ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK at this progressive worldview is to understand the origins and uses of “political correctness.” Political correctness is actually a term coined by the Chinese dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong. By “politically correct,” Mao meant adhering to the official position of the Communist Party, which the comrades referred to as “the party line.” Those who deviated from the party line, who expressed views that were politically incorrect, were guilty of betraying the communist dream and therefore of betraying the oppressed. For their betrayal, they were subjected to disciplinary measures and expulsion, which meant the loss not only of their party affiliation but of their community of friends and comrades. Although progressives in America are not communists in the Maoist sense, being politically incorrect in their ranks also entails punishment and shaming. If the offense is great enough, it can mean expulsion from progressive communities that include virtually all of one’s friends. This is a crucial reason why progressives don’t break ranks the way conservatives do.
The party line creates the solidarity, the lockstep, that is crucial to winning political battles and achieving the cherished goal: communism for Mao, “social justice” for progressives. Political correctness embodies and enforces the worldview of the party, which sees itself as the vanguard of the vulnerable and oppressed. Like their leftist predecessors, progressives see the world as divided into the haves and the have-nots, the 1 percent and the 99 percent, the victimizers and the victims, the powerful and the rest. Maintaining the party line—being politically correct—puts one in the vanguard of social progress. Deviating from the party line is the betrayal of this trust and rightly risks expulsion from the progressive community. It means joining the ranks of the deplorables. It means being shunned. If you are a progressive, the last thing you want to be called is a racist, a sexist, an Islamophobe, or a Republican.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and progressives generally, are disciples of the political organizer Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals has provided a well-thumbed guidebook for the contemporary left. This book has pride of place on the recommended reading list of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.1 Obama was trained as an Alinsky organizer and for decades worked with Alinsky organizations and activists to achieve radical goals.2 When Hillary was an undergraduate at Wellesley in 1969, she interviewed Alinsky and devoted her senior thesis to his theories and achievements. She compared him to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman, and Martin Luther King Jr. and portrayed him as an American hero.
Alinsky regarded himself as a revolutionary leftist and embraced the Marxist view that society was divided into haves and have-nots, oppressors and oppressed. To achieve equality and justice required Machiavellian means. “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power,” Alinsky explained. “Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”3 There was no room in Alinsky’s leftist worldview for the recognition that there are also “can-dos” and “can-nots” and “will-dos and will-nots” or that in a capitalist society there is mobility both upward and downward.
Tactically speaking, Alinsky was critical of the way sixties’ radicals went about trying to accomplish their ends. In particular, he was upset at the way they telegraphed their agendas and were frank about their goals. “We want a revolution, and we want it now!” was a typical radical slogan of the time. Alinsky was critical of sixties’ activists who shouted slogans to “Burn the system down!” Of them, he said, “They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book.”4 Alinsky was not appalled that sixties’ radicals wanted to burn the American system down; he was appalled that they would communicate that desire to the public. Being candid about their agendas, he wrote, would turn off potential recruits, create resistance, and make it impossible for them to achieve their goal. He was particularly distressed by the way they attacked the Democratic Party, which was the party of labor and the vehicle through which he thought they could actually achieve power. The advice his book offers to future radicals is this: lie about your intentions and join the Democratic Party; once inside the Democratic Party, you can subvert America’s institutions from within.
The most important chapter of Alinsky’s guide is called “Means and Ends” and is designed to address Alinsky’s biggest problem: how to explain to radicals who think they are creating a world of justice and harmony that the means they must use to get there are Machiavellian—deceitful, conniving, brutal, and ruthless. Alinsky answers the question with a statement worthy of the famous question Pontius Pilate put to Jesus: “What is truth?” The progressive organizer, he writes, “does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”5 Or a nihilist. Judging by the events of the election year alone, Hillary Clinton would qualify as a model Alinsky disciple.
The Alinsky activist breaks the rules whenever doing so advances the progressive cause. Being an activist in the service of the higher good becomes a license to do anything required to achieve that good. The ends justify the means. But this raises the question of whether one can create a new world—a world that is socially just—by belonging to a political movement that is corrupt. Alinsky dismisses any such concern: “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process . . . he who fears corruption fears life.”6 These are comforting words to anyone who needs to break the rules and is looking to justify their crimes as serving a higher good. Since life is corrupt, according to Alinsky, everyone is corrupt, and corruption is just business as usual. “In action,” Alinsky writes, “one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter.”7 But who is to determine what is good for mankind—the progressive elite? Alinsky’s creed is a creed that will justify anything.
Practicing deception to conceal one’s true goals and regarding moral principles and laws as applicable to others but not to oneself are the core concepts of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. But the all-consuming focus of Alinsky’s manual—its strategic end, which these are mere means to achieve—is power. The following anecdote about Alinsky’s teachings nicely illustrates the focus of Alinsky radicalism: “When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: ‘You want to organize for power!’ In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: ‘From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.’”8
The New Republic reporter Ryan Lizza interviewed Gregory Galluzzo, one of Barack Obama’s three mentors at the Alinsky institute. Galluzzo showed him the training manual they used to teach the future president: “It is filled with workshops and chapter headings on understanding power: ‘power analysis,’ ‘elements of a power organization,’ ‘the path to power.’ Galluzzo told me that many new trainees have an aversion to Alinsky’s gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. The Alinsky manual instructs them to get over these hang-ups. ‘We are not virtuous by not wanting power,’ it says. ‘We are really cowards for not wanting power,’ because ‘power is good’ and ‘powerlessness is evil.’”9 For Alinsky and his followers, power—a means—is in fact the end.
The quest for power in the belief that acquiring it can be world-transforming is the key to understanding the motivations and methods of today’s progressives, like Hillary Clinton. In March 2007, the Washington Post reported that Hillary Clinton had kept her ties to the Alinsky movement even in the White House, from which she gave support to Alinsky’s organization and its radical agendas.10
The quest for power as the first priority, the need to conceal one’s true agenda, and the assurance that the rules don’t apply to radicals who break them in service to the cause make up the core message of Alinsky’s teaching. These are the political guidelines for modern progressives and the Democratic Party today.