Kurtz, pp 382-386:
The most important clue of all to what the Obama administration may be up to comes from a fascinating analysis by Huffington Post political editor Thomas B. Edsall. Published in April 2010 by The Atlantic, Edsall’s article, “The Obama Coalition,” argues that the electorate is shifting toward a form of class-based political conflict unseen in America for decades.54 As a rule, says Edsall, economic growth reduces competition between America’s “haves” and “have-nots.” Yet, as the economic downturn lingers, spending battles have increasingly turned into zero sum struggles between taxpayers and tax beneficiaries. Edsall adds that the rapid rise in the proportion of relatively less-well-off blacks and Hispanics in the voting population accentuates this class division, by increasing the electoral power of the have-nots.
Edsall argues that as a result of these changes, a substantial political constituency for a European-style socialism, or “social democracy,” is now developing in the United States. He points to the recent Gallup poll in which surprisingly large proportions of Democrats, liberals, and minorities took a positive view of socialism. These socialist-friendly voters, says Edsall, will transform the Democratic Party of the future and already constitute the core of Obama’s coalition. Edsall adds that the huge expansion of public-sector unions means that for the first time, a majority of the American labor movement is now directly dependent on taxpayer dollars. Ideologically motivated and relatively well-to-do college-educated professionals, Edsall says, make up the last critical segment of the Obama coalition. (Although Edsall doesn’t make the point himself, it’s worth noting that this last group emerges from America socialist-friendly elite universities.)
Back in 1983, when Harold Washington swept Chicago’s machine aside, inspired America’s socialists, and drew a young Barack Obama into community organizing, his urban coalition was made up of the same combination of blacks, Hispanics, and leftist whites that Edsall now identifies as a force to be reckoned with nationally. 55 America’s so cialists were far too optimistic in 1983 about the potential for Harold Washington-style coalitions to draw socialist-friendly candidates into the mainstream of American politics. Yet as the nation’s demography has shifted and its economic circumstances have declined, it has be come possible to imagine a Harold Washington-style, socialist-tinged political coalition taking power nationally. This has been Obama’s aim all along.
How can Obama best help push America in the direction outlined by Edsall? Here is where the political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven comes into play — less their infamous “break the bank” strategy than their plan to polarize and realign the American electorate along class lines. 56 Obama has already made a good run at breaking the bank. I don’t believe his aim in enlarging America’s deficit is to provoke an economic crisis, however. Another economic meltdown would only be blamed on him. Yet I do think President Obama is at least flirting with the financial dangers of a huge deficit so as to stampede the country into a value added tax-and the permanently enlarged European-style welfare state that goes with it. There is real risk to this strategy, even though the president surely wants to avoid a full-scale economic crisis on his watch. In any case, this part of Obama’s long-term vision is already understood by many. The accompanying realignment strategy, however, has not been widely remarked upon. Yet a risky but winnable bid for fundamental political realignment would explain the chances Obama has been taking.
A play to polarize and realign the electorate along class lines, thus radicalizing the Democratic Party and pushing it toward “social democracy,” fits nicely with Obama’s entitlement-based strategy. Not coincidentally, this was the ambitious rationale behind Cloward and Piven’s original voter registration drive. Their aim was not simply to register voters. The real hope was that by encouraging openly anti Reagan efforts by government employees to register voters on welfare lines, the left might provoke an intense Republican reaction. According to the plan, Republicans would be goaded by intentionally politicized tactics into restricting voter registration at welfare offices, thus kicking off an angry movement of the poor. In Cloward and Piven’s mind, this second coming of the civil rights movement would send low-income and minority voter registration through the roof, thus energizing and radicalizing the Democratic Party. The Cloward-Piven registration strategy dovetailed nicely with Michael Harrington’s plan to provoke a class-based realignment of the parties by moving economic policy left, thus driving business interests toward the Republicans, while more than making up for the Democrats’ losses with an inflow of radicalized unionists and the poor. Obama’s funneling of stimulus money toward public employee unions can easily be seen as part of this larger plan.
These are the ideas Obama would have drunk in at those early Socialist Scholars Conferences. They also constitute the strategy behind Project Vote, which maintained a close working relationship with the Cloward and Piven for years. Obama was deeply tied to this socialist network, and devoted himself to an in-depth study of its theoretical underpinnings. In fact, his statements as head of Illinois Project vote came directly out of this framework.
