On the Border with Cloward and Piven

The left's strategy to ruin America by relying on its morality.

Most of us believe in the standard model of history - that is, we believe that what we learned in our history books is more or less accurate, and pretty much reflects reality.

There are those who disagree.  They think that history as we've learned it is mostly a lie, and that the true reality of what goes in is controlled by hidden dark forces - the Bilderbergs, the "1%", the Jewish ZOG, even by lizardlike space aliens dressed up in human costumes.  Most of the time, the rest of us dismiss these folks as kooks and slowly back away when we encounter them.

Every now and again, however, something happens that makes us wonder if there may not be something to these conspiracy theories after all.  Which brings us to the disaster at America's borders, and the legendary duo of Cloward-Piven.

How To Destroy a Moral Culture

Even the doctrinarily-leftist mainstream media, which is all in favor of America being overrun by ignorant socialists who'll work as the elite's nannies and gardeners for pennies, haven't been able to conceal the historic collapse of our ability to secure our southern border.  We have had a serious problem with illegal immigration for a long time, but never before have we had tens of thousands of filthy, starving, diseased, unaccompanied minors - and equally misbegotten but far less sympathetic teenage gangsters - pouring across what ought by right and law to have been a heavily-defended high and solid wall.  Never before have the armed and uniformed officials of these United States exercised their power, not to enforce the law and send the invaders back, but to squash American citizens protesting the theft of their birthright.

Of course, the bedraggledness of these hordes raises a problem: Are Americans really willing to boot children back into the mouths of coyotes, of both the human and animal varieties?  Can Americans live with themselves if they do this?

Thus traditional and conservative Americans are presented with an impossible dilemma.

They can harden their hearts and do what needs to be done to expel the invasion, knowing that their actions will directly lead to the deaths of many thousands of innocent children and destroying forever America's self-image as "the last best hope of mankind."

Or, they can listen to the supposedly moral appeals of the left and accept these children into our country - and then more, and more, and more of them, until it isn't our country anymore but theirs, resembling in all particulars the hellholes from which they fled.  Thus America will no longer be "the last best hope of mankind" or even of whoever is living here.  Either way, we lose.

What sort of devils could have designed such a conundrum?  Actually, two very specific ones: Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

The Road to Socialism

Cloward and Piven were 60s liberals from central casting, devoutly believing in all things governmental and denying the very concept of individual responsibility.  Their article which laid out what has come to be known as "the Cloward-Piven strategy", written in 1966, targeted the major issue of the time - poverty and LBJ's Great Society.

Their great insight was actually one that Republicans would agree with: that the nation cannot, in fact, afford to cash the welfare check LBJ wrote to America's poor, under anything resembling our then-current economic or tax systems.  They argued that full-on redistributive socialism was the only way to end poverty, but that the American people then voting were not willing to support such a system.

So, they suggested, leftist activists and community organizers should exert all their efforts to making every single poor person apply for every last government benefit to which they might plausibly be entitled.  The Great Society safety net was supported by most voters and would never be significantly reduced because it was too easy to tar would-be cutters as "hard-hearted" - but if it was applied to each and every poor person, cities and states would be bankrupted.  Then the Federal government would be forced to step in, nationalize welfare, heavily tax the rich, and ergo!  Redistributive socialist equality!

History proved Cloward and Piven half right - many local governments were bankrupted by social programs, most notably New York City in the 1970s and Detroit more recently.  To some extent, the welfare function has indeed been nationalized.

It turned out that Americans were not committed enough to the idea of themselves as generous to the poor as to be willing to be impoverished themselves.  Democrat Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill in the mid-1990s that enormously reduced the cost of welfare programs by eliminating it as a "right."  Until the Obama administratively gutted this reform a few years ago, the system had a financial safety valve - no individual poor person could collect benefits for more than a few years.  Cloward-Piven tactics failed regarding welfare socialism, because the American voters were more hard-nosed than Cloward and Piven expected.

The Compliment and the Contrast

In a way, the very idea of the Cloward-Piven strategy is a historic compliment to the greatness of America, because it can only work in a nation with an enormously strong and generous moral tradition.  Much as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's protests only worked because most Americans really did believe in individual liberty and human equality, Cloward and Piven rested their confidence in the concern that Americans have for the poor.

