Rules for Radicals…of the SSPX

Rad Trad apologists tap Saul Alinsky to rationalize their schism.

By Louis Massett

How the SSPX defense playbook borrows its favorite rhetorical trick from Saul Alinsky — and why the trick is not just deflection, but the load-bearing wall of the whole enterprise.

Try this experiment. Post something factually true about the Society of St. Pius X on X or Facebook. Choose something documented — the 2020 abuse reporting on Fr. Ramón Ángles, the Krohn attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1982, Bishop Williamson’s expulsion from the Society for Holocaust denial, the ipso facto excommunications of 1988. Any of these will do.

Then wait.

Within an hour, some percentage of the replies will look something like this:

•          “What about McCarrick?”

•          “What about the Vatican bank?”

•          “What about the abuse cover-ups in the diocesan Church?”

•          “What about the modernist bishops in good standing preaching heresy?”

•          “What about the Novus Ordo Masses that violate liturgical law every Sunday?”

None of these responses is an argument. Not one engages the actual claim you made. Every one is a category of rhetorical move so recognizable that political-analysis writers have given it a specific name.

They are all whataboutism.

Naming the tactic

Whataboutism is a form of the older Latin fallacy tu quoque — “you too.” Its structure is simple. Someone raises a criticism about X. Instead of engaging that criticism, the respondent points to Y, a similar or worse problem. The move is not to defend X on the merits. The move is to make the accuser look inconsistent, or at least tired, for having raised X in the first place.

It works because it forces the accuser to defend a position he never took. If I say “the Society of St. Pius X has a documented problem with sexual abuse cover-ups, as the 2020 reporting on Fr. Ángles established,” and the reply is “what about McCarrick?” — I now have a choice. I can defend the diocesan Church’s handling of McCarrick (which was often disgraceful). Or I can point out that whether the diocesan Church handled McCarrick well or badly has nothing to do with whether the Society handled Ángles well or badly. Either way, the conversation has moved from the topic I raised to the topic my interlocutor prefers.

That is not accident. That is the tactic operating as designed.

Why the SSPX needs the tactic more than anyone else

Whataboutism is a common enough move on the internet in 2026. Every political faction runs some version of it. What makes it specifically load-bearing for the Society of St. Pius X is that the Society’s whole canonical existence depends on a claim that whataboutism is uniquely equipped to maintain.

The claim is called the state of necessity.

Canon 1323 of the Code of Canon Law excuses a person from canonical penalty when he acts “compelled by grave fear” or “out of necessity.” Since 1988, the Society has invoked this canon to defend Archbishop Lefebvre’s consecration of four bishops without the Pope’s mandate. The argument runs like this: the Church, after Vatican II, entered a state of grave crisis; the Faith itself was under existential threat; Lefebvre, as a bishop, was morally obligated to act to save souls; he therefore consecrated successors — not out of schismatic intent, but out of necessity. The 1988 consecrations, the Society has said ever since, were technically illicit but morally justified. The excommunications Rome pronounced were therefore either invalid, or should be treated as if they were.

Everything in the SSPX’s institutional identity is built on this claim being currently, materially, and canonically true.

If the state of necessity is real, the Society is heroic. If it is not — if the Church is not, in fact, in a condition of existential crisis such that a bishop is required to ordain successors in defiance of the Pope — then the Society is in ongoing schism, its bishops are illicit, and its parishes are canonical anomalies that ought to be either reconciled or dissolved.

And here is the theological load the whataboutism is actually carrying: the state of necessity has to be perpetually current. A necessity that existed in 1988 but has since resolved is no longer a necessity. If circumstances have changed — if popes have extended overtures, if the Latin Mass has been widely restored across dioceses, if canonical accommodations have been repeatedly offered — the necessity claim collapses. And with it collapses the theological cover for the four consecrations of 1988, the four consecrations scheduled for July 1, 2026, and the entire parallel jurisdiction the Society has spent forty years constructing.

This is why the SSPX defense needs whataboutism structurally, and why it will never stop.

