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.
“To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.
“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.
Hellbound and Down 
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