I trained under an Alinsky protege, Mile Miller, at the Citizens Action League in California, I think that was early in 1978 and I worked with that group as an organizer for about a year, maybe a little longer. I saw the effectiveness of the tactics, and helped win a couple of local campaigns using them. Those small campaigns were almost intentionally apolitical in any ideological sense, other than the meta principle of empowering powerless people to get what they wanted and/or needed. The group I worked with pressured a reluctant small city into putting in a traffic light at a dangerous intersection, and also got that city to roll back the cancellation of a local bus route. But in the big picture the goal was to identify and train effective local leaders who would then meet with and coordinate with other local leaders in a state wide citizen's lobby, thereby building a potent political force. These smaller battles were essentially training missions.
It seemed almost an implicit assumption that as long as you worked with relatively disenfranchised populations, and screened out developing potential leaders of any obviously reactionary bent, that the movement that grew from those efforts would be fundamentally progressive in orientation. At the time I was involved that was mostly the case, but I took mental note of the fact that there was no fail safe mechanism to guarantee that. Our local chapter that I was staff to started to drift toward the right some around issues regarding curbing rising property taxes. The Citizens Action League had been building support for a progressive approach to curbing excessive rises in property taxes, but when that got held up by infighting between the Democratic State Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown, the momentum in our group swung toward Proposition 13, the Jarvis-Gann initiative, which lacked any progressive features and was more of a vehicle for more rightist populism. I was working in an inherently more conservative part of San Mateo County, and I saw the trend developing sooner than did our liberal state wide leadership.
The fact that the far right could adopt and adapt Alinsky's organizing techniques for their own ends does not come as a complete surprise to me
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