This article was published in Prism and Pen in Medium.com on July 16, 2023.
The Saul in Question is Saul Alinsky
Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals was published in 1971, just a year before he died of a sudden heart attack. He was 63. I suspect that he hoped, though not yet into his retirement years, that the book would inspire generations of coming radicals to do their work better. Actually, that’s exactly what happened for the radicals who were to come, both those from the liberal left as well as those from the conservative right.
Alinsky himself was an unabashedly leftist radical, organizing efforts in communities to respond to all sorts of unfairness. I wonder how he would have reacted to radicals on the conservative right, like the Tea Party during the Bush II years, appropriating his methods to do exactly the opposite — to perpetuate inequity in our society.
Alinsky’s approach to organizing was vocal, determined, punchy, but realistic. He always started from an understanding of some current bad situation in a community and worked toward a pragmatic solution, one that he couldn’t necessarily visualize from the get-go. The reason, I suspect, for taking this position was that the solution depended ultimately on what the community itself was willing to work hard for. At the outset of taking on a cause, he had to ingratiate himself into the community. The people had to have “faith” in him and in his competence. That’s likely why he was assertive and aggressive. We seem to prefer our political and community leaders to be that way.
Alinsky in his book didn’t leave his fundamentals undefined. On the question of faith, for instance, he took pains to say that he didn’t mean love. In fact he writes that, “Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly, power and fear consort with faith.” He was thinking of religion, government, and corporate executives. They profess love for their flocks, constituents, and clients, but what they really work for is your faith in them. Your betterment is secondary.
In talking further about faith, he writes that the faith he wants the community to have in him as an organizer has to supplant the faith they all too often have in the institutions and people that are causing their problems. These include especially the faith they have in those with money, celebrity, status, and power. Alinsky calls them the Haves. The people who have put faith and trust in the Haves become the Have-Nots.
I’m not historian enough to know whether the heyday of Alinsky’s work, especially in the turbulent 1960s, gave him some confidence that he had hit upon a successful formula to better the lives of the Have-Nots. The job he faced was to question and suppress the Have-Nots’ allegiance to the Haves. Instead of seeing the Haves as possessing greater intelligence and being deserving of the privilege they demand, people need to see them as antagonists.
It was Alinsky’s job to show them why they were playing a sucker’s game to believe that the Haves were going to part voluntarily with any of their money, their power, or their privilege.
The 60s were the era of Civil Rights, Black Power, the United Farm Workers, the Vietnam War protests, Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement, hippies and free love, assassinations of JFK and MLK, and then too there were the Beatles. Everything was in flux and Alinsky could pick and choose his causes.
The Haves of the 60s, as they always had been, were reluctant to cede their power, something they still haven’t done to this day. Alinsky, who died in 1972, didn’t live long enough to find that the Haves struck back and that the gains of the 60s, though significant, failed to hobble the Haves’ powers. In fact, it could be argued that the Haves have strengthened over the decades. The evidence is as obvious as counting the number of billionaires and the numbers of the poor. As the one group has increased, so has the other.
That disparity between the rich and the poor is continuing evidence of Alinsky’s dismal conclusion: “The Have-Nots are hesitant and uncertain about their own judgments. Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength.”
This isn’t to assume that the Have-Nots are content with their situation in life. It means instead that they tend to see the way out of their perilous existence not by fighting the powers, but by becoming Haves themselves. And so they support the illusory American Dream.
The unfortunate fact for the Have-Nots is that the most powerful in this country are characterizable as white, male, married (to females), parents, straight, Christian, able-bodied, and Republican. If you check “Not” to any of these boxes, your chances of living the American Dream become problematic — not impossible, just harder, especially if you check “Not” for two or more categories.
For instance, if you’re a white gay man like myself, here are some of the hurdles you’ll face. As a kid, you’ll be gifted toys that you don’t relate to. You’ll encounter in high school a gauntlet of straight males who are learning to exercise the privilege of being heterosexual. They will bully you. You’ll find yourself steered into jobs that are gendered more toward females. You will reach a glass ceiling in your career. You’ll be at higher risk for drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and suicide. You’ll be much less likely to produce children. You will more likely age alone without family or community support. All of these dire futures, of course, are just statistics. None of this is fated to be. You can avoid all of that with the will to do so.