All of this suggests that when President Obama says, “Go for it” to Re publicans who hope to repeal his health-care-reform law, he means it. Those who already see Obama as a socialist tend to think of his insistence on backing health-care reform in the face of collapsing political support as the suicidal impulse of a true ideologue. It’s more likely that Obama has a long-term class-based realignment strategy in mind. Obama would love the Republicans to try to take away the health care he’s offered to millions of uninsured. Taking a leaf from the Cloward Piven handbook, Obama hopes that a Republican campaign for repeal will ignite a political movement of the poor that will energize and radicalize the Democratic Party. If the president loses a segment of the business interests that initially supported him as a moderate pragmatist, so be it. To a degree, the president’s ambitious regulatory projects have already pushed the business community away. In Edsall’s telling, however, Obama has the demographic makings of a class-based strategy that would allow him to ride out that storm.
In short, President Obama’s long-term political plan is a replay of Michael Harrington’s socialist realignment strategy. Obama’s goal is to polarize the country along class lines, with Republicans marked out as the aggressors. Harrington’s bet was that, once the have-nots began to act as a unified class, they would naturally gravitate to socialism. What ever the short-term political risks of this strategy, the potential long term gains would be worth it, in Obama’s mind. If the Republicans take power in the mid-term congressional elections, that only sets up the ultimate battle during the presidential race of 2012. With repeal of health-care reform and the rest of the Obama agenda on the line, the president hopes that a newly energized base of public employee unions, minorities, and the poor will overmatch the coalition of “haves” trying to take their new benefits away. At this point, the relatively dormant legions of Organizing for America and the vast new government-funded army of AmeriCorps volunteers would spring into action. America’s budding social-democratic movement would come to life.
Ultimately, the success of this strategy depends upon blue-collar workers voting according to what the left considers to be their economic interests, rather than on cultural issues. The hope is that this can be accomplished in a country increasingly polarized along class lines with a newly expansive government allied with labor. Does this mean Republicans ought to abandon their efforts to repeal and roll back the Obama agenda? Not at all. But it does help explain the political thinking behind the risks the president is taking.
Here, Peter Dreier’s transformational strategy based on the irreversible expansion of entitlements converges with the political realignment plans of Harrington, Cloward, and Piven. All of these socialist strategists worked together to refine and coordinate their ideas at the So cialist Scholars Conferences of the eighties.57 (Dreier was an advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.) In the end, all the plans in question depend in some way upon riling up the have-nots by provoking the haves into taking something away from them (usually taxes pocketed from the haves to begin with).
On reflection, Greg Galluzzo’s Alinsky-inspired polarizing tactics are a variation on the same strategic theme. Targeted politicians and businessmen are compelled to either fork over expensive goodies, or openly refuse to do so — thus enraging the community group and giving it the force of a movement. So President Obama’s politically “suicidal” push for health care may actually have been crazy like a fox. At any rate, I’d wager that’s how he sees it.
March, bold teachers. Walker = Hitler, etc…
(thanks to geoffB)
I’ll meet your Cassandra-ism and raise:
If Obama insists on playing the part of Allende, the inevitable reaction will be our own Pinochet.
If those teachers march they better goose step.
This is not going to work out well for them.
I wonder if these teachers got their permission slips in order before taking their students on a field trip to protest at the State House.
Unless those teachers prefer this sort of socialism.
Rep.: ‘Like Cairo Moved To Madison’…
You better hide the women in Madison.
link
He points to the recent Gallup poll in which surprisingly large proportions of Democrats, liberals, and minorities took a positive view of socialism.
I should mention that during “Moron Trivia” (during The 4th Hour by Pat and Stu), they always ask the contestant to define socialism, and the contestant invariably thinks it has to do with being social or friendly. They don’t get anywhere near the economic definition.
The contestants are employees at Quik-E-Marts all over the nation. So there goes your poll.
The upside of these Grand Schemes is:
a) Schemers are never as smart as they think they are; Hari Seldon’s predictive powers came from his being tight with the author, not from his genius
b) Murphy’s law never goes away.
c) Just as the devil does not know the mind of God, the Left cannot predict how the conservative majority will actually react to their schemes.
d) Glenn Beck.
