Cloward-Piven at the border
Human Events ^ | 6/9/14 | John Hayward
Posted on 6/9/2014, 10:36:33 AM by Nachum
Back in the Sixties, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven came up with a great strategy for overloading and collapsing democratic welfare states, paving the way for socialist tyranny. Basically, the idea was to hit the system with a tidal wave of demands it couldn’t refuse, and couldn’t possibly fulfill. The Left would then insist that the moral argument for the system remained intact, so the only way to meet those impossible demands was to scrap every vestige of Constitutional restraint and republican self-government, instituting a totalitarian system that in theory would forcibly restructure society to promote “fairness” and give all those government dependents what they “deserve.” (In practice, of course, what you actually get is an iron-fisted dictatorship that cooks up reports to make itself look good, or simply tells the unhappy citizens to shut up and obey when things deteriorate to the point that no volume of phony reports can paper over the problems – say, when the glorious worker’s paradise of Venezuela runs out of tap water.)
Cloward and Piven were specifically interested in replacing welfare programs with a government-guaranteed annual income for everyone – an idea that still emerges from the more absurd quarters of the Left occasionally – but the basic idea of overloading the republican system and replacing it with centrally-planned tyranny can be applied in many different ways. Take a look at the humanitarian crisis on the southern border, which I wrote about two weeks ago. It has since burst onto the front pages with some astonishing stories, including leaked photos of illegal alien children – many of them 12 years old and younger – “warehoused” in overcrowded facilities, where there are growing concerns about sanitation and disease. CBS News in Houston writes of unaccompanied minors sleeping on plastic boards in a
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