Interest Groups II: Community Organizing

 For next Monday: http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm

Also on Monday, bring your devices to complete the Student Experience Survey

Review: Ballot measures: Dialysis example and SEIU

Tocqueville (Lawrence/Mayer ed., pp. 513, 518):

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth of propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

...

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

Nonprofits in the United States

DIPLOMA DIVIDE AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION

The epigraph page

Yes, Hillary Rodham did write her senior thesis on Alinsky.  Here it is.

Alinsky and the Capone Gang

"Rules of Ethics" according to Alinsky:

• One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue (26). [Also see Madison: As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.]
• The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment (26)
• "The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 percent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 percent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust" (28)

TACTICS

• RULE 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
• RULE 2: Never go outside the experience of your people
• RULE 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy
• RULE 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
• RULE 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
• RULE 6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. (compare with p. 139-41)
• RULE 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
• RULE 8: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
• RULE 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
• RULE 10: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
• RULE 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
• RULE 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
• RULE 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

TIME IN JAIL" (156-158)