Rules for Radicals: WI Saul Alinsky lives

Wikipedia said:
In the course of nearly four decades of organizing the poor for radical social action, Alinsky made many enemies, but he has received praise from an array of public figures. His organizing skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s, he began turning his attention to improving conditions of the African-American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling to other ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen other "trouble spots."

His ideas were later adapted by some US college students and other young organizers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond.[2] Time magazine once wrote that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas," and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was "very close to being an organizational genius."

Alinsky described his plans in 1972 to begin to organize the White middle class across America, and the necessity of that project. He believed that what President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew called "The Silent Majority" was living in frustration and despair, worried about their future, and ripe for a turn to radical social change, to become politically-active citizens. He feared the middle class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, "making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday." His stated motive: "I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back."

The documentary The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy,[5] states that "Alinsky championed new ways to organize the poor and powerless that created a backyard revolution in cities across America." Alinsky formed the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940, and Chambers became its Executive Director after Alinsky died. Since the IAF's formation, hundreds of professional community and labor organizers and thousands of community and labor leaders have attended its workshops. Fred Ross, who worked for Alinsky, was the principal mentor for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.[6][7] Hillary Clinton's senior honors thesis on Saul Alinsky, written at Wellesley College, noted that Alinsky's personal efforts were a large part of his method.[8]

Alinsky died of a heart attack at the age of 63 in 1972, in Carmel, California.

So let's say that the Great Community Organizer did not succumb to his massive heart attack in '72 and lived well into true old age in the 1990's. What kind of effect might he have had in a Post-Watergate America? Would he have to seek political office inorder to push through some of his ideas concerning the middle class? Could he have stopped the Democrats from becoming the unelectable party of Northeastern/Pacific Coast Liberals, Minorities and Academians that it did in OTL from '68 to '92? Would it be ASB to see Alinsky and Reagan duke it for a Presidential election? And what other ramifications might come in effect with a longer Alinsky life?
 
The key for the Democrats to retain control was to fuse the Reagan Democrats with the middle class, as Thatcher, Reagan and Nixon did during their respective tenures. Those other groups would form part of their base, but not the whole party. If you want an indication of how the blue-collars felt in 1968, many WWC voters who supported Kennedy in the primaries voted for George Wallace or Nixon in November. Humphrey was seen as out of touch with their concerns and a "softie", which Wallace and Kennedy were most definitely not. They saw them as "tough guys who would stick it to the establishment". RFK understood, as Nixon and Reagan did, that "what they (the middle class) desire most is to be left alone". The Dems needed to get out of the New Deal mentality, which Kennedy did before any Democratic frontbenchers of his political generation but he lacked the middle-class appeal of Bill Clinton a generation later.
 
Thanks for bringing up one of my heroes!

Long and short of it, Alinsky's activism and the Democratic civil war in Chicago at the '68 convention sounded the death knell of Democratic unity in the 1970's. The Baby Boomers that took it up embraced causes that completely contradicted the status quo the New Deal-1960 crowd had built and shocked them to the core. Questioning America? Protesting a war? Sexual freedom? Taking drugs en masse? Insisting that civil rights aren't priveleges doled out by local authorities but federally protected rights? Regulating pollution when jobs are at stake? WTF?
Alinsky's genius was getting local people to tackle local issues to make local powers-that-be reverse unpopular policies. Healing the generational abyss in priorities between the Depression-WWII generation and the baby boomers was so far out of what Alinsky was ready and able to do that much as I admire Saul, it's almost ASB.
I think he could've been a good influence a la Nader or Dennis Kucinich, to get Dems to focus on bread-and-butter issues that affect everyone, but whether he'd be a gadfly or a real force is sorta up in the air for me.
 
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