Rules for Radicals is Worn Out
How the American Left beat Saul Alinsky’s playbook to death—and it backfired. Now the right has picked up the book and is eating itself, too.
Donald Trump sat in his tuxedo among Washington’s elite as President Obama took the podium at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. From that podium, the President launched mockery and humiliation designed to dismantle Trump’s image and political aspirations.
Obama did it all before an audience of journalists, celebrities, and power brokers.
Obama had just released his long-form birth certificate days earlier, directly responding to Trump’s relentless “birther” campaign, and now the President was ready to exact his revenge.
With surgical precision, Obama lampooned Trump’s conspiracy theory, suggesting that now Trump could move on to investigate whether the moon landing was faked. The room erupted in laughter as cameras captured Trump’s stony face.
Trump sat quietly through his own roasting.
Obama twisted the knife further by playing a clip from “The Celebrity Apprentice,” joking about the kind of “credentials” and “breadth of experience” Trump would bring to the Oval Office, lines which drew uproarious laughter.
The mockery intensified when comedian Seth Meyers took over, delivering blow after blow about the absurdity of Trump’s presidential aspirations, his questionable business acumen, and his career as a reality TV star being his true calling. Meyers quipped that Trump had said he’d run for president as a Republican, which was surprising since he’d “assumed he was running as a joke.”
The audience howled as Trump sat rigid, his expression frozen somewhere between forced composure and visible anger.
What made the evening particularly humiliating wasn’t just the content of the jokes, but the context: Trump was being dismissed as fundamentally unserious by the President and assembled Washington establishment. He was being treated not as a legitimate political figure but as a punchline—a reality TV star playing at politics. The contempt was palpable. The laughter was cruel. The tactic seemed to work, as the room completely isolated Donald Trump.
But something else happened outside the room. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, that evening was a watershed.
Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfill it, with respect on both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer.
—William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man
Rules for Radicals Rewind
Below is a list of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, based on the standard compilation from his 1971 book. I bring this to your attention to refresh your memory and set the context.
Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
Never go outside your people's expertise.
Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Keep the pressure on. Never let up.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, was intended as a tactical guide for organizers to challenge adversaries and entrenched power structures. Aimed initially at the disenfranchised, educated elites and their children picked up the manual and ran with it. Its tactics include psychological warfare, relentless pressure, and turning adversaries’ strengths against them through dissembling and distortion.
For decades, the American Left adopted Alinsky’s playbook with zeal, viewing it as a blueprint for social justice movements, especially when combined with critical theory. Even mainstream figures such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama drew inspiration from its methods. However, what began as political disruption devolved into rote, overused tactics. These approaches started to alienate the public, expose hypocrisies, and empower the Trumpian Right.
Because the tactics have become less effective, many have tried to double down. Practitioners have been drawn to more violent and destructive interpretations, which have shown up to American normies as just what they are.
In short, the American Left beat Alinsky’s rules to death. And this led to a spectacular backfire in 2024.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
The American Left once quite effectively weaponized mockery through late-night comedy and viral memes to dismantle conservative figures. From portraying opponents as rubes to relentless satire on shows like The Daily Show, this tactic initially humiliated targets and shifted public opinion. No one could deny it: John Stewart was the best.
But overuse bred resentment.
Not only had a plain-talking billionaire become the unlikely avatar for the “forgotten man,” it always seemed like the elites of Hollywood, the Press, and Academia were talking down to the rest.
By the 2020s, constant ridicule fatigued audiences, making the Left look both elitist and mean-spirited. The Left’s used Alinsky indiscriminately—against everyday people, not just power brokers. And it backfired. The backfire became the backlash against social justice fundamentalism. Humor that alienated working-class voters was no longer in vogue except among the elites. Humor that lambasted “woke” was ascendant.
Comic Dave Chappelle became a legend as he surfed the tsunami.
The Left had become a bunch of miserable scolds and perpetual victims.
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
This rule has been another staple, once used effectively to call out conservative hypocrisies on issues like family values and fiscal responsibility. The Left excelled at this during the George W. Bush era and, to some degree, during the first Trump presidency. All they had to do was highlight contradictions in rightwing stances on morality, law, and spending.
But as the Left held institutional power—in academia, media, and government—they became the “enemy” in Alinsky’s terms. Critics flipped the script, accusing progressives of failing to meet their own standards on free speech (e.g., campus censorship), diversity (e.g., mandatory racial diversity within an ideological monoculture), and tolerance (e.g., intolerance of dissenting views).
This reversal exposed deep double standards, such as defending destructive BLM protests while condemning January 6th. This led to widespread public distrust, particularly after it had become increasingly evident that the latter was a successful entrapment strategy by left-leaning factions within the national security state.
