But in the end, alas, Mr. Peterson gets Alinsky wrong.
Skipping to the bottom line:
Alinsky was a radical leftist. Of course, he struck the pose of one who eschewed faithful adherence to a particular doctrine; but that is a key part of the strategy. To be successful -- meaning, to advance the radical agenda -- a community organizer needs public support. Thus he must masquerade as a "pragmatist" rather than reveal himself as a socialist or a communist. The idea is for the organizer to portray himself as part of the bourgeois society he despises, to coopt its language and mores in order to bring about radical transformation from within.
But it is not as if Alinsky organizers are indifferent to the kind of change a society goes through as long as it is change of some kind. Alinsky was a man of the hard left, a social justice activist who sought massive redistribution of wealth and power. Peterson acknowledges this in a fleeting mention of Alinsky's "professed hatred of capitalism." Noteworthy, moreover, is Alinsky's Rules for Radicals critique of such seventies revolutionaries as the Weathermen: his contempt stemmed not from disagreement with their goals but from the fact that their terrorist methods enraged the public, making those goals harder to achieve. When a book begins, as Rules for Radicals does, by saluting Lucifer as "the very first radical," it is fairly clear that the author has taken sides.
Last para captures the essence of current progressive's 'death by a thousand cuts' effort.