THE MAD TEA PARTY: The Cloward-Piven Conspiracy
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From time to time, while surfing for news, I come across a story that must be reproduced in its entirety, because anything I could do would dilute its technical core. This is one of those tales. It is about Beck, and Limbaugh, et al, and conspiracy and loony tunes. It is a must read from The Nation:
Leftists like to say that another world is possible, but I was never quite sure of that until I started reading tea party websites. There, a government of leftists is not only possible, it’s on the cusp of seizing permanent power, having broken American capitalism and replaced it with a socialist state. Down that rabbit hole, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are communists, and “The Left”–which encompasses everyone from the Democratic Leadership Council to Maoist sectarians–is a disciplined and near omnipotent army marching in lockstep to a decades-old master plan for domination called the “Cloward-Piven strategy” or, as of January 20, 2009, “Cloward-Piven government.”
What is this plot? According to David Horowitz, who apparently coined the expression, Cloward-Piven is “the strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.” Named after sociologists and antipoverty and voting rights activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who first elucidated it in a May 2, 1966, article for The Nation called “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” the Cloward-Piven strategy, in Horowitz’s words, “seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.” Like a fun-house-mirror version of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine theory, the Cloward-Piven strategy dictates that the left will exploit that crisis to push through unpopular, socialist policies in a totalitarian manner.
Since Obama’s election and the financial crash of 2008, Horowitz’s description has been taken up by a clutch of tea party propagandists–from TV and radio hosts Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, National Review editor Stanley Kurtz and The Obama Nation author Jerome Corsi–to explain how both events could have happened, here, in the U-S-A. In their historical narrative, it was Cloward and Piven’s article that gave ACORN the idea to start peddling subprime mortgages to poor minorities in the 1980s, knowingly laying the groundwork for a global economic meltdown nearly thirty years later. Beck calls Cloward and Piven the two people who are “fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system.” It was Cloward and Piven who had the diabolical idea of registering (illegal or nonexistent) poor and minority voters through Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, thus guaranteeing Obama’s “fraudulent” victory. And it is the Cloward-Piven strategy that guides the Obama administration’s every move to this day, as it seeks to ram through healthcare reform, economic stimulus and financial regulation (all of which, in reality, have enjoyed majority support in many polls taken during the last two years).
As proof, Beck & Co. point to what they see as a shadowy web of associations: Cloward and Piven worked in alliance with welfare rights organizer George Wiley, who mentored Wade Rathke, who went on to found ACORN, which sometimes coordinated registration drives with Project Vote (whose board of directors Piven just recently joined), a previous incarnation of which employed Obama to run a Chicago chapter in the early ’90s. They also repeatedly cite Emanuel’s statement, made in November 2008 after the passage of TARP but before the stimulus, that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” From The Nation‘s pages to the White House’s brains and muscles–it took only forty-four years!
All of this, of course, is a reactionary paranoid fantasy. Rahm Emanuel is no more Frances Fox Piven’s stooge than Obama is a Muslim. But the looniness of it has not stopped the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory from spreading across tea party networks. And the left’s gut reaction upon hearing of it–to laugh it off as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery–does nothing to blunt its appeal or limit its impact. In order to respond, alas, we have to understand, and that means going through the looking glass.
Horowitz first wrote of the Cloward-Piven strategy on his website Discoverthenetworks.org, which claims to be “a guide to the left.” His description is a crude and false account of what Cloward and Piven argued. For example, the words “capital” and “capitalism” never appear in their article. The piece is about precipitating a crisis in the welfare system by legally enrolling masses of eligible recipients, which the welfare bureaucracy could not handle, thus creating a demand for more radical reforms, like a guaranteed minimum income–a proposal that Nixon, of all people, floated in 1969 and that, in fact, Democratic-majority Congresses voted down through 1972 [see Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, page 15]. Moreover, as Piven recently explained to me, although the article was written as a strategic thought experiment, in many ways it described and reacted to changes already sweeping the nation, chief among them the civil rights and welfare rights movements, which created newly politicized constituencies to which the Democratic Party had to respond. “The mainstream,” Piven says, “was responsive to the idea that we could end poverty because of these movements.” In short, the stresses placed on the welfare system were caused by a confluence of factors, of which an article published in The Nation, it is safe to say, was but one, and most likely a minor one at that.
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The Tea Party membership may not be aware of it, but they have truly been led and bred. Their antics remind me of some of the nonsensical crowd antics one used to see in Patric McGoohan’s old TV series The Prisoner.
I loved that show Jack. It is also a perfect analogy.
liberal jews are the downfall of america, glen beck backs evertthing he says with the their own words!
Funny how we leftists are all working in lockstep for these conspiracies which are so secret we ourselves have never heard of them.
In principle this is no different from the old paranoid fantasies that everything in the world is secretly controlled by a vast Jewish conspiracy, or by reptilian humanoids from outer space. The cardboard villains differ, but the mentality is the same.
Infidel I agree. It is reminiscent of centuries of propaganda aimed at the Jews. I hope that it is not as successful…
I always suspected that the Democrats were up to something. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Clearly they have been manipulating world events in order to bring about a marxist-socialist revolution here at home. Of course their greatest trick was when the planted those stories about Barack Obama’s birth in anticipation of him becoming President 47 years later. Ernst Blowfeld himself couldn’t keep up with the Democrats.
Those dang Democrats!! You just never know who to trust. When Barack Obama got elected I knew there was something going on. I mean things are getting better. Ya know that just ain’t right!
They don’t let facts interrupt their thinking do they? The quote of Rahm Emanuel’s “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” could be turned back on the Beck’s of the world “You never want a serious conspiracy theory go to waste.” In a nutshell they are scared about losing control of “their country” they must shiver when they see blacks and Hispanics getting elected and appointed to high positions. Their plan is definitely a call to arms.
Holte it is indeed a discreet, well in some cases not so discreet, call to arms. I think we are seeing the first gusts of the storm. I am afraid that the hurricane will be here before we know it.