The Alinsky/Goldwater Axis

Before he was a journalist, Nicholas von Hoffman was an activist
trained by the godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Von
Hoffman's new book about Alinsky,
Radical, includes a passage that should raise some
eyebrows in an era when Alinsky is a demon figure for the right and
Rand Paul is a demon figure for the left:

Although Alinsky is described as some kind of
liberal left-winger in actuality big government worried him. He had
no use for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society with its War on
Poverty. He used to say that if Washington was going to spend that
kind of dough the government might as well station people on the
ghetto street corners and hand out hundred-dollar bills to the
passing pedestrians. For him governmental action was the last
resort, not the ideal one.



He felt that when the government, via one or another of its poverty
programs, put the smartest and most energetic on its payroll it
made an independent civic life next to impossible. He would point
out that it opened up avenues of social and political control that
could be used by the government to stifle independent action. In
the worst case thousands of government-paid organizers could be
turned into police spies. Writers like George Orwell and José
Ortega y Gasset, men of the Left, now seem chiefly read by
conservatives but for Alinsky their thinking was central.



He feared the gigantism of government, corporation and even labor
union. The hope of his life was democratic organizations which
could pose countervailing power against modern bureaucracies. It
was only in that way, he thought, that personal freedom and privacy
could be maintained. He did not trust the courts and legal
protections to preserve individual liberty. It had to be backed up
by countervailing power. For him, as he would often say, it was the
struggle of the little man against big structures.



For these reasons he was less than enthusiastic about much civil
rights legislation, though he kept his misgivings to himself.
Around the time of Barry Goldwater's run for the presidency he was
contacted by the senator and the two men had at least one meeting.
Goldwater or perhaps one of his people had heard of Saul and wanted
to see if there was some common ground. The conversation, he told
me, was about Goldwater's opposition to pending civil rights
legislation. Saul shared the conservative misgivings about the
mischief such laws could cause if abused, but he told Goldwater
that he should not morally and could not politically oppose the
legislation unless he had a better idea himself. The country was
blowing up over civil rights. To stand mute with nothing to offer
except opposition to the one legislative proposal on the table was
untenable.

Bonus reading: My column
arguing that ACORN wasn't Alinskyan enough.

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