A Modern Machiavelli 3

From Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion

Alinksy dedicates his signature work, Rules for Radcials, to the devil, the first rebel: “Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer.”
Thus, at the very outset, Alinsky tells us what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system, even God’s system, but its would-be destroyer. In his own mind the radical is building his own kingdom of heaven on earth. But since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is an impossible dream, the radical’s real world efforts are directed to subverting and destroying the society he lives in. He is a nihilist. In The 18th Brumaire Marx summed up the radical passion by appropriating a comment made by Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
Alinsky’s tribute to Satan reminds us that the radical illusion is an ancient one and has not changed though the millennia. Recall how Satan tempted Adam and Eve to destroy their paradise by telling them that if they ate from the Tree of Knowledge they would be “as gods.” This is the radical hubris: to create a new race of men and women who are able to live in harmony and according to the principles of social justice. To create such a race requires the total control – the totalitarian control -- of individual behavior. Not incidentally, the kingdom the first radical “won,” as Alinsky so thoughtlessly puts it, was hell. Typical of radicals not to notice the ruin they leave behind