Alinsky Would Be Proud

Of all the eye-opening events happening around the recent election, the savage treatment of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) when she flipped her support to Republican Mike Rogers should have raised enough eyebrows to have a real impact on the Senate election in Michigan. Unfortunately, it did not. Why not? Perhaps we can find the answer in the Democrats’ political playbook, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

If there’s one thing today’s Democrats are good at, it’s the art of villainizing their political foes, using the Alinsky playbook to demonize their opposition with a constant bombardment of negativity. Of course, having Donald Trump as a target is oftentimes like shooting fish in a barrel. 

What’s frequently ignored is the fact that the Alinsky treatment is given to all Republicans and their supporters (MAGA especially), not just to Trump. By treating Stevens’ turncoat action into something akin to giving aid and comfort to Charles Manson, the Dems displayed their true colors as well as their adherence to Alinsky’s playbook. 

Supporting Rogers was not just unacceptable; it was punishable by death. In a former time, Stevens would have been tied to a stake and burned to an agonizing end. As it was, a modern death knell was pronounced: her banishment from the party of which she’d been a loyal left-wing member for years. These are not the actions of Constitution-loving politicians; rather, they more resemble the utter ruthlessness of Che Guevara in handling any dissent from party orthodoxy. 

Don’t believe it? Just look at the one who fancies himself the true oracle of the Dems, James Carville. Only a few weeks earlier, he was denouncing El Sayed as being too antisemitic and too extreme for the party. But his condemnation of Stevens, complete with gross sexual insults, was among the worst. Convenient amnesia? Maybe – and this seems to be a common affliction for the Dems.

When we consider the Dems’ modus operandi in recent times, the bristling contempt and immediate condemnation of Stevens should have come as no surprise. In following Alinsky, Dem leaders painted a target on Stevens as damning as Hawthorne’s scarlet letter, and made sure that the message was received. Stevens is now damaged goods, complete with some not-so-subtle suggestions that she must be having a mental breakdown to have made the decision she did.

The flip side of all of this is the effective neutering of political attacks on the Dems’ favored candidate. The more the Republicans and allies warned voters about the extreme positions of Abdul El Sayed, the more the Alinskyites played the Islamophobe card to defuse the potential outrage. Remember, most Americans are hard-wired to not judge someone harshly even if we’re encouraged to do so. And in giving this candidate over 54 percent of their votes, Michigan voters obviously were willing to take the risk that the Alinskyites were right in downplaying El Sayed’s potential toxicity. As Barack Obama’s association with Reverend Wright was minimized by supporters, so was El Sayed’s friendship with Hasan Piker, who, like Wright, claims that America “deserved” the 9/11 attacks.

When we then zoom out from Michigan to the country at large and observe the upsets that were unthinkable just a few years ago, we can see that a similar phenomenon was at work. For James Talarico, the newly elected Senator from Texas, voters from a state presumably a lot redder than Michigan also ignored the warnings about his extreme positions. The combination of his campaign deftly downplaying those positions, along with the Alinsky treatment given to his opponent, who might as well have been the spawn of Satan for his attractiveness to voters, resulted in not just victory, but a rout, with Talarico getting close to 60 percent of the vote. Talk about polar opposites – for the next couple of years anyway, Talarico and Ted Cruz, the conservatives’ conservative, will represent the Lone Star State in the Senate.

But it wasn’t just reliable conservatives like Mike Rogers and Ken Paxton who had their clocks cleaned on election night. Moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine lost her long-time Senate seat to yet another loony lefty who was “out there” about as far as the disgraced Graham Platner whom he replaced, except that maybe he didn’t sport a Nazi-supporting tattoo. 

What all of this says, when the wipeout is from coast to coast, is that the Alinskyites accomplished their mission. And they did so by painting all Republican candidates with the poisonous Trump brush. In my opinion, this election closely resembled that of 1974, when the post-Watergate Republicans were trounced since they were painted with the toxic Nixon brush. Alinskyism works especially well when the targeted opponent presents such a ripe environment for attacks. But it can even work on the RINOs.

It would be easy to throw in the chips and cash out of this madness, with the inevitable crowing the Dems will do about having a mandate to get Trump and all of his “cronies” out of the White House. However, that smug overconfidence has caused the Dems, time and time again, to overindulge their power. The resulting overreach is predictable, and 2028 can’t come soon enough.