PrintJuly 7, 2007
What We Face
It is time to recognize exactly what we are up against and the concerted effort that will be required to save our country from the rampaging Left. The failed immigration bill was but one issue. There will be many, many more of equal or greater importance before the elections of 2008.
Democrats play a tough game. This has always been true, but the immigration bill is perhaps one of the most poignant examples. Democrats couldn't care less what floods of illegal immigrants do to undermine our legal system, overwhelm welfare and medical services, fracture society and destroy our culture. The best of them recognize most of these illegals represent potential new Democrat voters.
But I believe for some there is an even more pernicious goal. In 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, wrote an article for The Nation explaining how to destroy capitalism by overwhelming government with excessive demands for services, pushing government and society into economic collapse in order to usher in a new socialist paradise. They proposed using low-income blacks as foot soldiers to make ever-increasing, strident demands. As quoted in David Horowitz's DiscovertheNetworks.org:
Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
Their article was devoured by leftwing activists, and Cloward and Piven soon implemented the plan, recruiting black militants to crash welfare offices with violent demands for benefits. The strategy was especially effective in New York City. According to Sol Stern of City Journal, as quoted in DiscoverTheNetworks.org, they "succeeded beyond [their] wildest dreams...From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy." New York City declared bankruptcy in 1975 as a result, a stunning victory for what became known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
It is difficult to swallow the notion that forcing people onto welfare rolls in order to destroy the welfare system was actually a deliberate strategy conceived by Americans, but this is what happened, and the fractured families, runaway crime, poverty and misery associated with the burgeoning welfare state can be linked directly to it. At the White House signing of the 1996 Republican welfare reform bill (officially titled the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996), Professors Cloward and Piven stood side-by-side with President Clinton, who reluctantly agreed to sign only because he didn't have the votes to defeat it.
Their next target was voting. According to Horowitz, the nationwide voter registration group, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, (ACORN), as well as Project Vote and Human SERVE, were all founded by Cloward and Piven or their associates. These groups also receive significant funding from George Soros' Open Society Institute. Not coincidentally, Soros groups also provided significant support to the umbrella organization, the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which pushed the latest immigration abomination thankfully defeated last week.
You can see where I am going. The radical left and the national Democratic Party are increasingly one-and-the-same. Their relentless efforts to open the floodgates of illegal immigration and pack the voter rolls will illegal immigrant voters have the same objective: to overwhelm our government with an impossible flood of new problems and balkanize our society, while stacking the voter rolls with newly-minted democrats who will unwittingly support the radicals in their subversive efforts to destroy this country in favor of their socialist vision. It is Cloward-Piven on steroids.
The Democrats made immigration a burning issue in very real hopes of destroying the Republican Party now. They almost succeeded, but instead it backfired. And while the immigration bill cloture vote may indeed have lost Republicans some support among Latino open-border proponents, what the Republican Party got back was its soul - a very worthwhile trade. Conservatives face high hurdles for 2008, but if this kind of principled behavior can be replicated again and again with the many more divisive issues Democrats plan to dump on us between now and then, Republicans will once again be able to draw a clear distinction between themselves as the party of principle and responsibility and the craven, fanatic, blatantly self-serving and willfully destructive Democrats.
We cannot afford to quit. This may be our last chance.
We cannot afford to quit. This may be our last chance.