The tactic, once a scalpel, became a blunt instrument, dragging on too long and violating Rule 7, namely, A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
The personalization and polarization of Rule 13—Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it—fueled identity politics and movements like Black Lives Matter. By freezing opponents like the police or corporations as villains, the Left mobilized bases effectively. By accusing figures like Elon Musk of being fascists and Nazis, or health insurance companies as evil, we got more street riots, widespread Tesla vandalism, and the murder of a CEO and father of two.
But relentless application of this rule has fractured society, turning every issue into a zero-sum battle. The 2020 riots, framed as mostly peaceful despite widespread damage, exemplified this overuse, alienating suburban voters and contributing to losses in down-ballot races. These tactics have also propelled politics toward violence, with inflammatory narratives resulting in harm and death, only to boomerang as public sympathy has waned.
Keep the pressure on
This rule has backfired through exhaustion. Endless campaigns on climate, gender, and race kept issues alive ad nauseam. Campus protests in 2024-2025 were abstract, dragged on, and lacked any positive note, irritating normies rather than inspiring change.
Sophisticated Left strategists recognized this as a losing approach, yet grassroots zeal persisted, highlighting Alinskyism’s flaws: it prioritizes disruption over institutional norms, leaving initiative with the agitators and their cynical paymasters.
The ultimate irony?
The Right co-opted Alinsky, using his rules against the Left. Figures like Donald Trump employed ridicule, personalization, and constant pressure to portray progressives as radicals, turning the playbook against them. The Right even started to think of themselves as both victors and victims.
But just as the Right figured out how to do it, it flamed out.
People got sick of it, and now the Right is similarly fracturing itself in a manner that is likely to lose them the midterms.
There are worse things than gridlock.
This inversion—combined with their failure to offer constructive alternatives (Rule 12)- left the Left vulnerable in 2024 and a lot of moderates politically homeless.
Squandered Opportunities
About a year ago, I would have argued that the Right is mainly stupid and the Left is mostly evil. Today, it appears both sides have caught up with each other in both departments.
Fresh off rightwing victories in 2024, the evil-to-stupid ratio changed, and the winning coalition began to fracture within a few months. Instead of figuring out how to absorb all those people pushed out of the Left by its excesses, the Right started playing king of the mountain—not with a clear vision of a good society—but with knee-jerk contrarianism and empty iconoclasm. Witnessing this, the Left has somehow become more sanctimonious.
Yet, the scattered, leaderless, rudderless Left is likely to reclaim power in just two years. All they have to do is pretend to moderate and let the Right shoot itself in the proverbial foot. But can the Left rein in the crazy?
Overuse of Alinsky has bred cynicism all around. Rules for Radicals—left or right—has become outdated in a world where people are starved for authenticity over authoritarian teamsports. Even the cult of Trump’s Personality is on the wane as the America First movement tries to distinguish itself from a slogan. Still, in beating Alinsky to death, the Left sacrificed long-term gains for short-term wins, thereby fostering division within its own ranks.
In flogging the Alinsky horse, the Right was ascendant for a minute, yet too many started mutating into everything the Left had always thought of them. As I wrote in “Getting Up with Fleas,”
It’s the Molotov Cocktail Militia versus the Tiki Torch Brigade. Increasingly, they have communication arms.
But “independent” influencers are descending quickly into the fever swamps on both the left and right. On the left, shadowy figures pay meat puppets and furnish them with newspeak, firebombs, and bail money. On the right, indie media is eating itself in a contrarian arms race that brings out the worst in people.
The arms race is sensationalism, driven not just by shallow attention-seeking but also by millions of dollars in ad buys.
Nothing is quite so sensational as killing. And that ain’t good.
One wonders what would have horrified Saul Alinsky more? To see his beloved Left go on to misuse and abuse his book, or the Right pick it up and use it for their own ambitions? Whatever the case, Rules for Radicals, once revolutionary, is now a relic—its backfires and burnouts a cautionary tale of tactical hubris.
But having been sucked into the spectacles and lured into the extremes, have either the Left or the Right learned their lessons? Or must these sorry episodes play on repeat until we have to call this a multi-front civil war?
I don’t know.
But the Forgotten Man is still waiting to be remembered. Perhaps the time will come for him to ignore the tit-for-tat of attention seekers, rise to vanquish the partisans, and rebuild civilization with his smartphone on “Do Not Disturb.”
When I was a young activist in the 1980s, Rules for Radicals was all the rage. But the main rule I've continued to find useful is #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
But, as you correctly point out, that rule is only really useful if you're not already in charge. Once you're in charge, your use of it becomes ineffectual, and you yourself are vulnerable to it.
Insightful as ever, Mad Max!