The Straight Dope on the "Cloward-Piven Strategy"

[BrainGlutton]

Back in September I started a thread wondering what was the source of various RW rants I had read on other boards talking about the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” (a little-noticed radical idea presented in an article in The Nation in 1966 to overwhelm the welfare rolls and provoke demand for a “guaranteed national income”) and somehow relating it to the Obama Admin. Where was this nonsense coming from?!

Now I know. Richard Kim writes in The Nation:

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).

<snip>
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.

Nevertheless–history and facts be damned–it is Horowitz’s caricature of Cloward-Piven that is now the Rosetta stone of American politics for the tea party’s self-styled intellectuals. Glenn Beck has brought up Cloward and Piven on at least twenty-eight episodes of his show over the past year. Beck is sometimes aided by a blackboard on which he has diagramed something called “The Tree of Revolution,” which links Che Guevara, SEIU and ACORN’s Wade Rathke to Saul Alinsky, the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope, Bill Ayers and, perhaps most improbably, to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. In the center of the tree’s arching trunk, above SDS and Woodrow Wilson (!?) but below Barack Obama, who adorns the tree’s crown, Beck has scrawled “Cloward & Piven.”

Well, Horowitz is always good for inventing some entertaining crankery, and Beck for propagating it. But how can so many RWs (apparently) actually take this seriously? Or are they just pretending to? I mean, this makes the Socialist Muslim Antichrist thing look rational by comparison.

[BrainGlutton]

Here’s Horowitz’ page on it. And it links to this page, asserting that everything from CRA to the Obama stimulus package is a deliberate attempt to crash the American economy.

[Kolga]

I don’t understand this statement at all. Liberals/progressives/Dems/Obama want to deliberately crash the economy, destroy America, end the glorious experiment of democracy…for what purpose? What’s the end goal of all that destruction?

[BrainGlutton]

@Kolga

I don’t understand this statement at all. Liberals/progressives/Dems/Obama want to deliberately crash the economy, destroy America, end the glorious experiment of democracy…for what purpose? What’s the end goal of all that destruction?

Socialism. Ask any Trotskyist.

[Kolga]

So, there’s an orchestrated conspiracy between libs/progs/Dems/Obama to create a socialist society in America? An organized decades-long conspiracy - involving people who can’t keep it a secret that the current President likes fatty food too much and occasionally smokes a cigarette.

Yea, I can totally see that

[foolsguinea]

It’s silly. It’s no secret that some GOP Congressmen in the 1990’s adhered to a “Starve the Beast” theory that bankrupting the state would end welfare & socialism. Now some daft conspiracy theorists are claiming that massive economic shock will do the opposite?

It’s the conservatives & neoconservatives that have held power since 1980 & wrecked the economy, while throwing people off welfare rolls. You can’t blame progressives for things over which we had no power.

The socialists of the mid-1900’s (FDR, Truman, Eisenhower) rebuilt this country & grew the economy. Then we went back to the conservatives; things have been falling apart slowly since.

[Der_Trihs]

@foolsguinea

It’s silly. It’s no secret that some GOP Congressmen in the 1990’s adhered to a “Starve the Beast” theory that bankrupting the state would end welfare & socialism. Now some daft conspiracy theorists are claiming that massive economic shock will do the opposite?

It’s the conservatives & neoconservatives that have held power since 1980 & wrecked the economy, while throwing people off welfare rolls. You can’t blame progressives for things over which we had no power.

It seems like an example of projection to me. The far Right wants to crash the country to destroy the Ultimate Evil of socialism, so they project the same kind of behavior onto their opponents. Except unlike the “Starve the Beast” right, what passes for the left in this country has shown no such plans. So, they must be doing it secretly!

[foolsguinea]

I’m not sure it’s projection so much as the right hand not knowing what the [del]left[/del] other right hand is doing. There’s a certain sort of person who thinks that de-socialization will be good for the economy, who voted GOP but never noticed or never understood what Starve the Beast would actually do to the economy. When collapsing welfare & slowing the growth of government spending (thus shrinking spending relative to the economy) prove to be bad for growth, that’s unthinkable! Then people start talking about a new New Deal, so, well, then, maybe this fits together somehow, but at least if our GOP supporters make the claim that the New Dealers are trying to wreck the economy then the swing voters won’t follow the socialistic road.

I suspect that it’s a mix of two kinds of voices: a) those honestly trying to make sense of events who have uncritically bought the line that free-markets are more pro-growth than dirigisme, socialism, & even the New Deal; & b) the same old sort of frauds who promulgated that unhistorical jive in the first place.

