Progressives and Communists: Out of the Closet -- Together

Via-American Thinker

By Paul Kengor

A close look at the Saturday "One Nation" rally in Washington reveals something quite telling. It was a major gathering of the "progressive" left, highly billed, vigorously promoted. And it happened to include -- in fact, it warmly accepted -- the endorsement of Communist Party USA.


Expectedly, a bunch of the rally's endorsers carried the word "progress" or "progressive" in their title, from People’s Organization for Progress to Progressive Democrats of America. More still unhesitatingly describe themselves as progressive, from racial eugenicist Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood to Norman Lear's heirs at People for the American Way, plus the usual suspects from the "social justice" Religious Left.

And then, too, there was CPUSA.

Why is this so remarkable? It's remarkable because historically, communist involvement at these rallies has been meticulously concealed, hidden from progressives, with the communists using the progressives as props -- as dupes. That the two sides here, on Saturday, happily accepted one another, proudly uniting, shows how far to the left progressives have moved, not to mention their unflagging confidence under the ascendancy of Obama-Pelosi-Reid.

My personal experience on this is very instructive. I've chronicled how communists, for a century now, cunningly manipulated progressives, surreptitiously drawing them into their rallies, protests, and petitions, not letting themselves (or their intentions) be known. I have fliers from marches sixty and seventy years ago, with many of the same endorsers that were there on Saturday, but with CPUSA's name smartly absent, even as CPUSA members canvassed the rally, if not spearheading it.

Back then, the communists' stunning successes suckering progressives shocked even Moscow. They fooled them right up to the front gates of the White House in the summer of 1940, where the hideous communist front the American Peace Mobilization duped even the New York Times into headlining it as a "clergy group." They pulled off an extraordinary stunt in Chicago in the summer of 1968, sabotaging the Democratic National Convention. Communists managed to enlist progressives into undermining their own Democratic presidents and parties and platforms.

As an indicator of the success and duration of this manipulation, consider this fact:
When Congress, in December 1961, published its seminal investigation of communist fronts, titled "Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications," a product of research dating to the founding of the American Communist Party in Chicago in 1919, the most popular index listing started with the word "Progressive." It was progressive groups that were misled, used, abused, and infiltrated more than any other.

How long has this continued? All the way to the 2008 election.

Consider the group Progressives for Obama, formed during Obama's presidential bid. It was loaded with and even founded by some hardcore communists from the 1960s. Consider merely two of them: Tom Hayden, one of the group's four founders, and Mark Rudd, one of the 94 original signers. Hayden and Rudd had been leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which subverted the policies and plans of Democratic presidents ranging from Vietnam to the 1968 convention. In 2008, both Hayden and Rudd suddenly reemerged as "Progressives for Obama."

Rudd’s take on how Obama won the 2008 election is shrewd -- and dead on. Understanding that moderates and independents made the difference, Rudd noted the crucial importance of Obama not openly conceding his far-left views. Rudd wrote,

Obama is a very strategic thinker. He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn’t blow it. But he also knew that what he said had to basically play to the center to not ... scare centrist and cross-over voters away. He made it. ... And I agree with this strategy. ... Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment.

Basically, what Rudd said is that Obama hoodwinked "centrist" and "cross-over" voters. As Rudd rightly put it, Obama couldn't be candid about his true intentions in "this environment." That's an environment where Americans, in poll after poll, have described themselves as "conservative" over "liberal" by a margin of 2:1, by approximately 40% to 20%, for decades now. Incredibly, those numbers were unchanged even on November 4, 2008, when Obama easily won the election.

Thus, a candidate like Obama can succeed only by pushing his agenda guardedly. He ran as a centrist, not as National Journal's certified "most liberal senator in 2007." It worked. As Rudd put it, Obama "didn't blow it."

America’s exalted moderates and independents were duped by a nebulous, catch-all-be-all banner of "change." Now, the progressives are in power, ready to implement the kind of change they had in mind all along.

And now, with Obama having secured victory, the likes of Rudd and Hayden -- shocked that the electorate finally voted for their kind of guy -- have been less circumspect about their intentions. Rudd urges, "Here's my mantra: 'Let's put this country on our shoulders and get to work.'"

Rudd has rolled up his sleeves, as have his erstwhile comrades.

And that was precisely what spilled into the streets on Saturday, October 2 in the "One Nation" rally, fittingly centralized in Washington. This time, however, the collective was unafraid, buttressed by a confidence that coaxed the communists out of the closet and into the welcoming arms of "progressives."

Gee, you'd think that after the collapse of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, and after 100 million corpses, progressives would be fleeing communists like the plague.

The election of Obama-Pelosi-Reid in November 2008 -- by America's "independents" and "moderates" -- has dawned a new day for the American Left -- or, at least perhaps, until November 2010. We shall see.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

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The Real Tea Party Story: Community Builders vs. Community Organizers

Via-American Thinker

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

In less than a year, the MSM has gone from ignoring Tea Parties to mocking and insulting their participants to grudging coverage with ridiculing overtones. Finally it has arrived at giving wide attention to the movement, albeit grudgingly and ungraciously. A once-highly esteemed fourth estate, they have become talking-head dilettantes on a mission to save the disgruntled masses from democracy itself.

