Violence has been a political tool of the Left at least since revolutionaries introduced the guillotine in late 18th-century France. The United States didn’t experience this kind of destructive, sanguinary urge during the War of Independence, though it increasingly does now. What was it that injected this modern strain of radicalism and violence into our politics? 

Perhaps no one helped bring violence and the disruption of all norms into the mainstream from the fringes more than Saul Alinsky. His book Rules for Radicals explains what we are seeing today and how we got here. Just as the title of this 1971 work of practical militancy suggests, it codified tactics intended to overturn the constitutional order. At the same time, the “rules” Alinsky had championed threatened — and promised — to propel American politics ineluctably into violence.

The most reprehensible accomplishment of Rules for Radicals was convincing a generation of progressive Democrats that it no longer needed to ask the fundamental question, “Does the end justify the means?” Indeed, Alinsky derided this broad rule of civilized conduct as a “meaningless” moral formulation. The only query worth posing, he said, was, “Does this particular end justify these particular means?” 

Alinsky fashioned himself a patriot, but that is highly dubious, and his view of politics as a consequentialist venture stripped of personal or national principles was deeply un-American. A “practical” revolutionary, Alinsky wrote, understands that “one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.” This is an invitation to do what one’s nature and civilization teach us to know to be wrong and to excuse any enormity as being for the wider good.

According to Rules for Radicals, what was good for mankind? Its answer was building a “revolutionary force” that methodically deconstructed the system and imposed class justice. The book is an instruction manual for appropriating the ideals of an open society and turning it against itself. It is also a ready-made strategy of disruption by trial attorneys.

This revolution begins with the fundamentally destructive task of transforming every interaction between citizens into a confrontation. We hear the lament today that everything is politicized, that no one can be left in peace with their opinions and way of life, and that strangers get in the faces of those they believe to be ideological opponents to shout and fight over ideas. 

“Pick the target,” Alinsky wrote, “freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” This is perhaps Alinsky’s most vulgar rule. Aim your fire at humans rather than amorphous institutions, he preached. Create caricatures of your opponents because if “you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.” This is how to isolate your adversary and deny him public sympathy, even from his side. There is........

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