The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing

Abstract

This essay contends that broad-based community organizing is best framed as an extension and development of American populism. To make this link it is necessary to focus on how the ‘dean’ of community organising, Saul Alinsky, drew on and developed key aspects of American populism. The link between Alinsky and populism is conceptual, genealogical, and sociological and a taproot that community organizing shares with certain elements of the civil rights movement and other forms of grassroots activism, both democratic and authoritarian.1 However, there are good reasons for refusing such a linkage when it comes to Alinsky. Not least among these is the consistent failure and lack of relationship between the constituency that formed the Populist movement and the People’s Party of the 1890s (primarily ‘yeoman’ farmers in alliance with miners and railroad workers) and the urban and predominantly Catholic industrial workers of that era, a lack of relationship that is central to the failure of the People’s Party to break the duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats and establish itself as a third force in American politics.2 Yet it was precisely among the urban industrial workers that Alinsky developed his craft as an organizer. However, like the Populists, Alinsky consistently and insistently drew conceptually on the Jeffersonian tradition of democracy, which was for him a key reference point in his teaching and writing, combining these with Biblical analogies and allusions. The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing