Cloward-Piven Revisited:

Biden Era Was the Ultimate Application — and Utterly Predictable Failure — of the Cloward-Piven Strategy

Mark Tapscott

There was a time in the mid-1960s when two left-wing Columbia University professors — Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — enjoyed a brief run of media celebrity by espousing a strategy for Democrats they believed could force the creation of an American welfare state based on a guaranteed annual income.

In a widely read article in the era's liberal flagship publication, Nation Magazine, the professors laid out their strategy as applied to the welfare state to illustrate the road to achieving all of the American left's ultimate economic, political and social goals:

"Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. 

"These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor.

"By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level." 

Put simply, Cloward-Piven said the way to force radical socialist reform of capitalistic America was to overwhelm the existing system by introducing so many participants that it collapses, thus creating political chaos, which Democrats then promise to end by enacting comprehensive and fundamental systemic changes. 

If that formula — known ever since the Swinging Sixties as the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" (CPS) — sounds familiar despite its origins seven decades ago, it should, because Democrats are still using it. In fact, the four years of Joe Biden's titular presidency likely represent what amounted to the most sweeping application of CPS  ever attempted.

Considered in this context, Biden's open border policy was pure CPS — removing every barrier to the entry of so many illegal immigrants coming into the country that Border Patrol and other immigration system personnel were reduced to little more than temporary escorts, housekeepers and travel agents.

Nobody knows with certainty the actual total of illegals who came into this country, but the figure of 11 million is almost certainly near the ballpark's home plate. Hundreds of thousands of these illegal aliens came in as "gotaways" — seen coming across the border and penetrating into the country but never being detained — as well as thousands whose names appear on terrorist watch lists and on the rolls of criminals convicted of murder, rape, theft and other serious crimes back home.

Not only did Biden's open border policy all but shut down the immigration system, the unregulated flood of illegal immigrants into major cities including New York and Chicago offered the additional benefit of threatening to overwhelm local law enforcement and human welfare systems.

Between Biden's $1.9 trillion American Relief Act and $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, the money supply was swamped with cheap money that drove up inflation to record levels. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars were lost to improper payments in pandemic-related special business aid and unemployment benefits, and, encouraged by official policies, millions of illegal immigrants became Social Security and Medicaid beneficiaries.

The added Medicaid beneficiaries have received little public notice, but the Washington Stand's Suzanne Dabney laid it out in succinct fashion in a recent column:

"What most people don’t realize is that there’s been a massive expansion of Medicaid since COVID. 'In the last five years, federal Medicaid spending has skyrocketed from $409 billion in 2019 to $618 billion in 2024,' House Freedom Caucus members warn in a new op-ed, 'a 51 percent increase. Despite being 60 years old, a third of Medicaid’s growth has occurred in those same five years. And in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicaid will cost more than $1 trillion annually, rivaling the size of Saudi Arabia’s current economy.'"

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