2 June 2026
Resolved - Cloward-Piven strategy?
The winner of this week’s poll was the Cloward-Piven strategy. If you want to read more about that strategy, you can do so here, here, and here. But the TL;DR is this: In 1966, two Columbia sociology professors—Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven (a married couple, btw)—proposed a strategy for collapsing the existing welfare system by overloading it with recipients, forcing the Democrats (then in power) to implement a federal basic income. This was different from today’s Universal Basic Income only in that it was means-tested.
Organizations were founded to try to further this objective, signing up millions for welfare and agitating for change. But ultimately the revolution that Cloward and Piven hoped for failed to materialize, as planned, in the 1970s. Ironically, though, it does seem to have splintered the Democrats’ coalition exactly as they predicted:
[It would] deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor.
Whites—both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class—would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few...would probably support the movement.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cloward and Piven that the Democrats might bleed voters instead of rallying behind their desired revolution. For several decades, the strategy seemed to have been cast into the dustbin of history.
But Cloward-Piven has gained attention again in recent years. Some believe that the importation of immigrants (chiefly illegal)—who will then strain government safety nets to the breaking point—is a new attempt to implement Cloward-Piven’s now-even-more-unabashedly-socialist revolution.
What do you think? Is the Cloward-Piven strategy actually happening now? Can anything be done to stop it if it is?
What do you think about this issue?
Hard to tell if the Biden Democrat Administration's patently unlawful opening of the border to admit perhaps 30 million illegal aliens was an effort to implement Cloward-Piven or something even darker. But it was clearly treasonous and deeply disruptive of law and custom. Even without Biden's treason, the social safety nets of social security, Medicare and Medicaid have been increasingly stressed by a lazy and licentious liberal mindset that eschews all hint of personal responsibility and rewards indolence and sloth. (Why, pray tell, must hard working American taxpayers fund SNAP benefits for cake, candy, cookies and cola, that only make the poor, fatter, sicker and more somnolent than they already are?). Then there is the vast network of leftist pols and NGOs that fleece or allow the system to be fleeced with all sort of fraud and abuse, from phony 'learing centers" to hospices for healthy people. Just ending the fraud would probably return these programs to fiscal health, were it not for the tidal wave of new, third world gate crashers. The treachery of the Biden border opening was so vicious, so calculated to harm America and so depraved that I find it jaw dropping that the sleazy old windbag's rotting corpse is not now hanging from a noose as a lesson to traitors. Biden and all of his cronies in crime engaged in a calculated scheme to weaken and destabilize our nation. And if you can't see or understand that - and demand punishment and accountability - your are a big part of the problem.
I have not studied or read much of the Cloward Piven Strategy/Method, to be able to criticize it specifically.
I do believe that it is diametrically opposed to our American idea of Individual Liberty and the "American Dream". We just do not believe in handouts ..... we believe hard work will be rewarded.
The influx recently of the illegals has certainly pushed this theory into prominence..... but as soon as we get the majority of them out, we can return to normalcy.