Democratic Socialists Channel Cloward-Piven

www.americanthinker.com

Is what we’re living through a political replay of the Age of Aquarius? Maybe it’s just me, but I can almost smell the patchouli oil. Everywhere I look, I’m confronted with the same bell-bottomed flower children who caused trouble back in the hippie days of the 1960s. It’s as though the radicals of that era have simply inhabited new bodies: men without Adam’s apples sporting fake smiles and shrill, pink-pussy-hat-wearing female militants who drive their cars into ICE agents and make up the radical wing of the Democrat party and its illegitimate love child, the Democratic Socialists of America.

It was way back in 1966, as the scent of incense and patchouli began wafting across college campuses, that professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, of Columbia University’s School of Social Work, wrote an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” Fran and Rich proposed using chaos to achieve their goals, which, judging from what we’re witnessing right now, remains the left’s most tried-and-true tactic. Lest we forget, Saul Alinsky, the man who influenced and inspired Barack Obama’s community organizing strategy, is the holy father of provoking crisis to initiate change.

It’s no surprise that, to date, we’ve not yet heard Barack Obama slap back at AOC or Zohran Mamdani with a rebuke stating that Democratic Socialism is incompatible with American ideals. Maybe silence is Barry’s implicit — behind-the-scenes — way of confirming that he agrees that “the world as it is” isn’t “the world as it should be.” After all, he does emphasize democracy over the constitutional republic and, based on his visit to the South Bronx with comrade Zohran, obviously believes in free childcare.

Barack Obama aside, like today’s Democratic Socialists of America — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Muslim apologist Mamdani, and national co-chairs Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer — Cloward and Piven believed poverty could be eliminated by replacing the existing system. Naturally, it had to be one they devised. Their strategy was to encourage every person legally eligible for welfare to rush down to the social services office and apply, overwhelming the system in hopes of triggering a fiscal and administrative crisis that would pressure America into accepting guaranteed national income.

Sixty years later, the DSA’s proposal is essentially Cloward-Piven’s guaranteed income for welfare recipients on steroids. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) advocate replacing many aspects of capitalism with what they believe is a more democratic, publicly accountable economic system. They argue that essential goods and services should be treated as rights rather than commodities. Free food. Free health care. Free housing. Free education. What these activists fail to mention is that guaranteeing all this “free stuff” through the state requires someone else to produce it. There is no such thing as a guaranteed free lunch.

Once the government claims a right to your labor, the state becomes the plantation owner. If all goes as planned, perhaps the free buses carrying protesters to Mamdani’s next rally will arrive on time — after all, socialism famously “keeps the trains running.”

The irony doesn’t end there. Seemingly unaware of the Islamic concept of taqiyyah — a form of religious concealment — and oblivious to the fact that alliances of convenience rarely remain convenient, Marxists appear perfectly willing to align with Islamist activists who are also pursuing political power. Each side believes it is using the other to advance its own agenda. The real question is, do Marxists actually believe they will be left standing when the partnership with Islamists has served its purpose?

Granted, the DSA has expanded its goals far beyond Cloward-Piven, but the underlying strategy, if you’re paying attention, remains strikingly similar: Foment a crisis. Push the system to an unlivable crescendo. Then rush in with the leftist solution.

It’s a tactic as old as Marxist, socialist, and communist organizing itself — and thus far, remarkably effective.

Why? Because many of today’s blue-haired revolutionaries, those waving Hamas flags at train stations in the name of the free speech they would gladly deny their opponents, couldn’t tell you what a woman is, let alone explain the devastation socialism has inflicted on humanity throughout history. Nevertheless, they’re more than willing to punish success, suppress hard work, and undermine the entrepreneurial spirit that made America the prosperous nation they despise in the first place.

Meanwhile, disingenuous establishment Democrats feign outrage as the DSA platform seeks to topple the pillars of the American government. I don’t buy it; I believe they’re complicit and frothing at the mouth to help transition from the current U.S. constitutional system by abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College, replacing the president with a parliamentary system, and ousting the Supreme Court and replacing it with a judiciary chosen by a Congress controlled by radical leftists. After all, these are the same lunatics who, while pretending to be moderate, perpetuated fraud and corruption by continuing to justify election cheating, opposing voter ID, waving illegal criminals over the border, fostering disrespect toward the present commander in chief and would love nothing more than to pack the Supreme Court.

This is more like a Democratic Socialist takeover tag team, in which established Democrats obstruct, accuse, support, and finance the radicals who are causing the chaos that they and more extreme socialist types hope will usher in the dissolution of the American dream. Think the Democrat governor of New York, Kathy Hochul. Has “Bugs” Hochul ever criticized Zohran Mamdani?

How could America ever have reached the point of even entertaining such a radical ideology? How could someone like the imperious, self-exalting mayor of NYC, Zohran Mamdani, actually be elected to office? Here’s how: By applying Cloward Piven–style strategies to illegal immigration, welfare expansion, and government spending, all of which have strained public institutions. The solution? The DSA marches in, promising to quell the purposeful chaos with policies foreign to the American ideal.

It’s sort of like a wife who wants a new deck and can’t get her husband to agree to build one. So she hosts a dance party on the deck for 200 people who whoop it up, grooving to the oldies. The deck collapses, and wifey scores a new deck.

When the economic deck inevitably collapses under the pile-on, the left — the catalyst that deliberately caused the collapse — will point to the wreckage and insist, “See? The old deck was never adequate. We need a completely new one.” And those who think what lies ahead is one big dance party seem to be all for it.

Rather than admitting that organized Democrat fraud and corruption have caused the stresses we’re enduring in immigration, public spending, and social services, Democratic Socialists propose expanding the government that caused those issues as the solution. The left has set the fire, and now arsonists are appointing themselves to put it out? The DSA — and the Democrats who quietly or openly enable them — are perfectly content to “fix” the very problems their own political movement created.

Whether one accepts or rejects the Cloward-Piven interpretation of modern politics, Americans should always ask the same question whenever a sweeping new government solution is proposed by those who believe America’s constitutional system should be fundamentally transformed: Did the crisis they claim they’re fixing arise naturally, or did political decisions help create the very emergency now being used to justify the system’s renovation?

Jeannie blogs at www.jeannieology.us.

Image: Zohran Mamdani. Credit: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.