Let’s face it , di: Lots and lots of socialists talk about social advantages without so much mentioning the economic concerns. Many of them operate under the assumption that “well meaning ” socialist programs designed to bring people together will, eventually, right all the wrongs and bring order and decency.
Just about the same time that the “social society” becomes functionally financially bankrupt, requiring the social society to yank out the pockets of wealthier people more and more, despite the crushing of free enterprise. Of course, all of this will be blamed on filthy rich people and bankruptcy will get worse.
CESMI doesn’t seem to care about this as he has a nice chunk of literary change and at least one or two more baffling, incoherent books to sell to … socialists.
Hari Seldon was a pain in the ass.
This is where the left in their “reality-based-view” crash their bus into the light rail train. Even at the height of unionization there were only about 35% of blue-collar workers unionized. Today it is much less.
Also those “cultural issues”, God, guns, freedom in general and in it’s particulars, remain important in the blue collar life, more so than in the white collar world that the progressives mostly inhabit. They look around themselves and see their own image all around and assume that everyone is like they are.
One other problem is that now the unionized public sector can be more easily viewed as the “haves” and they are now daily showing that they want to take even more from the “have-not” private sector folks. I don’t see this ending well for the left unless the conservative side’s political leaders preemptively surrender like rinos have in the past.
I probably messed up the its/it’s thing.
In the end, all the plans in question depend in some way upon riling up the have-nots by provoking the haves into taking something away from them.
Riling up the have-nots, smashing the Machine, and bringing down the Man are things that most undergrads grow out of, as they enter mainstream society, get jobs, and start raising families of their own. What good fortune for our society that we’ve created a sub-culture where the emotional cripples and antisocial misanthropes can nurture one another and work together to see their romantic plans to fruition.
What’s left unsaid is that the “have-nots” that these True Believers want to serve as their army will generally rip each other to shreds before they do much damage to the Machine or the Man. Funny thing about urban riots is that they generally happen in urban areas that have been mostly abandoned by those the Left would really like to target.
In the end, these little Eichmanns wind up getting a lot of their so-called “allies” (who in reality are just their pawns) arrest, injured or killed, and wind up destroying what little productive capital may exist in blighted neighborhoods. Ask your local Korean grocer how he feels about the prospect of “civil” unrest. He’ll tell you that he spent a small fortune on high-strength shutters for his storefront, having learned well from the last time.
One of the reasons I’m so insouciant about the prospect of future unrest is that I don’t see it affecting me much. The crippling of the economy, the failing schools and hospitals, rampant unemployment, and crushing debt affect me and mine far more acutely, and they’re already here. If pulling the plug on all that results in some urban unrest, I can’t help but consider it a small price to pay.
But I suppose such an attitude comes across as unhelpful, so perhaps I’d best just sit down and shut up.
Best part to all this? The economic interests of the “have nots” are never really served by socialism, as seen again, and again, and again……
One other problem is that now the unionized public sector can be more easily viewed as the “haves”.
It’s not even an optics thing: it’s real. Average public-sector salaries are now higher than those in the private sector.
Add the word “parasite” or “red-tapeworm” and you’ve got yourself a slogan.
If pulling the plug on all that results in some urban unrest, I can’t help but consider it a small price to pay.
What if the unrest doesn’t limit itself to the urban sphere? What if people start breaking into your house to find food or copper wire?
And what if, to quell the anarchy, we end up with martial law or worse? “It can’t happen here” isn’t much of an argument, given that the U.S. is populated with human beings just like the rest of the world, and if we get cold and hungry, who knows what we’ll end up doing?
That Korean store owner has probably made a few quiet investments in precious metals, namely brass and lead. An awful lot of the “share-the-wealth” types find something better to do when the possibility exists that they’ll get a half-ounce lead souvenir.
To Squid’s point: I once saw a pbs documentary about the problems of growing up male in the inner city. The thing that stuck with me about it is that there’s a shitload of disaffected young men waiting to be organized into stormtroopers for anyone willing and able to take it that far.
Good subject matter for an It Can’t Happen Here type story.
Of course, we have a combat experience heavy National Guard that would probably not let looters run rampant… well, if they actually have Governors that will employ them, that is.
Answer, when we started to have a government of Community Organizer Alinsky rules not laws and a Constitution.
Jeff… after contemplating this analysis and other events this week, one might expect gridlock at the Tanner Show at I-25/58th this weekend… just sayin’