One of the weirder phenomena cluttering this political season has been the way Saul Alinsky’s name suddenly bloomed on a thousand rightie blogs. I hadn’t thought of him in years, and I suspect many younger progressives had no idea who he was. But suddenly he was, in rightie minds, the evil mentor of all lefties. Not that any of them had any clue what Saul Alinsky was really about, of course.

Phoenix Woman has a nice analysis of Alinsky and the Right, and argues that it’s the Right, not the Left, that is following Alinsky’s tactical playbook.

The constant harping on Alinsky’s Socialist beliefs and some of his more outré actions conceals the basic fact that Alinsky practiced several techniques that are beloved of conservatives but eschewed by many if not most liberals and lefties, both of his era and today. If he were alive, he likely would be scorned as an amoral compromiser by the same people who are confronted daily by conservatives who successfully use his strategies and tactics.

Alinsky pioneered the use of single-issue politics as a tool for working with what we now call “low-information voters”, doing better with them than almost any other lefty activist before or since. His method was to first establish a relationship with the group he hoped to organize, and to pick a particular issue with which to create and nurture this relationship; he would keep things simple and distraction-free by focusing on that issue, and only that issue, until success was achieved or it was felt advisable to move on to another issue. …

… The issue itself was often secondary — the true objective was getting the people organized and comfortable enough with the organizer so that he/she could, by degrees, start introducing them to the organizer’s actual long-term goals.

Tea Party, meet the Koch brothers.

Be sure to read the whole post; it brings up a number of interesting points. But it also left me musing about the way the Right can be made to obsess about anyone or anything. We’ve seen figures like Alinsky, or George Soros, or Ward Churchill, or ACORN, or even President Obama’s teleprompter turned into great and terrible bogeymen in the rightie psyche.

All it takes is a quick jerk of the chain, and from thenon the mere mention of a name like ACORN or Soros fills the rightie imagination with frightening visions of evil; Hitler, Stalin, gulags, jack boots. They see into a liberalsocialist future, gray and bitter, in which all shreds of whatever privilege they think they are entitled to are stripped away, and they become no better than the poor, the foreign, and, um, the melanin enhanced.

And the remarkable thing is that these totems of evil exist only in their own heads; the Alinsky, Soros, ACORN, etc. of objective reality are entirely different critters from what righties imagine them to be. Or, like Ward Churchill, they are figureheads with no followers, small things blown up way out of proportion to their importance.

I hope the social psychologists are watching this. It’s a fascinating example of how the Web and mass media enable groupthink. It sounds like a great subject for some dissertations, if it doesn’t get us all killed first.