Hillary inching ever closer to the power she has sought relentlessly.
Beyond Mr. Alinsky, the treatise yields insights about its author. Gaining power, Ms. Rodham asserted, was at the core of effective activism. It “is the very essence of life, the dynamo of life,” she wrote, quoting Mr. Alinsky.
Ms. Rodham endorsed Mr. Alinsky’s central critique of government antipoverty programs — that they tended to be too top-down and removed from the wishes of individuals.
But the student leader split with Mr. Alinsky over a central point. He vowed to “rub raw the sores of discontent” and compel action through agitation. This, she believed, ran counter to the notion of change within the system.
Nearly half a century after these youthful aspirations, Hillary Clinton appears to have nearly come full circle. No longer is she simply the academic activist adorned with thick-framed spectacles hoping to change the establishment from within.
At this point, Hillary Clinton is, indeed, the establishment. She is one of the many faces of American power for many at home and abroad. But will she become the ultimate face of American power? Will Hillary Clinton become the first woman to have her portrait rendered as President of the United States?
Well, before that question is answered, Americans should be asking more questions not only about Hillary Clinton but about the very the nature of state power itself.
Power Corrupts
Do Hillary Clinton’s “noble” ends justify her choice of means, her ambitions for state power?
In my opinion, the answer is a firm “no,” but I do not say this as something unique to Hillary Clinton. She comes from a long line of murderers and thieves dressed up in high ideals – the type of person Isabel Paterson once called the “humanitarian with the guillotine,” – those who, as Paterson wrote, cause great harm as “the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.” In step, Hillary is quick to downplay her mistakes and the “collateral damage” left in her wake in the name of her “virtuous ends.”
One may realize the promise of power is one of the oldest temptations known to man, leading to mistake after bloody mistake. Just think of all the “humanitarian” foreign policy adventures to Hillary’s name, carried out with weapons much more powerful than any guillotine – she pushed the bombing of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, advocated strongly for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, supported the 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan (which led to the majority of American deaths in the Afghan war), orchestrated the 2009 coup in Honduras, supported the revolutionary overthrow of Hosni Mubarak 2011, led the policy to violently overthrow Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in the same year only to smugly giggle at his death, and persists in her defense of the use of drone warfare that kills innocents across the globe from Yemen to Pakistan while continuing to advocate the arming of Syrian rebels as part of her on-going support for the overthrow of ISIS’s enemy, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
To Clinton, the ends really do justify the means. But again, this is not unique to Hillary Clinton. No, when engaged in the pursuit of political power, the politician is always certain of her truths and victories while being forever ignorant of her falsehoods and failures. She is happy to remember the parades in her honor, but it darkens her doorstep to remind her of the times when she blindly marched people to folly.
At the bottom of politics, there is a smarmy certainty, a sort of bad faith, underlying the whole hubbub. Politics relies on this faith in power – on a willingness to create a vision in one’s mind and force it upon the rest of the world with audacious violence – and accordingly the cornerstone of statecraft is drenched in sure-fire sacrifices.
Faith in state power and the corruption that follows may not be unique to Hillary Clinton – before writing Clinton Cash, author Peter Schweizer wrote another excellent book, Extortion, outlining how our dear public servants systematically use their political power to manipulate those they supposedly serve – but Hillary’s career in politics certainly provides a crash course in how such a faith corrupts.
Whether it be her support of NSA mass surveillance programs, her penchant to centrally plan the American economy through a morass of crony capitalists enabling job-killing policies, or the Clinton Foundation’s global pay-for-play scheme, Hillary has in many ways become the very establishment she used to dream of replacing. She makes the ‘69 establishment President Richard Nixon look like a domesticated pussy cat, as she escalates America’s imperial wars, facilitates arms deals for Clinton Foundation donors, and continually lies to the American public about her own record.
Break with Alinksy
When did Clinton stop agreeing with Alinsky that the government’s programs are “too top-down” and removed from the wishes of individuals on the ground? Just as Dorian Gray’s indifference for anything other than his search for beauty led him down a dark path, how many more Sibyl Vane’s must be driven into death’s arms by Hillary Clinton for her to see the cruelty that flows out of her indifference for those who oppose her pursuit and use of state power?
