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? 

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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 no respite for grace or compromise in Alinsky’s world. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” All of it, in essence, dehumanizes the opposition.

Social media has thermonuclearized the ability of activists to demonize an opponent. Young people are now ceaselessly subjected to a blizzard of out-of-context snippets, videos, and memes, feeding hate clicks at the expense of meaningful personal interactions, and misguided anger over deeper insight. Add to this mix a decline of religious faith and a lack of belief in foundational American ideals, and it makes radical and transgressive ideas far more likely to fill the resultant vacuum.   

Hyperpersonalization of politics works only if you can convince people on your side that the opposition is evil. This is why progressive Democrats, bred on this kind of radicalized politics, treat every political setback, no matter how trivial, as if it’s an existential threat to the nation. Conservatives aren’t seen as merely adopting misguided policies but as putting the elderly, poor, and minorities in perilous situations. Even fleeting and mundane policy disagreements, such as a tax cut or the institution of net neutrality, portend death. Former President Joe Biden, recall, delivered a speech smearing the Right as budding fascists. Alinsky would have approved. He understood the “threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Which is why “democracy” is always allegedly hanging in the balance but somehow never ends.

Alinskyite cynics know this incitement by hyperbole is untrue, but they also know that millions of people who listen to them do not. This breeds a dangerous undercurrent of resentment. “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other,” Alinsky noted.  

What would a person be willing to do to stop the devils? Implicitly, the Rules for Radicals rationalizes and stokes violence against them. After all, Alinsky points out that most Americans would readily support people who “actively opposed the Nazi occupation and joined the underground Resistance,” which adopted “assassination, terror, property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages to the end of defeating the Nazis.” You see, radicals were counseled to compare their conservative opponents with Nazis even back then. And here we are.

Many of the modern Left have convinced themselves that their political opponents are ideologically as dangerous as Nazis — something the Left began accusing Republicans of when Democrat Harry Truman said GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey was a Hitlerian frontman for “bigots” and “profiteers.” That was in 1948. Alinsky himself ridiculously claimed to have “survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s” (emphasis mine), fashioning himself an ideological foe not merely of capitalists but also of neo-Nazis. 

Alinsky’s defenders stress that he preached nonviolent action. It’s true, so far as that goes, that he was most interested in cutting down and rebuilding institutions from the inside rather than simply demolishing them from the outside. Indeed, the hard Left’s march through our universities, media, and other cultural institutions since the 1960s has been a nearly complete success.

Surely, however, Alinsky knew, judging not only from history but also from his own era, that methods separating action from any justifying ideal other than that of attaining power were likely to slide easily into violence. Alinsky knew the leftist tradition of bloodshed in America. His life was punctuated by the bombing and assassinations of the “Anarchist Wave” and the Marxist terrorism of the ’60s and early ’70s. 

Democrats refuse to face the fact that they and their ideological and rhetorical brethren are in danger of taking America there again. Even the reaction by mainstream left-wingers to the appalling assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was met with an Alinskyite tactic: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Within hours of the assassination, the murder was treated by many on the Left as a secondary concern, less important than blaming the right wing for its reaction to the killing. After a decade of canceling people, not only for politically incorrect opinions but for supporting long-standing social institutions such as traditional heterosexual marriage, the Left acted flabbergasted that celebrating the murder of an innocent person on social media might cost you your job.   

Modern Alinskyites don’t function under any “book of rules,” that is, under any code that applies principles consistently. Their principles are contingent. If an act moves their cause forward, it is OK. This is just another iteration of the fascists’ “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” In the past few weeks alone, two major “liberal” media organs have published articles arguing that the Constitution is an impediment to national survival. This is a running theme. Yet Republicans are incessantly being accused of breaking “norms.” 

They can play innocent, but anyone functioning in the real world understands that many progressive Democrats, perhaps most of them, have a difficult time coexisting with conservatives, treating them often as pariahs. It’s not leftists who are browbeaten into silence and learn to keep their opinions to themselves in case they are attacked, verbally at a minimum. The problem of leftists shutting down speech on campus is an old one. According to a recent YouGov poll, “very liberal people” (a misnomer, incidentally) are eight times more likely to say that political violence is justified than “very conservative people” (25% vs. 3%). The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings found that about a third of students contend that “using violence to stop a campus speech” can be acceptable. That is a sizable minority. 

As we look at what today’s politics have become and where they are headed, it is worth remembering that the author of Rules for Radicals isn’t an obscure or distant figure from history, detached from the modern scenes. Few progressive activists have not either read Alinsky or absorbed his lessons from those who have. If they are not the type to pick up a book, there are plenty of radical teachers to guide them. Two of the most important Democrats of the past two decades owe their ideological development to Alinsky. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not only wrote a glowing thesis on his tactics while she was a student at Yale, but she also corresponded with him. She associated herself with him. Former President Barack Obama openly praised and weaponized Alinsky’s ideas as foundational in his work as a Chicago community organizer.

Thus, Clinton and Obama, two of the most consequential names in Democratic politics of the past half-century, are disciples of a theorist who advocated disruption and personal destruction and nurtured violence. They followed his advice, and they brought his ideas into the mainstream of the blue party, the party of “progressives,” the Democrats. Alinsky introduced and normalized revolutionary tactics to the mainstream of national governance with the help of figures who made it to the top of the pyramid of power, and in doing so, he systematically and deliberately weakened the constitutional order. 

The Right is not wholly innocent. There have been political rioters and perpetrators of violence on that side of the ledger. But there is nothing comparable on the Right to antifa or Black Lives Matter, which have spent millions of dollars to disseminate and practice the politics of violence. These groups espouse primitive, radical, identitarian politics in which there is no discernible principle except that of victory, in which triumph for oneself and defeat of the enemy is the only measure of moral content.

THE MARTYRDOM OF KAMALA HARRIS 

Factions of the progressive Left have made heroes of murderers for decades: Che, Castro, Mao, Stalin. For years, I attended the Conservative Political Action Conference, and not once did I witness anyone celebrating the legacy of a mass murderer or terrorist. Whenever I attended the Socialism Conference in Chicago, I could purchase a slew of their work at the book sale. Progressive Democrats still regard Angela Davis as a hero. She is showered with honorary degrees from major universities despite her participation in black militant domestic terrorism, which ended in the murder of a judge. Davis was a champion of Soviet bloc dictators, even as they tortured and executed political prisoners. There is no Bill Ayers on the Right, Obama’s good friend and likely ghostwriter. A longtime professor, Ayers was one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a group that conducted a campaign of bombings throughout the country. 

Our politics is a continuum, and Alinsky’s rules, amounting to nothing more than if it works, do it — the norms, traditions, and procedures of a decent, rule-of-law society be damned — have been internalized by an increasingly radicalized modern progressive movement. That’s a grim thing to contemplate. The only way for the mainstream Left to join the side of angels is to reject Alinsky’s moral relativism.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.