From Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion

In 1969, the year that publishers reissued Alinsky’s first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley undergraduate named Hillary Rodham submitted a 92-page research project on Alinsky for her senior thesis. In her conclusion Clinton compared Alinsky to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King, as someone who was considered dangerous not because he was a self-declared enemy of the American system, but because he “embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy.”
The title of Clinton’s thesis was “There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In this title she had identified the single most important Alinsky contribution to the radical cause – his embrace of political nihilism. An SDS radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words, the cause of a political action – whether civil rights or women’s rights – is never the real cause; women, blacks and other “victims” are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power. Battles over rights and other issues, according to Alinsky, should never be seen as more than occasions to advance the real agenda, which is the accumulation of power and resources in radical hands. Power is the all-consuming goal of Alinsky’s politics
This focus on power was illustrated by an anecdote recounted in a New Republic article that appeared during Obama’s presidential campaign: “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.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always building the army. The issue is always the revolution
Guided by these principles, Alinsky’s disciples are misperceived as idealists; in fact, they are practiced Machiavellians. Their focus is invariably on means rather than ends. As a result they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies or theoretical dogmatisms in the way their still admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power