Every fresh scandal in the mainstream Church, every failure of a modernist bishop, every alleged heresy from a pontiff, every abuse cover-up at the Vatican, is evidence in an ongoing case for the perpetual currency of the state of necessity. The whataboutisms are not idle deflection. They are evidentiary submissions in a canonical trial that never adjourns.

“What about McCarrick” is not merely rhetorical evasion. It is the daily maintenance of the theological premise the Society exists inside. Without a constant, self-refreshing supply of “what abouts” — abuse, heresy, modernism, papal error, liturgical abuse, ecumenical scandal — the state of necessity would starve, and the schism would look like what it actually is: an act of separation from a Church whose circumstances have materially changed in the thirty-eight years since Lefebvre consecrated four men in Écône.

This is what makes the SSPX case for whataboutism different from a political tribe’s use of the same tactic. When a political tribe says “what about the other side,” the tribe is dodging accountability. When the SSPX and its defenders say it, they are filing evidence in a proceeding that keeps the Society’s authorization to act alive. Every filing extends the necessity. Every extension of the necessity extends the Society’s warrant to keep ordaining bishops without Rome.

You cannot understand why the whataboutism is so persistent, so tribal, and so central to the Society’s public defense unless you understand this. The Society is not merely deflecting. It is fighting for its own theological continuation, which depends on the Church remaining, in perpetuity, in a condition grave enough that Lefebvre was right and Rome was wrong.

The tactic will not end when its practitioners get embarrassed by its structural weakness. It cannot end. The moment the Society concedes that the Church is not in a state of ongoing existential necessity, the Society concedes its own reason for being.

The Alinsky rule the traditionalists are quietly following

The traditionalist Catholic audience is not, generally speaking, a fan of Saul Alinsky. The Chicago community organizer who wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971 is one of the most reviled figures in the modern conservative Catholic imagination. He is invoked, at every trad Catholic conference and in half the traditionalist Substacks, as the intellectual grandfather of the American cultural left. Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on him. Barack Obama trained in his methods. The Chicago political machine ran on his tactics for decades. Two generations of conservative Catholic media have warned that the left’s whole playbook was written by an unbaptized organizer from Chicago.

So it is worth noting, quietly, that the SSPX defense playbook — the one now doing double duty as canonical theology — is currently running Rule 4 of Rules for Radicals verbatim.

Alinsky’s Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this.”

Translated for the trad Twitter context: If the mainstream Catholic critic invokes accountability, canon law, moral theology, or historical honesty, hold him to the maximalist version of his own standard and invoke every failure of anyone in his camp who has ever fallen short of it. Make him defend Cardinal McCarrick, the Novus Ordo Missae, Pope Francis’s every gesture, and the actions of every modernist bishop in North America — while he is trying to raise one specific point about Bishop Williamson.

This is Alinsky, verbatim. It has been reissued as a defense of Catholic tradition. And its most enthusiastic users have no idea they are running it.

There is Rule 5, too: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Read any comment thread under a critical piece on the SSPX and count the ratio of arguments to insults. “His book would be better served as a roll of toilet paper.” That is not Alinsky, exactly. But it is the same rule, applied to the same purpose.

And Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.” Pope Francis was a target. Pope Leo will be a target. Any priest or bishop who publicly questions the Society becomes, within twenty-four hours, a personalized target with a hashtag around his name. Ridicule follows. Then the whataboutism. Then the closing move — the demand that the target apologize, resign, or be personally excommunicated by the traditionalist commentariat.

Alinsky wrote his rules for organizers of the political left in an era before Twitter, before any Catholic bishop had a smartphone, and before Rules for Radicals had been read into oblivion by conservative think tanks warning about it. He would find the ideological adoption of his tactics by his ideological opponents entirely predictable. He would also find it very funny.

Why the tactic works — and why it fails

Whataboutism works in the moment because it exploits three facts about how humans argue:

Fatigue. No one has the time or energy to defend every position his tribe has ever taken. Confronted with “what about McCarrick,” the honest critic often just walks away. The tactic wins by default.

Tribal loyalty. Even a critic who knows better may hesitate to concede a point that seems to reflect badly on his own side. The whataboutism forces him to either defend the indefensible or look disloyal.

