Community Organizing: Understanding how the Left responds (and does not respond) to economic change

Even if you are not planning to read all 1,078 pages of text in David Garrow’s Obama biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (the other 400 pages are mostly endnotes), I recommend you read the first chapter. Titled “The End of the World as They Knew It,” Obama appears nowhere in it. Instead, the chapter details the death of the steel industry in Chicago’s South Side between 1980 and 1985, the deterioration of the community around the shuttered steel mills, and the rise of a community-organizer culture in the ashes of what used to be stable mill towns and stable minority communities. Garrow chooses to begin his book with this vignette because South Chicago’s Rosewood community is where Obama began his career as a community organizer. It’s an interesting choice: Garrow is pointing at the politics and practices of grassroots organizing and saying: this is the authentic Obama — what he became later was inauthentic. Saying this appears to be the main point of the book. “Community organizer” is a title also preferred by Obama himself, who made sure his “organizer” credentials were front and center throughout all of his autobiographical work and political campaigns. Obama does not believe that he has betrayed his own identity as a left-wing political organizer, as Garrow thinks he did.

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