[Lumpy]

If Wiki’s article on the subject is an accurate description, then it appears to me that what Cloward and Piven were trying to do was force the Democratic coalition into recognizing that poverty wasn’t an aberration that could be fixed by band-aid solutions- a message that wouldn’t sit well with the Dems’ middle class base.

To hear the Republicans today tell it, it was simply part two of a long-term plan: trick mainstream American society in accepting a welfare state, then use that foot in the door to tear down and destroy the bourgois society foolish enough to allow it. It sounds almost like a latter-day Protocols: push for “reforms” that are deliberately intended to destroy society

[foolsguinea]

What’s striking to me about that Wikipedia entry on Cloward & Piven is that it seems like it really would not work. Granted, I’m from a later, non-boom era & a conservative part of the country, but my experience of politicians is that they’d just cut rolls way way back.

[BrainGlutton]

@foolsguinea

What’s striking to me about that Wikipedia entry on Cloward & Piven is that it seems like it really would not work. Granted, I’m from a later, non-boom era & a conservative part of the country, but my experience of politicians is that they’d just cut rolls way way back.

I guess it was the '60s and you had to be there.

[Sam_Stone]

First a disclaimer: I’m not personally supporting this, but I can give you some examples where this could potentially be happening in the health care plan.

The Cloward-Piven strategy has come to mean something less than the utter collapse of society, to be rebuilt on socialist lines. I’ve seen it used to refer to any scheme to enact change through the back door by manipulating legislation to force a crisis.

Here’s the conspiracy theory in the health care plan: It appears that the individual mandate requirement is flawed for several reasons. For one, the legislation appears to make it impossible to actually punish anyone who doesn’t pay their fine for not carrying health insurance. This seems tailor-made to result in a lot of people not paying their fees, which could turn into a giant mess a la the immigration problem. What do you do when 20 million people are delinquent in payments? Do you go back and arrest them all? Confiscate their incomes? Or does the problem become so big that you simply can’t do it?

The second and related problem is that it appears that the penalties for non-compliance are much smaller than the economic benefit of non-compliance. If insurance costs you $5,000 per year, and the penalty for not having it is $695, and if the no pre-existing conditions clause means you can’t be refused insurance no matter when you demand it, then it looks like the system has been intentionally set up to be unstable.

A bigger problem is that there also appears to be a huge imbalance between employer subsidies and personal subsidies. So big that there will be great incentive for workers with employer-sponsored plans to renegotiate for higher salaries in lieu of health care benefits, then use part of the money to buy insurance from the health exchanges and pocket the rest.

If these things are all true, then the result would that the exchanges would be more expensive per person because the pool will have higher risk than it would if the healthy didn’t sit out and pay their penalties, and the government’s cost for subsidies will be much larger than anticipated because of the flood of people out of the relatively unsubsidized employer insurance market into the heavily subsidized health exchanges.

The result would be either a complete fiscal meltdown, or the government would have to heavily fund the exchanges and raise taxes much higher to pay for it.

The end result: Everyone winds up in the health exchange, which are almost completely government funded. Everyone pays higher tax to maintain the program. And voila, you have single payer health care, with the insurance companies reduced to nothing more than public utility status - they become the administrators of the program on behalf of the government.

So the Cloward-Piven strategy would be this: Because you can’t get the country to agree to single payer, you put together a plan that is more palatable, but hidden inside it are imbalances that cause it to collapse into a de-facto single payer system anyway.

Like I said, I don’t know that I buy this myself. I generally believe the maxim that you’re more likely to be correct by assuming idiocy instead of malice.

[foolsguinea]

@Sam_Stone

What do you do when 20 million people are delinquent in payments? Do you go back and arrest them all? Confiscate their incomes? Or does the problem become so big that you simply can’t do it?

Audit their taxes? The fine should be a tax anyway.

The second and related problem is that it appears that the penalties for non-compliance are much smaller than the economic benefit of non-compliance. If insurance costs you $5,000 per year, and the penalty for not having it is $695, and if the no pre-existing conditions clause means you can’t be refused insurance no matter when you demand it, then it looks like the system has been intentionally set up to be unstable.

It’s a weird mismatch.

A bigger problem is that there also appears to be a huge imbalance between employer subsidies and personal subsidies. So big that there will be great incentive for workers with employer-sponsored plans to renegotiate for higher salaries in lieu of health care benefits, then use part of the money to buy insurance from the health exchanges and pocket the rest.

I don’t know about this part, but if true it could lead to delinking health insurance from employment, which is good on libertarian grounds, right?

The result would be either a complete fiscal meltdown, or the government would have to heavily fund the exchanges and raise taxes much higher to pay for it.

I think it more likely that the system is just awkwardly designed & will be fixed later. The most radical likely result would be backwards rather than forwards; chucking the whole kludge. But it’s probably more likely that the fines will be increased, in 30 years or so.

