says,

The classic statement of polarization comes from Christ: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23). He allowed no middle ground to the money-changers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.

Alinsky does not let traditional morality limit him. He is driven only by success. Of course, we would argue that no one could be so sure that he has a pipeline to the truth that this should allow him to set aside any considerations of the morality of his means, but such thinking would not sway Alinsky. To him, he saw an injustice, and he went about doing whatever was necessary to set the injustice straight. While, on the surface, this type of dedication and clarity of purpose again seems laudable, remember that the entire philosophy rests on the premise that one man is able to identify what constitutes injustice. He must then be equally qualified to determine what methods would be appropriate to employ in his effort to right the wrong.  Alinsky confidently appoints himself qualified to do both and chooses to simply discard any consideration as to whether his methods are moral, or whether anyone is wrongly treated in his process of transforming what he deems to be injustices into what he he alone decides is right.

Obama and his advisors buy into this philosophy, and share Alinsky’s view that they are somehow more qualified to decide what is right and what is wrong. If you fail to see that, you are ignorant of an extremely dangerous methodology being used against not only Obama’s political adversaries, but against the American people, as he deems necessary.

I will go into more depth on how to battle specific tactics, including how to battle them on twitter and in other social media in the book. Here, let me just point out that Alinsky distilled the real power of the thirteenth rule into three concise statements. If you study them carefully, along with what you’re learning about the Alinsky model, you should begin to see some ways to defeat these tactics.

The three statements are,

1. The real action is in the enemy’s reaction
2. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.
3. Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with action.

If you can see how to push back without losing your sense of morality from these three statements then you are well on your way to understanding the Alinsky model, and how to successfully defeat or diffuse it. If not, then you need to continue to learn. Either way, this ends the series of articles on the thirteen Alinsky tactics, but I will continue to write about other aspects of the Alinsky model, and I will attempt to point out ways in which Obama uses the tactics in the upcoming election season.

And…my book covering the tactics, means and ends, how and when to use or not use the tactics, successful methods for using or diffusing Alinsky tactics in social media, and much more will be out soon. I hope that you will have found my blog posts helpful, and that you will consider purchasing the book. Thank you.

 

Works Cited

Alinsky, Saul Rules for Radicals. Toronto: Vintage Publishing 1971