David Brooks, token toy conservative at the NYT, wrote his explanation for the Tea Parties without ever mentioning them by name, even. He wrote a whole diatribe on the meaning of it all. It's a knee-jerk reaction by us commoners, you see, against the "educated class." It has nothing to do with real issues, don't you know. This whole wave of discontent is simply a revolt by the common man against his intellectual betters.

What a bunch of myopic poppycock.

The real Tea Party story is quite simple and an eloquent tribute to democracy: a genuine movement of ordinary people rising to the demands of their all-American principles. It represents a fundamental difference between those who seek to provide for themselves and those who see government as provider of all material goods. The Tea Party movement is a valiant resistance to decades of profligate entitlement spending, which has had the real effect of worsening every problem it was intended to fix, landing the country, at last, in a sea of impossible debt. Tea Partiers, like the Liberty Boys of 1776, stand steadfast on the principle of equality in the rule of law, not government-ordered equality in material-world goods.

Basically, the resistance boils down to a contest between community builders and community organizers.

How Alinsky Counterfeited Community-Building Associations

Up until this presidential election, when hearing the term "community organizations," most Americans probably assumed that these were the traditional community-building, volunteer civic and altruistic groups, giving tirelessly of their spare time and dollars to improve their own and others' communities.

The list of genuine, all-American volunteer citizens' groups is endless. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his mid-19th century treatise Democracy in America, one of the most exceptional qualities of this country was her vast proliferation of purely voluntary civic and altruistic associations.

Americans of all ages, conditions, and all dispositions constantly unite together. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations to which all belong but also a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very specialized, large and small. Americans group together to hold fetes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method.

De Tocqueville insisted that this vast array of purely voluntary associations was peculiar to American democracy and drew its possibilities from equality of all citizens under rule of self-made law. Of course, at the time de Tocqueville was writing -- the mid-1800s -- all American citizens were not, in fact, equal under the rule of law or in the vote. But as de Tocqueville also wisely surmised, another dimension of American exceptionalism was the manner built into her Constitution to "right itself," to fix former errors through the Constitutional amendment process, which in truth, granted the majority its right to change those things it later decided made good sense.

As one of the hallmarks of peculiarly American democracy had always been the forming of free associations to accomplish all manner of good in local communities, Saul Alinsky hatched a truly brilliant plan to counterfeit these altruistic associations for political revolution. So it's no wonder that unaware Americans were fooled for so many years, that they accepted Alinsky's revolutionary "community organizations" as just another type of the associations with which they were so familiar.

But as we have so painfully learned from the ACORN exposés, Alinsky had far different aims from improving any communities.

And to alert his own acolytes to the real difference between his own vision for "people's organizations" and the traditional, Alinsky spelled out the difference in his first manifesto, Reveille for Radicals, in 1946:

A People's Organization is not a philanthropic plaything or a social service's ameliorative gesture. It is a deep, hard-driving force, striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which beset the people ... It thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups.

Alinsky went on to explain that he was declaring war on the status quo, which allowed some to grow wealthy while others remained poor. He declared that in war, such as he was declaring, there was no such thing as "rules of fair play," and he encouraged his followers to proudly seek "self-interest" while cloaking their aims in rhetorical "moral garments." The insiders were to be well-informed on their revolutionary objectives, while the public was to be kept intentionally deceived.

Alinsky formulated a set of tactics for massive organizations of "have-nots" to seize power and material goods from the "haves."

And therein lies the rub. In order for the "haves" to have anything, they must have built something and acquired some things through their efforts, smarts, and sweat which are worth taking away from them. These "haves" of American society were first and foremost community builders. Their ideas, their investments, their risks, their civic mindedness and charities actually built the communities which Alinsky desired to "organize" into a class of legally sanctioned thieves.

A secular Jew working as an outsider, Alinsky convinced an Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago's Catholic Church that his vision for redistribution of wealth coincided perfectly with the Church's own doctrines on social justice. Alinsky artfully played on the Catholic Church's own long, tainted history of mixing its spiritual mission with worldly power and managed to bring both the public clout of the Church and vast amounts of funding on board for his mission to organize America's masses for revolution.

In his first treatise (Reveille for Radicals) on the People's Organization movement he was building, Alinsky tried to address critics who accused him of mounting a revolution against America. "It may be true," he wrote, "that it is revolution, but it is orderly revolution."