[sleeping]

@Sam_Stone

So the Cloward-Piven strategy would be this: Because you can’t get the country to agree to single payer, you put together a plan that is more palatable, but hidden inside it are imbalances that cause it to collapse into a de-facto single payer system anyway.

…right. So, that’s why single payer advocates were opposed to the Obama plan? And why Obama supported a public option plan that combined public and private systems, only to ditch it later in favor of mandated private healthcare coverage after the insurance lobby and pharma bribed most of the Dems? And why many progressives couldn’t tolerate the amount of compromise involved and preferred that the bill be rejected?

Even if you were to impute malice where idiocy would suffice, the “Cloward-Piven strategy” on healthcare reform would be too crazy for words.

(Also, 60% of Americans support a Medicare-for-all plan, with funding from increased payroll deductions. Now, I suppose that doesn’t amount to total agreement, but it certainly is a clear majority.)

The general idea of exploiting crises–or even orchestrating them–is not a new one. This is just one more case of conservative paranoia and fearmongering–and a pathetic one at that.

[Voyager]

If the mess we just saw was a coordinated plot, all the players deserve Oscars. We can add Anthem Blue Cross to the mix, because if they hadn’t pushed a tone deaf > 30% rate hike, it may never have passed. And add the GOP, for not compromising to produce something that they would call feasible.

I’m sure the meltdown helped HCR to pass, since it became clear how risky the system was for workers. So, add Bush and Greenspan into the plot.

[sleeping]

One more observation: While the basic idea of a conspiracy gained prominence because of the usual penchant for fear and need for scapegoating, there might be a method to this madness.

Conservatives didn’t have much of a narrative to explain the financial crisis and all the major factors that played a role in it. Spreading this story allows them to blame liberals for it. And since the government needs to engage in major stimulus spending in order to get the country out of this hole (while also regulating the banks and controlling the cost of healthcare), they have the convenience of an apparent confirmation in the Obama administration’s actions.

Notice how they’re not talking about the cost of two wars and the Bush tax cuts on the deficit, for example.

[BrainGlutton]

@Sam_Stone

The Cloward-Piven strategy has come to mean something less than the utter collapse of society, to be rebuilt on socialist lines.

N.B.: It meant something less than that originally, before Horowitz et al. started inflating it into an all-encompassing conspiracy theory.

[BrainGlutton]

Also from the Nation article linked in the OP:

Beck’s tree, however, is derivative of and pales in comparison with the flow chart created by Jim Simpson, a self-described businessman and former George H.W. Bush White House budget analyst and the leading proponent of the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory. Cribbing from Horowitz, but adding his own very special embellishments, Simpson has penned an 18,000-word, six-part exposé of the “Cloward-Piven strategy,” which can be found on the websites Americanthinker.com and Americandaughter.com. I have read it so you don’t have to. The central innovations of this wild and woolly compilation of right-wing myths, published in installments during the summer and fall of 2008, are to attribute nearly every past, present and future crisis to Cloward and Piven and to link them to Obama’s political past and agenda. Among the schemes Simpson credits to the Cloward-Piven strategy are healthcare reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, cap and trade, immigration reform, hate crimes legislation and public financing of elections. For Simpson, the Cloward-Piven strategy is vast, vast–“a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.” And beyond: somehow, Gorbachev’s Crimean dacha is implicated, as are Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

Most integral to Simpson’s theory, however, and where his rather impressive skills as a collagist descend into the orthodoxy of Fox News, is ACORN, which he says has been “the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear” since 1970. In what is by now a familiar right-wing story line, ACORN is responsible for the global economic crisis. By using the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act–itself a conspiratorial response to the bogus crisis of housing discrimination–ACORN enrolled masses of low-income people in subprime mortgages, creating a housing bubble that caused stock markets around the world to crash, paving the way for bank nationalization and socialism via the bailout and the stimulus. Whew! There are, of course, more than a few pages missing in this whodunit–for instance, that it was ACORN that tried to warn Congress about risky and predatory lenders; that it was too-big-to-fail banks and complex financial instruments that spread the contagion across the worldwide economy; and that in fact the banks have not been nationalized. [For a debunking of this myth, see Peter Dreier and John Atlas’s “The GOP’s Blame-ACORN Game,” October 22, 2008.]

If Simpson’s chain of events is not particularly original, his theory of intentionality is: according to him, the left, guided by the Cloward-Piven strategy, was fully aware that subprime mortgages would produce a calamitous financial bubble; it supported subprime lending not to help minorities become homeowners but to sabotage capitalism from the inside. “The failure is deliberate,” he writes repeatedly in italics.