Cloward and Piven Join Our Side

For political aficionados of a conservative bent, there are certain political philosophers whose names evoke a similar response to citing Lucifer or Beelzebub in a monastery - a mixture of recoiling in horror from evil, combined with an earnest desire to study and better understand the evil so as to effectively combat and overcome it.  Karl Marx, of course; Saul Alinsky; Antonio Gramsci; and, most definitely Cloward and Piven.

This married couple of radical leftist Columbia University professors, like other more modern Marxist thinkers, realized that a 1917-style Red revolution was not likely to occur in the United States.  It was simply too rich, generally contented, well-armed, and sober-minded.

In order to overthrow capitalism and its obvious benefits, the benefits had to first be removed.  But an economic collapse alone wasn't sufficient - that had already happened in the 1930s Great Depression, and America still didn't turn to Communism.

Instead, writing in the 1960s when government and big business were viewed as the conservative establishment, Cloward and Piven's strategy called for intentionally overloading the government bureaucracies, causing a breakdown of their function, public order, and eventually the economy.  In the chaos, the prepared and trained Marxists could maneuver their way to power, without having to overtly create a revolution but bringing about one indirectly.

Another more recent way to express their strategy was famously voiced by Chicago mayor and Obama apparatchik Rahm Emanuel:

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

We see this as being a guiding principle of the Democrat party for this entire millennium so far, and the reason for the never-ending cavalcade of Biden administration "failures" that all make America weaker, poorer, more divided, and ever more dependent on an omnipowerful, unaccountable, and omni-incompetent government - all of which, of course, are exactly what the Left wants.

But a lot has changed in our nation since Cloward and Piven put down their red pens.  Where once the establishment was conservative, now the Deep State is the furthest thing from it.  Every major city is run by the farthest of far-left nuts, as is our entire Federal government, basically all bureaucracies, as well as large numbers of our major corporations.

In this environment, it's time to revisit Cloward and Piven's dark wisdom, along with Saul Alinsky's.  Why not, after all, hold our enemies to the standards they themselves have set?  Why not overload their systems, draining their coffers of ill-gotten gains and revealing their naked corruption and incompetence for all to see?  Why not, as the late great Rush Limbaugh put it, "demonstrate absurdity by being absurd"?

Get On the Bus!

To his great good credit, Texas governor Greg Abbott has been doing just that.  Now, we've not always been fans of Gov. Abbott - he's a decent fellow, to be sure, but we expect better of the leader of the biggest and richest red states.  Why does Florida's governor Ron DeSantis earn and rightfully receive all the glory?

Well, it looks like Gov. Abbott figured this out, with a stunningly simple and effective ploy:

Around 7,600 migrants have poured into New York over the last several weeks - many on buses from Texas courtesy of Gov. Greg Abbott - straining an already-shaky social service network.... As a sanctuary city, New York is an attractive destination for those arriving in the country with few resources.

The buses from Texas aren't slowing down, and show no signs of stopping. While some of the first buses came with just dozens of asylum seekers, now, hundreds of migrants arrive near-daily.

The sheer brilliance of this move is jawdropping.  For lo these many years, residents of border states and their conservative governments have screamed in anguish at the costs, human and financial, of the human tide of uneducated, disease-ridden, and definitionally criminal aliens pouring into their communities, only to be met with contempt and disdain by their betters in the faraway hubs of power.

Every single illegal alien should be summarily packed on a bus and sent south, to the back of the line, to attempt to enter in accordance with our laws and good order.  But, the Biden maladministration and many years of Democrat misgovernance and Deep State intransigence have made this impossible.

So, like a master of jujitsu who uses his opponents' momentum against them, Gov. Abbott is rounding up migrants and herding them onto buses headed North like the "Reverse Freedom Riders" before them, deeper into the country in which they don't belong - in fact, all the way to those selfsame lawless Democrat "sanctuary cities" that have sanctimoniously flaunted their refusal to obey or enforce our immigration laws.

Indeed, New York City goes one step further even than that:

The city's "right to shelter" law requires the city to find shelter for anyone requesting it, regardless of immigration status, but shelters - already near capacity as the city's homeless population swells - don't have enough empty beds to accommodate the new arrivals. [emphasis added]

Well, they said they would welcome all comers - Gov. Abbott is just holding them to their promise!  The illegals don't really want to stay in the barren borderland desert, they want to go where people, money, and commerce are.  Where better than a New York that has promised to provide all their needs free of charge?

Of course, this does create the occasional difficulty:

According to the most recent Department of Social Services tally, there are more than 52,000 homeless people in the city - a sharp increase from even a decade ago. The city's shrinking shelter vacancy rate recently rested under one percent.

All of this adds up to a dire shortage of beds - and questions about whether the system will be able to keep pace. The city in July violated the Right to Shelter law, which requires finding a place to stay for anyone arriving by 10 p.m. looking for one.

As the city continues to wrestle with rapidly increasing demand and strain on the system, advocates fear additional violations or other problems.

You don't say... Could it possibly be that conservatives have been right for all these decades, that there simply isn't enough room or resources for the entire world to pile into the United States and loot?  Of course, New York does have another alternative, as Gov. Abbott's press secretary pointed out:

Mayor Adams should call on President Biden to take immediate action to secure the border-something the President continues failing to do.

Or, put another way - Gov. Abbott is going to keep the buses coming until the systems of New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and other Democrat disaster cities overload and break down, and their leaders are forced to scream to Sleepy Joe to stop the problem at its source.

Which, of course, is exactly what conservatives have wanted to have done all along.  What insight on Gov. Abbott's part!  Perhaps he and Gov. DeSantis are like the proverbial hedgehog and the fox - the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Cloward and Piven would be aghast - but darned if they weren't perhaps right after all!