Victor Davis Hanson
"Finally, he is willing to meet with authorities (such as the mayor, city council, various legislators, college president, police, etc.). Then the organizer subtly offers “solutions,” a euphemism for payoffs such as new laws, favorable executive orders, lucrative jobs for himself and friends, community block grants, diversity hires, some sort of reparations and set-asides, legal exemptions, new community programs, etc. Soon the organizer’s original radical demands metamorphosize from being shrill and costly to mainstream, doable and akin to cost-effective protection money. And then onto the next victim.
"The modern art of a community organizer seems fairly simple.
"The proverbial agitator identifies a particular aggrieved racial, ethnic, gender, or class group that believes equality of opportunity must guarantee equality of result.
"Then he “organizes” the victims by claiming that their ostensible failure to obtain parity can only be due to systematic racism, sexism, and bias by the supposed callous establishment majority (usually emblemized as callous white, male, heterosexual Christians). Myth is useful (e.g., “hands up, don’t shoot” or “one in four women on campus suffer sexual assault”).
"Next he mounts a shrill campaign to demand “fairness” and “equality” (demonstrations, demonization of public figures, boycotts, media campaigns, showing up outside the homes of supposed enemies of the people, getting “in their faces,” and metaphorically “taking a gun to a knife fight,” etc.).
"Finally, he is willing to meet with authorities (such as the mayor, city council, various legislators, college president, police, etc.). Then the organizer subtly offers “solutions,” a euphemism for payoffs such as new laws, favorable executive orders, lucrative jobs for himself and friends, community block grants, diversity hires, some sort of reparations and set-asides, legal exemptions, new community programs, etc. Soon the organizer’s original radical demands metamorphosize from being shrill and costly to mainstream, doable and akin to cost-effective protection money. And then onto the next victim.
"The community organizer himself usually ends up quite well off, in the manner of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s mini-mansion on the golf course, or Barack Obama’s book deals, spousal income, home and expansive yard (the latter thanks to Tony Rezko’s largess). The spectrum of community organizers ranges widely, from the buffoonish Al Sharpton to the suave Barack Obama of the 1990s. Univision’s activist Jorge Ramos is a telegenic community organizer of sorts, and he has parlayed his victim shtick into becoming an aristocrat with all the perks of the .0001% — and a multimillion-dollar salary. In good community-organizer fashion, Ramos does not send his children to schools with sizable enrollments of illegal aliens or live in the barrio analogous to those in Delano or Parlier.
"Community organizing under President Obama has been applied to the country at large. "Obama may have wrecked the Democratic Party (loss of the Senate, loss of the House, minority status in all the state legislatures and governorships, well below 50% approval rating of the president, etc.), which now is on the path to becoming openly neo-socialist. But at least he did community organize and thus divide the United States in rather radical ways.
Obama by intent has shattered the populace into dozens of fragments. He cannot put the country back together again, but he did glue enough shards together to reconstruct half of a Humpty Dumpty America, and thus a narrow majority in 2012."
Emphasis added. TD
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