PrintAugust 9, 2009
Protest for Me, But Not for Thee
What happens when the middle class feels even more victimized than the nation's poor? When American middle-class citizens feel that they are being steamrolled by a Changeopoly Blitzkrieg, engineered by the principalities and powers of overreaching government and corporate oligarchs? When the only answer they're given to their just concerns about unsustainable debt is "We won."?
Well, those beleaguered middle-class folks might take a look at the tactics which have been working against them for four decades and decide to make use of some of those tactics themselves. Middle-class Americans, myself among them, have watched for 40 years, as one angry group after another has managed to get its way, and more and more entitlements from our purses to theirs, using the tactics designed by the liberal fascist revolutionary, Saul Alinsky.
One would need to be buried under a rock not to understand by now that small groups of angry people can get what they want.
Think ACORN and NINJA home loans.
Think Code Pink and the tarring of GW as a "war criminal."
Think ANSWER and the closing of Gitmo.
This list could fill a museum on the success of "community organizing" for "change."
So, what in the world is the legacy media doing going bonkers about it now? Why on earth would media elites not give glowing coverage to this democracy in action, the same kind they've been unabashedly heralding for decades now, every time a dozen live bodies show up with signs in a public place?
Why, I do declare, they seem to be saying with a rather concerted effort, "Protest for me, but not for thee."
What the Democrats and their bullhorns in media are telling us, the folks, is that they are plum scared down to their woolies because they now know they've lost their monopoly on information. And the left has lost its monopoly on grievance, too.
For 40 years, this Country has been blackmailed by angry Alinskyite protest into redistributing great chunks of wealth to aggrieved-status mobs under the pretense of charity or entitlement. The scales of grievance have now tilted so far to the left that it is the middle-class, which feels itself most endangered, most unable to make its voice heard in the Halls of Congress.
Saul Alinsky, for his part, told the young radicals of the 1960s that they had to bring the middle-class into the revolution by the mid-1970s or give up altogether. Alinsky understood where the real power in America was held. Alinsky understood that power wasn't in the board rooms, but in the middle-class consumer's purse. It wasn't in the school board, but in the middle-class parent's expectations. Power wasn't even in Washington, but in the demands of the most populous group of Americans: the vast middle-class, whom he called the "have-a-little-want-mores," in keeping with his solely material worldview.
But Saul Alinsky's vision amounted to making the middle-class so "rubbed raw" with "discontent", making them feel so downtrodden that they would demand more government handouts for themselves and more government control in the hands of their political masters. Government controlling everything in the whole society was Alinsky's idea of "freedom" and "liberty." He disavowed the power of a single individual to affect change in his own life, and always, every single time, looked to collectivist power for strength. Alinsky's vision was, of course, Marxist, but with fascist elements thrown into the mix.
Alinsky's first successes, during the 40s and 50s, were in getting the Catholic Church and other fair-weather liberals to sign onto the radical labor agenda, which has now successfully crippled the American auto industry and put it at the mercy of a federal takeover. This corporatist model, of leaving big business in private hands, while a central government calls all the shots, is one of the hallmarks of fascist third-way activity.
But as we've learned to our dismay, the left has successfully branded conservative Americans, who continue to believe in limited government and the true separation of powers, as fascist. So, in Nancy Pelosi's addled imagination, protesters against government control of yet another still-mostly-private American enterprise, are the ones carrying Swastikas.
Doesn't Nancy Pelosi remind you, dear readers, of the mindless scarecrow in Oz?
With no independent mind of her own, she's giddily traveled the yellow-brick road and now depends upon her Wizard in Chief to call all the shots for her ninnified illusions.
What we are seeing now in townhalls across this country are middle-class people demanding that their government drop any and every plan to convert America's healthcare system to one like those failing throughout socialized Europe and Canada. Anyone who honestly believed that a man, who had done nothing whatsoever in his entire life but go to school, shout slogans at rallies, and run for office could be an able president, have now been disabused of that fantasy. Anyone who believed that Barack Obama was a conciliator who could de-polarize a Nation, purposely polarized for 80 years by his own side, has now awakened from the spell.
Honey, even a complete nitwit knows that a president, who hires out his real job to 32 czars, is not CEO material.
And, it is those people mostly, who now are coming out of their homes and businesses in earnest dissent. They oppose the takeover of yet another part, perhaps the most intimate part, of their already over-controlled lives. And middle-class America seems anything but ready to concede and give life-and-death decision making over to the Wizard and his loyal band of Alinskyites.
The American people are anything but mindless dolts, most especially our vibrant and diverse middle-class. We are seeing some of the same Alinsky tactics employed at townhall meetings, but by a group opposed to more government control, not demanding more of it. They are the anti-fascist, anti-socialist, anti-Alinsky folks, who would prefer to keep the liberties they have, even if it means sacrifice and suffering.
This ain't what the leftists in charge expected to see. The Democrats envisioned the middle-class welcoming, with spread-wide-open arms of gratitude, these new power plays that would put more control into the hands of their beneficent bureaucracy.
Instead, the Alinskyites are being met with 1776 Redux, and all they can do is yell "Fascist" at the top of their lungs, just as they've been doing for 40 years.
What a heap of malicious poppycock.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.
