Dynamique
03-30-2010, 10:24 PM
The Mad Tea Party
By Richard Kim
This article appeared in the April 12, 2010 edition of The
Nation.
March 25, 2010, The Nation
The Mad Tea Party (https://www.thenation.com/doc/20100412/kim)
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.
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."
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.
Like others on the right, Simpson sees Obama's election
itself as a machination of ACORN, which registered millions
of felons, illegal aliens and dead citizens to vote through
Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, which Cloward and Piven
championed and which Bill Clinton signed in 1993. (Voter
fraud seems to be Simpson's enduring preoccupation and the
subject of an early 2007 article on Cloward-Piven.) By the
logic of the Cloward-Piven strategy, he suggests, voter
registration efforts were aimed at corrupting democracy, not
expanding it. This argument depends on the denial of several
key realities: that changing demographics have altered the
balance of party power, that legally increasing the voting
rate of key constituencies is a common and legitimate
practice of both parties, and that the Republican Party
consistently fails to win over minorities because of the
policies it promotes. What Simpson and Beck want to cast
doubt on is that the democratic process could elect Obama, or
that democratic majorities would endorse the agenda Obama has
proposed. In the months before the 2008 election, Simpson
wrote, "It is not inconceivable that this presidential race
could be decided by fraudulent votes alone."
Beck and Simpson have played the tea party's Paul Reveres,
warning the masses of the Cloward-Piven assault. But nearly
the entire orbit of tea party luminaries have taken it up in
some way. In October 2008 the Washington Times ran an op-ed
by Robert Chandler called "The Cloward Piven Strategy," and
Stanley Kurtz wrote about it in National Review Online. Mark
Levin, author of the bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A
Conservative Manifesto, has discussed it on multiple
occasions on his radio program, as did Rush Limbaugh on the
March 4 broadcast of his show. In a January 13 interview,
Beck asked Sarah Palin if she had seen and believed in the
case he had been making on Cloward and Piven. Palin replied,
"I do. I do believe it.... It has to be purposeful what they
are doing. Otherwise--otherwise I would say, Glenn, that
there is no hope, that there are no solutions."
In February, Kyle Olson, a GOP hack who runs an ersatz
education nonprofit called the Education Action Group, posed
as a student and requested a videotaped interview with Piven,
which she gave in her home. Olson posted a portion of the
interview on BigGovernment.com, a website run by Andrew
Breitbart, who released the "prostitute and pimp" undercover
ACORN sting in 2009. Olson captures nothing so dramatic:
Piven lucidly discusses homeowner civil disobedience during
the Great Depression as a model for how foreclosed homeowners
today could refuse to leave their homes and thus create
pressure on banks to renegotiate mortgages--a strategy
advocated by Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and, yes, ACORN.
Suffice it to say, if Beck and crew believe half of this
crap, they belong in an asylum in the middle of Shutter
Island, where they can tend to their survival seeds and
sleuth out imagined conspiracies apart from the rest of the
human population. The danger, however, is that they will
maroon a sizable portion of the electorate there with them.
Since Obama's inauguration, references to the Cloward-Piven
strategy have popped up with increasing frequency in op-eds
and letters to the editor of local newspapers, including
those in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Snippets
of Simpson's tome or Beck's rants appear frequently in the
comments section of blogs and articles; a search for the term
"Cloward-Piven strategy" generated more than 255,000 Google
hits.
Why does the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory hold such
appeal? And what, if anything, does it accomplish? On one
level it's entertainment. It allows believers to tease out
the left's secrets and sinister patterns. Since none of the
evidence that supposedly confirms the existence of the
Cloward-Piven strategy is, in fact, secret, this proves
rather easy to do, and so the puzzle is both thrilling and
gratifying.
On another level, the theory is an adaptive response to the
tea party's fragmentation. As Jonathan Raban pointed out in
The New York Review of Books, the tea party is an uneasy
conclave of Ayn Rand secular libertarians and fundamentalist
Christian evangelicals; it contains birthers, Birchers,
racists, xenophobes, Ron Paulites, cold warriors, Zionists,
constitutionalists, vanilla Republicans looking for a high
and militia-style survivalists. Because the Cloward-Piven
strategy is so expansive, it allows tea party propagandists
to engage any one--or all--of the pet issues that incite
these various constituencies. For some, the left's "offensive
to promote illegal immigration" is "Cloward-Piven on
steroids." For others, it is the Cloward-Piven "advocates of
social change" who "used the Fed, which was complicit in the
scheme" to "engineer" the 2008 fiscal crisis. In his speech
at the tea party convention in Nashville, WorldNetDaily's
Joseph Farah notes that Obama was just 4 when the Cloward-
Piven strategy was written. "We think," Farah said. He paused
dramatically before adding, "Without the birth certificate we
really just don't know," as a sizable portion of the audience
broke into applause.
