One Reason We're Divided

One thing we can all agree on in the current political climate is that political discourse has become so toxic and vile that we're creating almost irreparable breaches between conservatives and progressives and even within these groups.

President Trump has set a poor example for us with his childish, insulting Twitter rants, but he's far from the only person in our culture whose Twitter messages demean and degrade our national conversation.

Indeed, demeaning and degrading others is a deliberate tactic employed by left-wing acolytes of the late activist Saul Alinsky, and one step that may go some distance toward nurturing a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people in the Democratic party to dissociate themselves from the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism.

They don't have to renounce the entire book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salubrious development if more Democrats would disavow Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies. Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy.

Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but their opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed.

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malignant effect upon our nation.

Division is what the book advocates, and it's what its votaries want, but if anyone on the left is sincere about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously repudiate Alinsky and his Rules.