Audience distraction. People watching the exchange rarely have the patience to trace who introduced which subject. If the thread ends on “what about McCarrick” and the original critic has gone quiet, the audience remembers that the mainstream Church looked bad — not that the original point about the Society was never actually rebutted.

But whataboutism fails, over time, in one specific and important way.

It cannot build anything.

A tradition that defends itself only by pointing at the failures of others has no content of its own. It has only enemies. A community whose central rhetorical move is “but they are worse” is a community that has already conceded, silently, that it cannot be defended on its own merits.

That is what has happened to the public case for the SSPX in the last twenty years. There is a serious traditionalist argument to be made about liturgy, catechesis, the sacramental patrimony of the Church, the aesthetic and spiritual losses of the mid-twentieth century. Serious Catholics have made it. Joseph Ratzinger made much of it. Cardinal Sarah has made much of it. Many of the great English Catholic writers of the last century — Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh, Knox — held versions of that argument in forms any modern reader can still learn from.

None of them ran the Alinsky playbook. None of them needed the state of necessity to justify their voice.

What honest engagement would look like

If the SSPX and its defenders wanted to make a serious case in the current moment, the moves are available. They would look like this:

When the state of necessity is invoked — engage it head-on. State what has to be true about the current condition of the Church for the necessity to still apply. Explain what has changed since 1988, and what has not. Do not offer a rolling list of unrelated scandals as proof of ongoing existential crisis. Argue the specific canonical criteria of Canon 1323 on their merits — grave fear, immediate danger, proportional response, absence of alternative remedy — and defend each one against the counter-evidence of the last forty years.

When the abuse question is raised — engage it directly. Concede what is documented. Distinguish the Society’s institutional handling of Ángles from the personal holiness of many of its priests. Explain what has been reformed and what has not.

When the schism question is raised — engage the canon law directly. Do not deflect to Pope Francis or to modernist bishops. State what the Society believes about its own canonical status and defend that position on its merits.

When the 1988 consecrations are raised — do not point at the moral failures of the popes. Explain, on the theological record, why Lefebvre judged those consecrations necessary, and what the thirty-eight-year evidence suggests about whether that judgment has been vindicated or not.

When the Williamson question is raised — do not point at other bishops’ failures. Explain what the Society learned from Williamson, what it did about him, and what mechanisms it has now to prevent his kind of theology from finding institutional shelter within it.

These are the moves an honest interlocutor makes. None of them are being made in the current SSPX defense on social media. What is being made, at scale, is Rule 4 — because Rule 4 is the tool a movement uses when its own case cannot be argued on the merits and has to be inferred, indefinitely, from the failures of others.

The pattern the book actually diagnoses

Traddyland is not, in its own argument, a book about rhetorical fallacies or canonical fine print. It is a book about how belief becomes ideology, and what that transformation costs inside a family.

But the tactical shift I am describing here is part of the same disease. When a tradition can no longer be defended on its merits, and when the alternative to the merit-based defense is a Chicago-style deflection game run in service of an emergency claim that has not been re-examined in forty years, then what is being defended is no longer really the tradition. What is being defended is a side — and, beneath the side, a state of exception that has hardened into a state of habit.

The Latin Mass, the discipline of catechesis, the recovery of reverence — none of these requires Rule 4. None of them requires the perpetual state of necessity. None of them will, in the long run, survive their fusion with either.

There is a reason Saul Alinsky’s actual movement produced very little that lasted. Deflection cannot build. It can only exhaust the accuser. And once the accuser walks away, all that is left is a community that has proven, one more time, that it is very good at not being the topic — and, when pressed, very good at explaining that the topic is still, in perpetuity, a Church that has forfeited its own competence to judge.

Ask the better question the next time you see the tactic in the wild.

“What about McCarrick” is a fine sentence. It is not an answer to the question you asked. And “the necessity remains” is not an answer either, until someone is willing to defend the necessity itself instead of merely inheriting it.

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Louis Massett is the author of Traddyland, Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic. https://a.co/d/0aU8uOi1