Actually, we're not interested in politics. We're into chaos.
From the Minnesota Independent:
"Michael Patrick Leahy’s self-published conservative manifesto is coming off the presses this week, and not a moment too soon.
'The timing is crucial,' said Leahy, the Knoxville, Tenn., activist who founded the Top Conservatives on Twitter hashtag and played another founding role in the anti-tax 'Tea Party' movement. 'I’m trying to get these principles out there for conservatives this month, as people attend these town hall meetings with their members of Congress. These are principles that conservatives need to know.'
Those principles are the ones that the late left-wing activist Saul Alinsky outlined in his 1971 book 'Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.' Leahy’s book, “Rules for Conservative Radicals,' boils them down and scraps Alinsky’s more 'amoral' suggestions. 'The problem that conservatives have with Alinsky is that, for him, the ends justified the means,' explained Leahy. 'I’m suggesting that we take the successful Alinsky rules, we update them and apply them to new social networking technology, and we execute them in the Judeo-Christian tradition.'
Thirty-eight years since the publication of his handbook and 37 years since he died, Alinsky has found a thriving and surprising fan club in the modern conservative movement. Leahy is one of many 'Tea Party' activists who have latched onto 'Rules for Radicals' as a blueprint for a counter-revolution, a campaign of robust challenges to President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress that is playing out nearly every day of the August recess in noisy town hall meetings.
'Alinsky-cons' have taken the union organizer’s '13 rules for power tactics' and '11 rules to test whether power tactics are ethical' and found a strategy that, they believe, is chipping away at the momentum for national health care reform. When they flummox representatives with chants, or laugh out loud at their attempts to explain their votes, many 'Tea Party' activists say they’re cribbing from Alinsky.
The most obvious beneficiary of the surge of interest in Alinsky has been Random House, which publishes the book through its Vintage imprint. According to Nielsen BookScan, 'Rules for Radicals' has sold 15,000 copies since the start of this year - it only sold 35,000 copies from 2000 through 2008. Since the start of August, it has sold 1,000 copies. At Amazon.com, 'Rules' is safely nestled in the Top 75 on the retailer’s bestseller list, and it’s No. 1 in the 'radical thought,' 'civics,' and 'sociology/history' categories. Most tellingly, the people who snatch up copies of Alinsky’s book at Amazon don’t go on to buy more liberal texts. Instead, according to the online bookseller, they purchase Michelle Malkin’s 'Culture of Corruption,' Glenn Beck’s 'Common Sense,' and Mark Levin’s 'Liberty and Tyranny.'
'I picked up the book after the [November 2008] election,' said John O’Hara, a staffer at the conservative Heartland Institute who helped plan anti-tax 'Tea Parties' in February and April. 'There really is no equivalent book for conservatives. There’s no ‘Rules for Counter-Radicals.’'
There’s a reason why 'Rules for Radicals' became the go-to book for would-be Tea Party and town hall activists. Alinsky-cons can trace their inspiration back to 2008, when it became clear that Obama would win the nomination and Republicans looked deeper into his past for clues about his hidden, not-so-centrist beliefs. Attacking Alinsky was easy; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had been pilloried for writing her senior thesis on the organizer, and in his influential 2008 book 'Liberal Fascism,' Jonah Goldberg placed him firmly in the totalitarian tradition: 'ubstitute the word "fascist" for "radical" in many of Alinsky’s statements and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference.'
In the conservative muckraker Jerome Corsi’s 'Obama Nation,' published one year ago this week, Alinsky (whom Obama never met) was singled out as a malign influence in the candidate’s education. Alinsky had 'extreme socialist objectives,' explained Corsi in an August 2008 Fox News appearance, as 'a radical leftist organizer who said that his goal was redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots.'
[...]
The growth of the “Tea Party” movement has seen Alinky morph from a bogeyman to a possible inspiration to conservative activists. In April, Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks, the conservative group that has provided guidance to many 'Tea Party' organizers and town hall rowdies, told the Washington Independent that the group was 'applying Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals'' in its approach to anti-tax 'Tea Parties.' In June, he told Eric Kleefeld of TPMDC that 'Rules' was the first book handed to new employees of the group.
'That first rule, "power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have" - that argument is happening right now,' said Steinhauser, 'with both sides arguing about which side represents the majority on health care.' The mockery and laughter at town halls struck Steinhauser as an adoption of the fifth rule, which posits that 'Ridicule is a man’s most potent weapon.' The old deference to congressmen, out of respect for the office, has 'broken down.'
[...]
All of this has been quite confusing to Gregory Galluzzo. A veteran community organizer at the Gamaliel Foundation and a disciple of Alinsky (though they never met) who trained the young Obama, Galluzzo has watched with frustration as “over the top and rabid ideologues” on the right stormed town hall meetings, claiming to have flipped Alinsky’s rulebook back onto liberals.
'They polarize,' said Galluzzo. 'They’ve got that part down. They do direct action. But that’s not the kind of organizing we do. We end up building relationships with the people we oppose. I’m not going to go up to Mayor [Richard] Daley and say "you’re just a Nazi." I want to end up working with him.'
But according to Galluzzo, if Alinsky could take a look at the Alinsky-cons, he’d call them 'petty protesters' who want to destroy the system without offering solutions. 'If you just go around calling people assholes,' Galluzzo said, 'you’re not going to get anything done.'"
- David Weigel, "Conservatives find town hall strategy in leftist text," The Minnesota Independent