How I Ended up in Glenn Beck’s Line-of-Fire…
And why it matters.
by Frances Fox Piven
Today I Googled “Cloward Piven crisis strategy” and got 27,700 hits. Then I Googled “Frances Fox Piven” and got 135,000 hits. I have been writing, teaching and doing politics for a very long time, but I have never gotten so much attention, and I want to tell you the story of what it is all about.
Early last February I received a call from someone who claimed he was a student at Western Michigan State University. His class, he said, was required to read my book Challenging Authority. So, to fulfill his term assignment, he wanted to interview me. This didn’t seem strange. I’m used to students who try to fill assignments with as little reading as possible and I was not eager to do the interview. I had just gotten out of the hospital after an auto accident and was a bit unsteady. But I also hate to say no to students, so I suggested we do the interview at my apartment, for only an hour, and then thought little of it.
A couple of weeks later clips from the interview showed up on the internet. I Googled the “student” and discovered that he was in fact an official of the Michigan Republican party and also the director of a small 501c4 devoted to attacking the Michigan teachers union. Now I was interested.
I Googled some more and discovered that I and my deceased husband, Richard Cloward, were being depicted as the central figures in a plan to foment crises that had led first to the creation of the National Welfare Rights Organization, then to ACORN, was somehow connected to George Soros, created the financial crisis, then brought Barack Obama to the presidency, and much more. (Recently Woodrow Wilson has been added to one of the diagrams, presumably because the roots of all of this trouble can be traced to the progressive movement.) This Cloward Piven crisis strategy had been featured on the Glenn Beck show, complete with fantastical diagrams, some 30-odd times, was also the subject of numerous right-wing blogs, and had even been the focus of a major address at the Tea Party convention.
Naturally, my students were on to this before I was, and they were delighted to have such a notorious and powerful professor. So, in a way, was I delighted. It was funny, just because it was so preposterous. The diagrams hinged on crazy connections, and the blogs were riddled with errors.
But there is also something serious going on here. There are lots of Americans who are ready to believe this and similar stories that single out particular people or groups, and make those real and palpable persons the villains in a narrative that explains vast political, cultural and economic changes in American society. What isn’t funny is that a lot of people discomfited by these changes — by changing family and sexual mores, by deindustrialization, by an African-American president — find the narrative convincing.
The story that Glenn Beck and others tell begins oddly enough with an article that Richard and I published in The Nation in 1966 with the title “A Strategy to End Poverty.” The article proposed a campaign to enroll eligible people in the welfare program. We knew from our work with Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side in New York City that the welfare department was turning many eligible people away, sometimes giving them bus tickets to go back south instead of processing their applications for benefits. We also learned from our research that this was a widespread practice, with the consequence that less than half of those who were eligible for welfare benefits were actually receiving them. So we tried to think through the consequences of a campaign for full coverage, including the fiscal and political troubles it would cause in the cities, and the policy responses of a Democratic federal government that depended on its big city base, including the increasingly militant poor minorities. We thought there was a good chance that such a welfare “crisis” in the cities would prompt a Democratic administration to intervene, federalizing the program to relieve fiscal pressures, and improving it to satisfy the minority poor. (In fact some of the categorical assistance programs were federalized with the creation of the Supplemental Security Income program in 1974.) Moreover, we could see no downside to the strategy because along the way desperately poor people got welfare, food stamps and Medicaid benefits. Of course, this was a considerably more modest strategy, and a strategy for reform rather than revolution, than Glenn Beck and his ilk perceive
Lest readers simply dismiss this sort of thing with a chuckle, I want to emphasize that slander campaigns of this sort can have serious consequences, and I don’t mean personal consequences for me. Of course, misleading people is of itself serious. But ACORN, the largest and most effective organization of poor and minority people in the country, was destroyed by this sort of campaign. One of the things that ACORN did was to register poor people to vote. A massive voter registration effort by ACORN in 2005 in the state of Florida succeeded in winning a big hike in the state minimum wage. That victory sparked a relentless series of attacks on ACORN as a criminal conspiracy to fraudulently register voters, attacks that were mindlessly echoed by the mainstream media, with the result that ACORN’s funding dried up.
I think the impulse to dismiss lunatic charges by the right in the hopes they will go away is a mistake. They aren’t going away because the attacks are effective. What we should do instead of ducking is rally to the defense of the individuals and groups that are under assault, and we should do that aggressively, proudly, even joyfully because we are standing with what is best in American politics, and especially with the social movements from below that have sometimes humanized our society. That is what drives the right crazy, and it is also what should make us proud.
Frances Fox Piven is a distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.