Suppose Dr. King's tactics of protest had been tried by the Jews of Nazi Germany.  They were equally plausible on paper.  German Jews were, or had been, citizens, with the same rights of any other citizen.

But unlike the American people and government, Hitler's Nazis had no morals whatsoever.  They would have gleefully machine-gunned the unarmed protesting Jews, happily enjoying the convenience of self-identified targets.  Which is why the Jews never tried that.

Similarly, today's invading hordes know better than to try the human-wave approach with countries such as China.  The contrast between North Korea and China is greater than between the U.S. and Mexico, yet there aren't millions of illegal North Korean immigrants in China, because China spares no effort to make sure there aren't.  China has let it be known that it has no sympathy for even the most Bambi-eyed of starving children, thus it isn't forced to look at them.

Americans view themselves as better than that.  We even quote poems about "The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

The fact is, as any visitor to an American inner city or all too many rural communities can testify, we have quite as much wretched refuse as we have any use for.  We don't need any more.  While we can afford to tolerate some, there comes a point where - just as Cloward and Piven hoped in the case of the welfare state - the system overloads and collapses, leading to a dictatorship of some kind.

Out, Out!

Thus we return to the conspiracy theory.  Is our undefended border the result of Obama applying Cloward-Piven tactics to overwhelm American citizens, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry seems to think?  Or is it just another example of the most grotesquely incompetent administration in living memory?

We don't know.  Almost certainly we never will know - although like the proverbial stopped clock, even the most incompetent administration ought to get things right every now and again if only by accident.  Jimmy Carter, for instance, deregulated trucking and airlines, which have led to enormously cheaper fares and shipping rates for all Americans ever since.  Has Obama accomplished even one visible improvement, in anything?

So let's assume for the sake of argument, that Obama has indeed set up this human avalanche with malice aforethought, and that we are thus caught in the Cloward-Piven trap laid for us over many decades of hard, determined, evil work.  Are we therefore doomed?

Actually, there is a solution, just as there was and is a solution to the excessive burden of welfare programs, founded in the general goodness of America that the left wants forgotten and buried in the deepest pit.

Americans generally have no desire to conquer other countries.  Though historically we have often dominated economically, we've been the lightest-weighted imperial power in all of human history.  But when some other country is doing something sufficiently evil, we set aside our general goodwill to all men, and fight with vigor.

Did machine-gunning the Kaiser's men or bombing Hitler and Tojo's cities make us less American?  No - after expansionist Germany and imperial Japan were finally defeated, we didn't incorporate them into our Empire, merely into our network of allies.  We even brought vast improvements to the lives of the nationals living in them.  We protected and defended America - using harsh and violent tactics, yes, but only for as long as absolutely necessary, and for the ultimate betterment of the entire world.

The end result?  Our fathers who fought in the World Wars made America if anything even more American than it was before.

And it's a good thing, too - because if we hadn't - ultimately, there would be no America, it having been conquered by Hitler.  The same is true today with the border invasion.

So just as America proved Cloward and Piven wrong when it came to economy, budget, and soul-destroying socialist welfarism, we need to prove them wrong yet again by showing there are limits to American generosity and open arms.  We must reject the teeming hordes of illegals, and turn back many if not all of the ones we already have.

If we'd screwed our courage to the sticking-place thirty years ago, or twenty, or ten, or even five, it wouldn't be nearly so bad.  Even now, it's still not, quite, too late.

Petrarch is a contributing editor for Scragged.  Read other Scragged.com articles by Petrarch or other articles on Immigration.
Reader Comments

Petrarch, great job as usual! Haven't you seen House of Cards? They make us to believe they're bumbling idiots while they quietly steal everything they want. I'm all for turning Bambi back into the forest to fend for herself. I don't have much, but what I have I worked extremely hard for. Now I'm in my 50's and I can't stand to see the world I grew up in turn to shit on my watch. What can we do???

July 8, 2014 12:14 PM

I've seen the original British House of Cards and it was brilliant. Honestly I haven't the heart to see the same thing set in my own country, it hits just a little bit too close to home.

But we've addressed this question many times in the pages of Scragged - How much of what is going on is clueless lazy incompetence? And how much is highly intelligent, carefully planned evil? The pendulum swings from day to day.