At this point, Alinsky joined his grain of truth -- an admission that he was promoting revolution -- with a deceptive false choice, writing:

To reject orderly revolution is to be hemmed in by two hellish alternatives: disorderly, sudden, stormy, bloody revolution or a further deterioration of the mass foundation of democracy to the point of inevitable dictatorship. (Reveille for Radicals, p. 198)

Now, dear readers, one must admit that these words are truly priceless. It must be remembered that Saul Alinsky wrote this little "orderly revolution" manifesto, Reveille for Radicals, in 1946, just one year after the might of American industrial strength and the valiant sacrifices of millions had brought Nazism and eastern imperialism to their knees. America was anything but on the verge of "deterioration of the mass foundation of democracy to the point of inevitable dictatorship" in 1946. America was in actuality on its way to unparalleled prosperity for more of its citizens than had ever been achieved in the entire history of human civilization.

What Saul Alinsky offered his justifiably concerned critics was simply a false choice so easily refuted that it's a wonder anyone with an ounce of real sense fell for his cheap lure.

But fall they did -- hook, line and sinker.

Alinsky went on in Reveille for Radicals to address another concern which had evidently been put to him in the early stages of his "orderly revolution," calling the concern a "fear" which "stems from distrust of power in the hands of the people":

They fear that the development and building of People's Organizations is the building of a vast power group which may fall prey to a fascistic demagogue who will seize leadership and turn an organization into a Frankenstein's monster against democracy. (Reveille for Radicals, p. 19

Alinsky then went on to write that this would be an utterly impossible eventuality, insisting that the "road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with apathy, hopelessness, frustration, futility, and despair in the masses of the people."

Yet in Alinsky's second treatise on "orderly revolution," Rules for Radicals, he advised his acolytes on the utmost necessity of cultivating these very conditions among the masses in order to bring about the "change" required for his revolution to succeed.

Writing in Rules for Radicals (1971), Alinsky set up his development of power tactics with his idea of how "revolutionary change" is actually realized:

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. (Rules for Radicals; p. xix)

And this overall belief in the failure of the American system of free enterprise and limited government to fix all that ails mankind is precisely the idea behind the attitudes fostered by the entire network of Alinsky-fathered "community" organizations from ACORN to PICO to the SEIU to the gargantuan tree of religious-left political entities. The very attitudes which Alinsky rightly said in 1946 would lead to fascism and dictatorship are the attitudes he taught his community organizers to foster.

The most evident difference between traditional American community-builders and Alinskyite community organizers is spelled out in Rules for Radicals under the heading "The Process of Power." Alinsky, like both Marx and Mussolini before him, saw individuals working to build their own communities as tacky, piecemeal efforts unworthy of those with grander, bolder schemes to fix the entire world. Alinsky, therefore, recognized that revolution against this ordinary American idea of community-building was necessary if the "organizer" was to reach his true destination: "the highest level for which man can reach -- to create, to be a 'great creator,' to play God" (Rules for Radicals; p. 61).

When Evan Thomas blithely remarked last year that Barack Obama was "sort of like God," it should be no wonder. For in Barack Obama's intensive Alinskyite training, he was carefully tutored on indulging this very delusion. Alinsky planted the seed. Reverend Wright fertilized it for twenty years. And Barack Obama exhibits all the signs of believing he can indeed bring his Alinsky-inspired godhood to fruition.

Toward the goal of destroying Americans' ideas of community-building, Alinsky taught his organizers to dissuade the people from believing that there was any hope outside a mother state. He taught his organizers to intentionally and continually sow discontent with the "status quo":

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.

Now that we've had a year of a proud Alinskyite community organizer as president, it's not at all hard to see that Obama is much, much closer to being a "fascistic demagogue" than he is to being the grand conciliator for whom his befuddled followers fell into willing sway.

From the Stimulus package of political payoffs to the power grab of car companies "too big to fail," to the climate bill rewards for privileged corporate interests, to the health care takeover in the same vein, we see a man dedicated to destroying the very foundations of America's community-builders and replacing them with the grand social-engineers' paradise, which Saul Alinsky -- and Mussolini, Hitler, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and others -- have envisioned.

This is not rocket science. It's just ordinary logic and a smidgen of research.

The real Tea Party story is as simple as this. Genuine community-builders do not wish to be robbed blind and see their children in the shackles of debt so that the modern version of tyranny -- community organizers -- can split up a pie they didn't bake.

The message from Tea Partiers is that Alinsky has not succeeded any better than his more illustrious revolutionary peers. Rather than losing all hope in the American system of liberty, justice and limited government, these community-builders -- the Tea Partiers -- are rallying to express their firm commitment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees equality under the law, not equality of material-world goods. The Constitution is designed to preserve liberty, not "empathy," for as any sentient person knows, empathy is entirely dependent upon which type of tyrant is sitting in the seat of judgment.

We are witnessing a clash of worldviews in which, as the Tea Partiers have recognized, fence-sitting is simply not an option. Americans will now either rise to reverse the tides of socialist tyranny, which have taken root for decades, or they will oversee the bitter end of our grand experiment in democracy.



More...

We shall see

Obama’s Corrosive Communitarian ‘Service’ for Students