There was a time in the mid-1960s when two left-wing Columbia University professors — Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — enjoyed a brief run of media celebrity by espousing a strategy for Democrats they believed could force the creation of an American welfare state based on a guaranteed annual income.
In a widely read article in the era's liberal flagship publication, Nation Magazine, the professors laid out their strategy as applied to the welfare state to illustrate the road to achieving all of the American left's ultimate economic, political and social goals:
"Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments.
"These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor.
"To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.
"By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level."
Put simply, Cloward-Piven said the way to force radical socialist reform of capitalistic America was to overwhelm the existing system by introducing so many participants that it collapses, thus creating political chaos, which Democrats then promise to end by enacting comprehensive and fundamental systemic changes.
If that formula — known ever since the Swinging Sixties as the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" (CPS) — sounds familiar despite its origins seven decades ago, it should, because Democrats are still using it. In fact, the four years of Joe Biden's titular presidency likely represent what amounted to the most sweeping application of CPS ever attempted.
Considered in this context, Biden's open border policy was pure CPS — removing every barrier to the entry of so many illegal immigrants coming into the country that Border Patrol and other immigration system personnel were reduced to little more than temporary escorts, housekeepers and travel agents.
Nobody knows with certainty the actual total of illegals who came into this country, but the figure of 11 million is almost certainly near the ballpark's home plate. Hundreds of thousands of these illegal aliens came in as "gotaways" — seen coming across the border and penetrating into the country but never being detained — as well as thousands whose names appear on terrorist watch lists and on the rolls of criminals convicted of murder, rape, theft and other serious crimes back home.
Not only did Biden's open border policy all but shut down the immigration system, the unregulated flood of illegal immigrants into major cities including New York and Chicago offered the additional benefit of threatening to overwhelm local law enforcement and human welfare systems.
But the border chaos was only the most prominent of Biden CPS applications. Biden took office in Jan. 2021 with the nation still reeling from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Biden imposed an authoritarian vaccination program to inoculate 200 million Americans, and included compulsory shots for millions of Americans, many of whom were at risk of losing their jobs for failing to do so. Public schools remained closed, public services constricted and local economies floundered.
Between Biden's $1.9 trillion American Relief Act and $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, the money supply was swamped with cheap money that drove up inflation to record levels. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars were lost to improper payments in pandemic-related special business aid and unemployment benefits, and, encouraged by official policies, millions of illegal immigrants became Social Security and Medicaid beneficiaries.
The added Medicaid beneficiaries have received little public notice, but the Washington Stand's Suzanne Dabney laid it out in succinct fashion in a recent column:
"What most people don’t realize is that there’s been a massive expansion of Medicaid since COVID. 'In the last five years, federal Medicaid spending has skyrocketed from $409 billion in 2019 to $618 billion in 2024,' House Freedom Caucus members warn in a new op-ed, 'a 51 percent increase. Despite being 60 years old, a third of Medicaid’s growth has occurred in those same five years. And in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicaid will cost more than $1 trillion annually, rivaling the size of Saudi Arabia’s current economy.'"
By enabling the addition of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to the Social Security rolls and extending Medicaid benefits to another estimated 1.3 million illegals, the bankruptcies of both programs are nearer than ever.
And just for the record, let's not forget how the left, empowered as never before by the Biden regime, engaged in the courtroom edition of CPS by mounting the unprecedented, and ultimately failed, attempt to entangle Donald Trump in litigation stemming from a series of bogus criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions.
The dozens of lawsuits filed since Trump's inauguration and the explosion of nationwide injunctions issued by mostly Biden and Obama District Court appointees is the second level of the left's courtroom CPS.
With reports of horrendous crimes committed by illegals against U.S. citizens going about their daily lives, inflation keeping eggs and other staples at record highs, continuing chaos at the border as more illegals raced to get across the border before the Nov. 2024 election, voters went to the polls and chose ... Donald Trump, who promised to stop the chaos, restore law and order, and restore economic sanity and prosperity.
Millions of working-class Americans, Hispanics and blacks who traditionally voted strongly for Democrats for generations went for Trump, in a potentially landmark shift in American politics that will influence elections for decades to come.
So does the fact that the electorate overwhelmingly rejected Democrats in 2024 mean that CPS failed? On the surface, that seems to be the obvious answer. And there has been a continuing academic debate in certain quarters since the 1970s on whether CPS "worked" as its authors predicted.
The view in this corner is that the numbers tell the deeper and most significant story: in a 2014 report on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, social welfare scholars Robert Rector and Rachel Scheffield pointed out:
"In his January 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson proclaimed, 'This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.' Since that time, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs (in constant 2012 dollars).
"Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all military wars in U.S. history since the American Revolution. Despite this mountain of spending, progress against poverty, at least as measured by the government, has been minimal."
The official poverty rate, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, was 14.7 percent in 2014. A decade later, Census pegged the rate at 11.1 percent. But total expenditures for the period 1965 to 2024 exploded 1,320 percent, adjusted for inflation even as the official poverty rate has remained in double figures for decades.
Clearly, trillions of tax dollars spent on failed welfare programs has not ended poverty. Ironically, a key fact in that regard was recognized by the authors of CPS in their original magazine piece, where they said their approach "is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive."
Aha! Trillions spent on welfare doesn't even begin to put trillions in the pockets of the poorest Americans. The reality is that, for the most part, those tax dollars enriched legions of civil servants, government consultants, politicians, public relations operators, academic "experts" and nonprofit activists.
Maybe the bottom line conclusion here is that neither CPS nor any other government welfare "reform" will ever eliminate poverty, because government simply isn't capable of achieving such an end.
Maybe Jesus knew something when He said:
"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[a] you did it to me.’"
And maybe that's why He also said: "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God what is God's."
The Cloward-Piven strategy has failed, but that doesn't mean Democrats have stopped applying it. That's another reason why you should become a PJ Media VIP member. At PJ Media, we bring you the truth about the left's plans and hopes, and about its propaganda, which dominates the mainstream media. Get 60% off if you use the promo code FIGHT!
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