Cloward-Piven at the border

Back in the Sixties, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven came up with a great strategy for overloading and collapsing democratic welfare states, paving the way for socialist tyranny. Basically, the idea was to hit the system with a tidal wave of demands it couldn’t refuse, and couldn’t possibly fulfill. The Left would then insist that the moral argument for the system remained intact, so the only way to meet those impossible demands was to scrap every vestige of Constitutional restraint and republican self-government, instituting a totalitarian system that in theory would forcibly restructure society to promote “fairness” and give all those government dependents what they “deserve.”...

Cloward and Piven were specifically interested in replacing welfare programs with a government-guaranteed annual income for everyone – an idea that still emerges from the more absurd quarters of the Left occasionally – but the basic idea of overloading the republican system and replacing it with centrally-planned tyranny can be applied in many different ways. Take a look at the humanitarian crisis on the southern border, which I wrote about two weeks ago. It has since burst onto the front pages with some astonishing stories, including leaked photos of illegal alien children – many of them 12 years old and younger – “warehoused” in overcrowded facilities, where there are growing concerns about sanitation and disease...

There’s nothing complicated about what is happening here. Barack Obama invited these people to send their children to the United States as refugees. He’s already made illegal use of executive orders to gut the immigration system; he’s talking about doing it again, and the people of South and Central America can hear him just fine. There have been anecdotal reports of a message being spread throughout Central American countries, by everything from word-of-mouth gossip to news media: “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.”...

And it’s not just the President sending those signals, since there’s a vibrant bipartisan amnesty chorus in Congress. Obama will only seize power to rewrite the laws if Congress doesn’t do it fast enough for his taste, or if he sees electoral advantage in taking matters into his own hands...

This tidal wave of illegals is not an accident, and not entirely a result of conditions in Central America (which have deteriorated lately, but were already bad enough to inspire any sane person to seek a new life elsewhere.) These people were summoned. And now that they’re here, the system is collapsing beneath their weight...

Contrary to popular mythology about President Obama being some sort of deportation hard-liner, the truth is that most of his “deportations” were actually catch-and-release scenarios played out at the border – people who were essentially repulsed rather than caught and deported. Such people were not counted as “deportations” in the past ... There’s no practical method for sending the wave of families and unaccompanied minors surging in from Central America back to their homes. They’re most likely here to stay. And even though the Obama Administration had every reason to know they were coming, the immigration system was curiously unprepared to deal with them. Cloward-Piven tactics work even better when the system is hollowed out and made ready for speedy collapse.

Does the amnesty chorus recoil from this humanitarian crisis in shame... Of course not...

They won’t be shy about pointing to the very humanitarian crisis they have deliberately created to argue that their demands must be immediately met – a tactic that will further exhaust resistance from those who are already weary of being slandered as cruel xenophobes, and holding the line against an amnesty demand the Beltway-media complex portrays as inevitable.

Soon we’ll have millions of new citizens placing heavy demands on our maternal government, with hundreds of thousands more streaming in every year, eager to claim the prizes that have been offered to them. The governments that mismanage the nations from which these poor souls are fleeing will feel even less pressure to make things better – they’re happy to use the United States as a dumping ground for excess population. The Cloward-Piven effect will spread inward from the border, and outward into every aspect of our centralized system...

What’s happening on our southern border right now is horrifying, but it’s not unexpected. The people who caused it will never feel an instant of remorse for what they’ve done...