A Modern Machiavelli (Saul Alinsky)
(from the final chapter of Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion)
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
-- Barack Obama
Conservative outlooks spring from observations about the past and are therefore as a rule pragmatic. Whatever ‘first principles’ comprise such beliefs, they are (or should be) propositions that encapsulate the lessons of experience. Conservative principles are about limits, and what the respect for limits makes possible. By contrast, progressive views are built on expectations about the future. Progressive principles are based on ideas about a world that does not exist. For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences, but a moral choice. To achieve “social justice” requires only that enough people will it.
This ambition leads to several unsavory consequences. First among them is an intolerance for beliefs that question its optimism. Such beliefs appear as obstacles to the progressive result, and therefore as both reactionary and immoral. Second, whereas conservatives defend ideals they believe have led to present good, the ideals progressives defend belong to a future that is only imagined. The significant impact of progressive attitudes lies in the negative stance they take towards the present reality. To annihilate this present is the practical goal of utopian desires. A fundamental aspect of the progressive aspiration is thus the disloyalty it inspires towards the actual communities its adherents inhabit. As the progressive philosopher Richard Rorty observed in a moment of candor: “You have to be loyal to a dream country, rather than one you wake up to every morning.”
By calling the progressive future a “dream country” Rorty underscored the dilemma confronting modern radicals who have given up trying to describe the society of the future with which they propose to replace the one they are bent on destroying. Marx scorned 19th Century utopians because their ideas were based on wishful thinking. He regarded his version of socialism as “scientific” because its promised future was not a “dream country” but an inevitable outcome of the historical process. By the middle of the 20th Century this Marxist illusion had become increasingly untenable; with the collapse of the Communist system its “science” became impossible even for progressives to credit. Consequently, they were thus faced with the dilemma of how to carry on a crusade that had led to such destructive consequences in the absence of a concrete plan to avoid them. The dilemma was resolved by an American radical named Saul Alinsky, whose influence eventually spread to so broad a spectrum of activists that it extended from former Weatherman radicals like Billy Ayers to his friend and political associate Barack Obama, and captured the heart of the Democratic Party itself.
(from the final chapter of Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion)
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
-- Barack Obama
Conservative outlooks spring from observations about the past and are therefore as a rule pragmatic. Whatever ‘first principles’ comprise such beliefs, they are (or should be) propositions that encapsulate the lessons of experience. Conservative principles are about limits, and what the respect for limits makes possible. By contrast, progressive views are built on expectations about the future. Progressive principles are based on ideas about a world that does not exist. For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences, but a moral choice. To achieve “social justice” requires only that enough people will it.
This ambition leads to several unsavory consequences. First among them is an intolerance for beliefs that question its optimism. Such beliefs appear as obstacles to the progressive result, and therefore as both reactionary and immoral. Second, whereas conservatives defend ideals they believe have led to present good, the ideals progressives defend belong to a future that is only imagined. The significant impact of progressive attitudes lies in the negative stance they take towards the present reality. To annihilate this present is the practical goal of utopian desires. A fundamental aspect of the progressive aspiration is thus the disloyalty it inspires towards the actual communities its adherents inhabit. As the progressive philosopher Richard Rorty observed in a moment of candor: “You have to be loyal to a dream country, rather than one you wake up to every morning.”
By calling the progressive future a “dream country” Rorty underscored the dilemma confronting modern radicals who have given up trying to describe the society of the future with which they propose to replace the one they are bent on destroying. Marx scorned 19th Century utopians because their ideas were based on wishful thinking. He regarded his version of socialism as “scientific” because its promised future was not a “dream country” but an inevitable outcome of the historical process. By the middle of the 20th Century this Marxist illusion had become increasingly untenable; with the collapse of the Communist system its “science” became impossible even for progressives to credit. Consequently, they were thus faced with the dilemma of how to carry on a crusade that had led to such destructive consequences in the absence of a concrete plan to avoid them. The dilemma was resolved by an American radical named Saul Alinsky, whose influence eventually spread to so broad a spectrum of activists that it extended from former Weatherman radicals like Billy Ayers to his friend and political associate Barack Obama, and captured the heart of the Democratic Party itself.
( David Horowitz )
www.ChordsAZ.com