Once again, I can’t read the article. Says I have to pay. I don’t want to subscribe to the WSJ right now.
Oh, no. I am so sorry. My husband has been a subscriber since college. Let me see what I can do.
Here is the article in full. ( BTW, I did not post this thread.)
Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, recently caused a stir by sending letters to seven university presidents seeking background information on scientists and professors who had given congressional testimony that failed to endorse what is the conventional wisdom in some quarters regarding climate change. One of the targets was Steven Hayward, a colleague of mine at Pepperdines School of Public Policy.
Though the congressman lacked legal authority to demand information, his aggressive plan, which came to light in late February, should not be a surprise at a time when power holders from the White House on down are employing similar means against perceived enemies.
Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. Im a Saul Alinsky guy, he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, thats where I learned this stuff.
What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.
But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalvas staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due dateasking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companiesusing official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalvas congressional office. This is a page from Alinskys book, in both senses of the word: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have, reads one tip in his 1971 Rules for Radicals.
Yet adopting Alinskys tactics may not in this case fit with Alinskys philosophy. This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, Rules for Radicals is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
In a similar vein, the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain supported Alinskys work in getting disengaged communitiestypically in lower socio-economic stratato assume the difficult responsibilities of citizenship. As a way of challenging big government, even conservatives such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey have recommended Alinskys tactics (minus his professed hatred of capitalism, etc.).
But what happens when Machiavellis Prince reads and employs Rules for Radicals? In 2009 President Obamas friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett was asked on CNN about media bias, particularly at Fox News, and she responded: What the administration has said very clearly is that were going to speak truth to power. I remember thinking: Wait a minute, youre the White House. You are the power.
In that sense President Obamas election was both the climax of Alinskys vision and an existential crisis for that vision. Alinsky promoted the few tactics available to the downtrodden: irreverence, ridicule and deception. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, he wrote. So the rise to power of the worlds most famous community organizer raises a question: Should Alinskyite tactics be employed by those in power, or should they be reserved for those without?
Mr. Grijalvas campaign against seven academics serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when power adopts these strategies to suppress opposition. The congressmans office arranged additional pressure by notifying national and local media that these professors were under investigation. On the day the letters went out, the Washington Post blared: House Dems: Did Big Oil seek to sway scientists in climate debate?
After receiving a call from a Grijalva staffer, our local Malibu Times obliged with the front-page headline, Pepperdine Professor Investigated by Congressman. The online Delaware News Journal, the hometown newspaper for David Legates at the University of Delaware, wrote: UDs David Legates caught in climate change controversy. Alabamas Huntsville Times had a piece under the headline: Arizona congressman asking questions about outside funding for UAH climate expert John Christy.
To their credit, several editorial boards came to the defense of the professors. The Arizona Republic, the home-state newspaper of Mr. Grijalva and targeted Arizona State University professor Robert Balling, wrote that Mr. Grijalvas campaign fits the classic definition of a witch hunt. Rep. Grijalva on March 2 acknowledged to National Journal that some of the information he demanded from the universities was overreach but defended his demand for information about funding sources.
How did it come to this? The inability of politicians to confront anothers argument, much less to attempt to persuade the other side, has become standard operating procedure. Now this toxic approach is extending to the broader world of policyincluding scientific research. Instead of evaluating the quality of the research, opponents make heavy-handed insinuations about who funds itas though that matters if the science is sound. And now just about every climate scientist employed by an American university knows that Washington is watching.
More broadly, what has happened is that a generation of American politicians who came of age during Saul Alinskys lifetime has moved into positions of institutional power that he so often derided as the enemy. They are showing an inability to leave behind Alinskys tactics that were intended for the weak against the strong. Civil discourse and academic freedom suffer while the Prince becomes more powerful.
Mr. Peterson is the executive director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement at Pepperdines School of Public Policy.