Of course any points you lose from “Not” checking a box, you can make up in some other way, generally by becoming good at something that the straight males don’t dominate in or becoming the best in some area. For gay white males, there are the examples of a philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein), an entertainer (Elton John), a CEO (Tim Cook), a politician (Pete Buttigieg), a journalist (Anderson Cooper), an economist (John Maynard Keynes), and so on.
There are comparable hurdles, as well as success stories, for people who “Not” check the other boxes; for instance, Black men, Jewish and Muslim men, Socialist men, disabled men, trans men. And naturally, there are tons of examples of women in every possible intersection.
Your political party of preference and your religion are things you can change, as opposed to your skin color, your sexual orientation, and your disability. Other characteristics, especially your gender identification, can be changed, but there’s a chance you won’t make yourself any more appealing to the Haves. Same with changing religion. There can be issues.
Alinsky didn’t pick LGBTQ causes to fight for, but he set the stage and wrote the game plan that the organizers of the Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) took up 15 years after his death. The majority of these Act Up leaders were gay men and lesbians who were spurred into action in the 1980s and 1990s by the AIDS crisis. There had been earlier efforts to bring focus and compassion to the crisis, but they used more guarded and socially acceptable methods — petitions, letter writing, advocacy.
The AIDS epidemic officially started in 1981, the same year Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency. During the eight years he was president, he and the Haves he represented were largely content to sit by and watch thousands of mostly gay men die. In 1990, the year after Reagan left office, my own partner was one of 32,000 people who died of AIDS that year.
AIDS was a Have-Not’s disease, unlike COVID, which is an equal opportunity Have’s disease. The response of the government to each epidemic is telling. With AIDS, the government had to be pushed and shoved into action via demonstrations, letter writing, die-ins, and civil disobedience.
With COVID, the government leaped into action. Haves were dying.
Act Up was officially inaugurated in early 1987, the same year as the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights at which the AIDS Quilt was first displayed on the National Mall. The Quilt provided an emotional jolt to the gay community that ratcheted up the urgency of Act Up’s efforts. It motivated the rough, angry, in-your-face, no compromising set of actions used in the following years to rivet the nation’s attention and force it into some semblance of compassion.
A nation that had long denigrated gay men as fairies, fruits, flits, and faggots saw instead gay men with a seriousness of purpose and a resolve that was more akin to what you would expect of warriors. To the extent that they presented as more alpha male, the nation started to change its mind about AIDS and began to take treatment seriously.
So, towards the end of the 90s, America had put together a knowledge base and had produced the drug cocktail that started saving lives. We still didn’t love gay men enough, though, to make the treatments affordable. We left the pricing to the pharmaceutical companies, whose depth of compassion is reserved mainly for executive salaries and bottom lines.
Faith in their abilities, yes. But love? Not so much.
I leave causes and effects to the historians, but somewhere in the existing record or in their future analysis will be serious discussion as to the effect Act Up had on gays, lesbians, and bisexuals being extended the same civil rights as straight people — the rights to privacy, marriage, job protection, and equal protection under the law. As we’ve seen in recent Supreme Court decisions, LGBTQIA+ people have lesser rights than the conservative Christians set on demonizing them, especially transgender people, though others are in their sites.
Now, though, that same energy and purpose that gays and lesbians exerted to rein in the AIDS epidemic needs to be extended to all transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people. The faith that our society and culture invests in the male-female dichotomy and our reluctance to accept the reality of other distinctions complicates and threatens the lives and well-being of these “others.”
The tactical lessons of Alinsky’s radicalism are invested in the slogans from the Act Up era, especially the defiant “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”
This slogan, in Alinsky fashion, resets the parameters for how the LGBTQIA+ community regards itself, not as compliant to the norms of a society that does not respect them let alone love them, but as strong and committed to existing and flourishing. It declares that the community has found its power and is fearsome in its determination to be recognized as worthy.