It reads a little like Tom Wolfe on his worst day ever—like the morning his valet called in sick, he couldn’t locate his thesaurus, and his publisher was expecting the first draft of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. 

White liberals “surrender their own dignity” to become part of a “masochistic cult which submits to outrageous and, in many cases, patently psychotic charges and attacks” by dashiki-clad “black charlatans.” These “cynical black extremists” exploit “mindless white masochism,” which takes—among other forms—the hosting of “white racism seminars and paying [to have] the most insulting and sickest blacks to come and defecate all over them.” 

But that’s not Wolfe. It’s Saul Alinsky in the 1969 edition of Reveille for Radicals, in which the notorious “community organizer” and all-purpose conservative boogeyman also had sharp words for New Left activists. These choice specimens of the white middle class were guilty of “Political Hippyitus,” Alinsky wrote. These “ignorant and confused,” if well-educated, boys and girls wanted peace, equality, and freedom so they could “do their thing” before—at about the age of thirty-three—chucking it all and retreating into the comfort of the suburbs from which they sprang. 

Alinsky was clearly ornerier and more unsettling in his opinions than those on the left who profess to admire him seem to realize, and they would do well to study him again. By the same token, he had much to say that would benefit their counterparts on the political right who faint at the very mention of his name.