Rules for Radicals

Saul Alinsky

1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your own people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.  (Make them speechless).
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.  (The hypocrisy play)
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.  (Humor is the ultimate weapon!)
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.  (Timing is everything).
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. A major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.  (Put up or shut up).
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it (example, George Bush as the personification of evil).