Racial and class resentments, however, are never far from the
surface, no matter which subject is slotted into the great
Cloward-Piven conspiracy machine. The word "radical," for
example, is almost always preceded by the word "black" when
it can be (George Wiley), but nobody is ever called a "white
radical" (Bill Ayers). Whenever grammatically possible--and
sometimes even when it is not--Cloward and Piven are
identified as "Columbia professors" and Obama as a "Harvard
graduate." (Beyond just heaping Nixonian scorn on elites, the
Cloward-Piven conspiracy credits the left with an almost
divine intelligence.)
And as of now, the Cloward-Piven strategy is most often used
to put two classes of people on the tea party's enemies list:
those who work for the Obama administration and those who
work to increase the political power of poor people of color.
(Doing both--as was the case with Van Jones--can be fatal.)
It is the latter target that is particularly appalling: here
is a so-called populist movement promulgating a master
narrative that holds poor people to blame for the world's
woes. The precise impact of this conspiracy theory and the
broader movement it incites on Obama's legislative agenda is,
as of now, unclear. But the toll it has taken on
organizations that advocate for poor people of color could
not be more stark. On the weekend the healthcare reform bill
cleared the House, tea party activists descended on
Washington to decry "the end of America"; their bitter pill
was soothed by front-page coverage of the end of something
else--ACORN announced it was on the verge of bankruptcy, the
victim of what CEO Bertha Lewis called "a series of well-
orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right-wing attacks."
Perhaps most critical, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory
pushes the tea party's kettle closer to a boil. In its
obsession with voter fraud and the potential illegitimacy of
the 2008 election--and the democratic process itself--the
conspiracy suggests a tit-for-tat strategy for victory: if
the left is going to cynically manipulate the system to
produce tyranny, then so will we. How? To begin, there's the
tried-and-true tactic of suppressing the poor minority vote--
which would next place Project Vote in the tea party's cross
hairs. But why stop there? Like every good conspiracy theory,
this one too is a call to arms.
_____________________________________________
Portside aims to provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.
Search the archives: portside.org/archive
By Richard Kim
This article appeared in the April 12, 2010 edition of The
Nation.
March 25, 2010, The Nation
The Mad Tea Party (https://www.thenation.com/doc/20100412/kim)
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.
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."
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.
Like others on the right, Simpson sees Obama's election
itself as a machination of ACORN, which registered millions
of felons, illegal aliens and dead citizens to vote through
Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, which Cloward and Piven
championed and which Bill Clinton signed in 1993. (Voter
fraud seems to be Simpson's enduring preoccupation and the
subject of an early 2007 article on Cloward-Piven.) By the
logic of the Cloward-Piven strategy, he suggests, voter
registration efforts were aimed at corrupting democracy, not
expanding it. This argument depends on the denial of several
key realities: that changing demographics have altered the
balance of party power, that legally increasing the voting
rate of key constituencies is a common and legitimate
practice of both parties, and that the Republican Party
consistently fails to win over minorities because of the
policies it promotes. What Simpson and Beck want to cast
doubt on is that the democratic process could elect Obama, or
that democratic majorities would endorse the agenda Obama has
proposed. In the months before the 2008 election, Simpson
wrote, "It is not inconceivable that this presidential race
could be decided by fraudulent votes alone."
Beck and Simpson have played the tea party's Paul Reveres,
warning the masses of the Cloward-Piven assault. But nearly
the entire orbit of tea party luminaries have taken it up in
some way. In October 2008 the Washington Times ran an op-ed
by Robert Chandler called "The Cloward Piven Strategy," and
Stanley Kurtz wrote about it in National Review Online. Mark
Levin, author of the bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A
Conservative Manifesto, has discussed it on multiple
occasions on his radio program, as did Rush Limbaugh on the
March 4 broadcast of his show. In a January 13 interview,
Beck asked Sarah Palin if she had seen and believed in the
case he had been making on Cloward and Piven. Palin replied,
"I do. I do believe it.... It has to be purposeful what they
are doing. Otherwise--otherwise I would say, Glenn, that
there is no hope, that there are no solutions."
