Saul Alinsky in South Dakota

Saul Alinsky died in 1972. He was a Marxist grassroots organizer who spent much of his life organizing rent strikes and protesting conditions of the poor in Chicago in the 1930s. However, unlike Christian socialist and activist for the poor Dorothy Day, Alinsky's real claim to fame was as strategist for anti-establishment '60s radicals and revolutionaries. Indeed, Alinsky wrote the rule book for '60s radicals like Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Miller and Nancy Pelosi. He considered Hillary Rodham to be one of his better students and asked her to join him in his efforts as an organizer of radical leftist causes. But Hillary had other fish to fry on her climb to national prominence
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Alinsky advises his followers that the poor have no power and that the real target is the middle class: "Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority." But that didn't stop Alinsky and his followers from using the middle class for their own purposes. They counted on the guilt and shame of the white middle class to get what they wanted. In order to take over institutions and get power, the middle class had to be convinced that they were somehow lucky winners in "life's lottery."

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