RUTHFULLY YOURS

Less than three weeks from now President Obama will leave office. One might assume that, as with his predecessors, he will take a back seat in public life, only surfacing to write his memoirs, rake in a few millions on the lecture circuit and work on his golf handicap.

 This may be to misunderstand him as badly out of office as in it. After Donald Trump’s election, Mr Obama promised distraught Democrats that “next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you . . . and we’re going to be busy, involved in the amazing stuff that we’ve been doing all these years before”.

 Just vague aspirational waffle? Unlikely. For in his previous life Barack Obama was a community organiser. It sounds benign enough. Organising the community surely means doing good works to alleviate the hardship of the poor and disadvantaged? No.

 The term “community organiser” has a specific meaning. It was coined by the radical Chicago activist Saul Alinsky, a Marxist who believed in capturing the culture as the most effective means of overturning western society.

 The way to do this, he said, was through “people’s organisations” composed largely of discontented individuals who believed society was fundamentally unjust, and who would take their lead from trained community organisers. These organisers, taught Alinsky, should “rub raw the resentments of the people” and “agitate to the point of conflict” while pretending to be middle-class folk in suits.

 Based on the premise that the revolution would come not through institutions but through the masses, the organisers’ role was to galvanise the mob to oppose every institution of the state. In his handbook of sedition, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky describes Lucifer as “the very first radical”. 

Although he died in 1972, his influence over the Democratic Party remains enormous. In a letter to the Boston Globe in 2008, his son, L David Alinsky, said that every element of his father’s teaching had been present at that year’s Democratic convention: “. . . the crowd’s chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people”.

Two months later an Alinskyite radical, Barack Obama, was elected president of the United States. 

Mr Obama had been trained as a community organiser by Alinskyite organisations. In the early 1990s he provided legal services and leadership training seminars for the Alinsky-style Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (Acorn). Acorn was later accused of massive voter fraud during the 2008 election, particularly the falsification of voter registration cards.

 

In office Mr Obama constantly incited division between social groups. He claimed that low-income people were the victims of the wealthy, and backed racism charges against the police even though some of these were later shown to be false. Regularly invoking core American ideals, he simultaneously strove to transform American society. 

As Alinsky’s son further observed, this was his father’s agenda to the letter. “Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organisers is showing its effectiveness,” he wrote.

 

After he was first elected president Mr Obama launched Organising for America, a formal infrastructure of activism built upon his campaign’s extensive database of supporters. In his second term, this turned into Organising for Action (OFA).

 

This vast database now has the potential to be the launch-pad for a direct challenge to democratic institutions. 

After Mr Trump was elected president, Mr Obama told his OFA activists: “I’m giving you like a week and a half to get over it.” Then it would be time to “move forward not only to protect what we’ve accomplished, but also to see this as an opportunity” because “the network that you represent, you’re perfectly poised to do that. In other words, now is the time for some organising.”

 

In other words: agitating. On New Year’s Eve, OFA urged in one of its almost daily fundraising messages: “Across the country, OFA supporters and volunteers are already gearing up for the fights we’ll face in the next few months.” 

Three days earlier it said: “We’ve been training the next generation of change-makers and community leaders and giving people the resources they’ll need to create change. And we’re not going to back down just because the fight has gotten tough.”

 

Shortly after Mr Trump’s victory, yet another OFA message read: “Now is the time to get in the ring and fight harder than we ever have before.” 

The effect of such a climate of agitation extends much further than the Democratic Party. We’ve already seen it in the violent anti-Trump demonstrations and harassment of Republican voters; the Black Lives Matter riots with their calls for “dead cops” and the lynching of white people; the refusal of athletes to stand for the American national anthem. 

This now has the potential for a permanent grassroots insurrection against the Trump administration involving many different constituencies. Who better to spearhead this in one form or another than America’s very own community organiser-in-chief, soon-to-be-ex President Obama?

For weekly updates on Melanie’s work please visit melaniephillips.com