In February, Kyle Olson, a GOP hack who runs an ersatz
education nonprofit called the Education Action Group, posed
as a student and requested a videotaped interview with Piven,
which she gave in her home. Olson posted a portion of the
interview on BigGovernment.com, a website run by Andrew
Breitbart, who released the "prostitute and pimp" undercover
ACORN sting in 2009. Olson captures nothing so dramatic:
Piven lucidly discusses homeowner civil disobedience during
the Great Depression as a model for how foreclosed homeowners
today could refuse to leave their homes and thus create
pressure on banks to renegotiate mortgages--a strategy
advocated by Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and, yes, ACORN.
Suffice it to say, if Beck and crew believe half of this
crap, they belong in an asylum in the middle of Shutter
Island, where they can tend to their survival seeds and
sleuth out imagined conspiracies apart from the rest of the
human population. The danger, however, is that they will
maroon a sizable portion of the electorate there with them.
Since Obama's inauguration, references to the Cloward-Piven
strategy have popped up with increasing frequency in op-eds
and letters to the editor of local newspapers, including
those in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Snippets
of Simpson's tome or Beck's rants appear frequently in the
comments section of blogs and articles; a search for the term
"Cloward-Piven strategy" generated more than 255,000 Google
hits.
Why does the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory hold such
appeal? And what, if anything, does it accomplish? On one
level it's entertainment. It allows believers to tease out
the left's secrets and sinister patterns. Since none of the
evidence that supposedly confirms the existence of the
Cloward-Piven strategy is, in fact, secret, this proves
rather easy to do, and so the puzzle is both thrilling and
gratifying.
On another level, the theory is an adaptive response to the
tea party's fragmentation. As Jonathan Raban pointed out in
The New York Review of Books, the tea party is an uneasy
conclave of Ayn Rand secular libertarians and fundamentalist
Christian evangelicals; it contains birthers, Birchers,
racists, xenophobes, Ron Paulites, cold warriors, Zionists,
constitutionalists, vanilla Republicans looking for a high
and militia-style survivalists. Because the Cloward-Piven
strategy is so expansive, it allows tea party propagandists
to engage any one--or all--of the pet issues that incite
these various constituencies. For some, the left's "offensive
to promote illegal immigration" is "Cloward-Piven on
steroids." For others, it is the Cloward-Piven "advocates of
social change" who "used the Fed, which was complicit in the
scheme" to "engineer" the 2008 fiscal crisis. In his speech
at the tea party convention in Nashville, WorldNetDaily's
Joseph Farah notes that Obama was just 4 when the Cloward-
Piven strategy was written. "We think," Farah said. He paused
dramatically before adding, "Without the birth certificate we
really just don't know," as a sizable portion of the audience
broke into applause.
Racial and class resentments, however, are never far from the
surface, no matter which subject is slotted into the great
Cloward-Piven conspiracy machine. The word "radical," for
example, is almost always preceded by the word "black" when
it can be (George Wiley), but nobody is ever called a "white
radical" (Bill Ayers). Whenever grammatically possible--and
sometimes even when it is not--Cloward and Piven are
identified as "Columbia professors" and Obama as a "Harvard
graduate." (Beyond just heaping Nixonian scorn on elites, the
Cloward-Piven conspiracy credits the left with an almost
divine intelligence.)
And as of now, the Cloward-Piven strategy is most often used
to put two classes of people on the tea party's enemies list:
those who work for the Obama administration and those who
work to increase the political power of poor people of color.
(Doing both--as was the case with Van Jones--can be fatal.)
It is the latter target that is particularly appalling: here
is a so-called populist movement promulgating a master
narrative that holds poor people to blame for the world's
woes. The precise impact of this conspiracy theory and the
broader movement it incites on Obama's legislative agenda is,
as of now, unclear. But the toll it has taken on
organizations that advocate for poor people of color could
not be more stark. On the weekend the healthcare reform bill
cleared the House, tea party activists descended on
Washington to decry "the end of America"; their bitter pill
was soothed by front-page coverage of the end of something
else--ACORN announced it was on the verge of bankruptcy, the
victim of what CEO Bertha Lewis called "a series of well-
orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right-wing attacks."
Perhaps most critical, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory
pushes the tea party's kettle closer to a boil. In its
obsession with voter fraud and the potential illegitimacy of
the 2008 election--and the democratic process itself--the
conspiracy suggests a tit-for-tat strategy for victory: if
the left is going to cynically manipulate the system to
produce tyranny, then so will we. How? To begin, there's the
tried-and-true tactic of suppressing the poor minority vote--
which would next place Project Vote in the tea party's cross
hairs. But why stop there? Like every good conspiracy theory,
this one too is a call to arms.
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