July 8, 2014 12:31 PM

Well written and sobering article. HOWEVER, I'm not sure I agree with this statement:


The story books are full of Nazi party members/voters who watched in dismay at what transitioned from academic debate and rhetoric to open violence. Nazism took off not because there were many bad German people but because good people did nothing.

So why didn't the Jews organize and protest like 60s blacks did? Probably because of wealth. 60s blacks were mostly poor or middle class. Marching and protesting is a poor man's game. The wealthy are busy running businesses. Rich people are, first and foremost, afraid of unrest and instability in whatever political form it shows. German Jews in the 20s and 30s were one of the wealthiest classes of German citizenry.

July 8, 2014 2:36 PM

A few general items:

(1) I suspect very little is "incompetence." Incompetence is for the mouthpieces (i.e., Carney, Harf, etc.) who are made to defend nonsense with a straight face in public day after day. Yes, they are true believers; but that greases the pathway for the foot to find its way into a mouth. Incompetence is a handy shield to deflect charges of outright treason.

(2) Cloward-Piven may have been a plan to "end poverty," but I also suspect that even they know it's nonsense. Marxism itself is nothing more than philosophical and theological (such as it is) cover for grabbing power and wealth. The Cloward-Piven strategy will not solve poverty, but spread it everywhere, and everyone knows that. It's just been too drastic a move to use in public until now.

(3) There is now officially no difference between Middle Eastern terrorists and leftist Democrats, for each is completely and utterly shameless in its use of children as human shields.

(4) Not only is the invasion at the southern border:
a) a C-P component;
b) a push for amnesty/"reform";
c) a Democrat voter registration drive;
d) a sop to labor unions and chamber-of-commerce types;
e) the importation of third world poverty and destitution that will require government support perpetually;
but it's also *explicity* the de-whiting of America - or, put another way, it's a thumb in the eye of Middle America, the part that makes the country work. It's a middle finger to those who want to live amongst persons as much like themselves, and to those who understood that Enoch Powell was right. As much as anything else - and they are all pure evil and without doubt treasonous - it is simply a big "screw you" to anyone who didn't buy the "diversity" (read: divide and rule) nonsense, who understands that the people who live in horrible places are the ones who made them that way. "White" is an insult these days. Work, success, and prosperity are said to be evil things, and this will put an end to it by overwhelming and outnumbering those - of all colors and types - who strive for it and believe in it.

July 8, 2014 2:43 PM

It should be noted that it was George W. Bush that signed the bill that made it more difficult to deport minors.

July 8, 2014 4:04 PM

And the wall came tumbling down, that's exactly what is going on in our country. obama acts as if nothing is going on and actually encourages the illegals coming into the country. The media totally ignores it or when they do say something about it it is so plain vanilla that one would think that they are all really only coming to a "Cinco de Mayo" party. Between the media, obama and a congress that is an absolute joke we are getting what we deserve. For one thing the American people must wake up and boycott every TV station, newspaper and magazine that does not return to the watchdogs that they are suppose to be. They should make every politician uncomfortable with his/her vote to the point that they are scared to vote against what the American people want. A really far out possible solution would be for every person to vote electronically on issues and disband congress to a very large degree. With the technology that we have today the masters in DC can be neutered. I told you that my solution was off the Richter Scale.

July 8, 2014 11:33 PM

I have been preaching Cloward-Piven for over 10 years, it is good to see someone pick up the mantle. You can not raise a nation by reducing it's population to it's lowest common denominator - proven throughout history, repeatedly. The conniving elitists don't care, or care about the poor. LBJ wanted indentured voters, which he got with the help of prog Dung Beetles. His quote: “I’ll have them n****rs voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.”

FYI, The child trafficking act that Geo W. signed is being grossly abused and misused by Obama, like everything else he does (intentionally). The man doesn't have an honest bone in him. He will lie when the truth suits him better. I think it's a game with him - sociopathic smirks give him away.

Marx and Lenin knew that they would never suffer the fate of their subjects, just as our political elitists-pirates feel they will never suffer. Mao said, "all power comes from the barrel of a gun". Washington has armed itself with over 300 gun-toting agencies with enforcement authority. The Dept of Education has SWAT teams. And, the silent-majority will leave the resistance to the "crazy preppers". After it is far too late.

Wake up America.

October 3, 2014 11:17 AM
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