THE NATION: The Mad Tea Party

[kpete]

The Mad Tea Party
By Richard Kim

This article appeared in the April 12, 2010 edition of The Nation.
March 25, 2010


DREW FRIEDMAN

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.

...................

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.


the rest:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100412/kim

[hedgehog]

1. I can't tell the players without a scorecard - who is that caricatured as the Cheshire Cat?

[Flubadubya]

3. I would say Limbaugh...

but others may think otherwise. :shrug:

[CommonSensePLZ]

5. Or maybe Lou Dobbs?

[Fresh_Start]

2. their inability for any self-examination is remarkable

"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."

You mean like the daily terrorist color warnings? and WMD? etc

[DCKit]

8. The Shock Doctrine....

But they had to go and make up their own term for it. Pity they used all them big words, 'cause their base can't read 'em.

[srf Rantz]

4. nothing new there

the exact same strategy has been employed by the right for nearly a century. in particular in Latin America and throughout the developing world to suppress any legitimate democratic or socialist movements.
we've seen this clearly over and over. with conclusive proof to back it up. see the article on the RW death squads anniversary of Oscar Romero's assasination here: http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fu

in fact I submit they are doing it here and now in this country and using misdirection via Beck and his co-conspiracy theorists to point the blame on the largely imaginary "leftist" takeover.

but I guess that makes me as nutty as those on the right buying the Cloward-Piven strategy of the left.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

6. You're not nutty --

Projection is one of the reich wing's favorite .... well, 'strategy' isn't the right word, because accusing us of doing the dirty, reprehensible shit that they actually do is just the automatic reaction of twisted diseased minds.

[Blue_Tires]

7. ttt