Oct 03 2008

Change Through Orchestrated Crisis

In a remarkable article in the American Thinker, James Simpson connects the dots between the various parts of the Left that have contributed to our current financial “crisis”.

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

You may think the previous paragraph is indefensible on its face, and so not bother to read the rest of the amazing article at this link. But consider: With sixty years of mostly unbroken Democrat Congressional power, and the Democrat presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton, we had the Korean “police action”, Vietnam (both products of Democrat presidents), Social Security (now known to be unfundable at current levels over the long term, the elephant in the room for any “fincancial crisis” discussion), Medicare (in as bad a condition as Social Security in the long term), the incredible rise in medical costs resulting from WWIIs wage fixing and Medicare’s government funding, the disaster of AFDC (welfare for unwed mothers) and its effects on inner city families, the incredible decline of our schools, the first real invasion of American soil since the War of 1812, in the form of illegal immigration.  Coincident with this huge rise in social spending (six or seven trillion dollars(!)  since the 1960s) was a starved space program, the decline of infrastructure like roads, bridges, the failure to adequately fund NEW infrastructure, the failure to adequately fund basic science (the seed corn for US technological dominance of the world economy), and so on.

All of this took place in a period where the majority of big city governments, most school systems, all unions, and all the major media were dominated by Democrats.

The article connects a great deal that has happened since the 1960s in the radicalization of “liberal” politics to a conscious strategy of orchestrated crisis, described below:

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation
magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors,
Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes
it as:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.
The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by
overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible
demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:
“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When
pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every
Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal
social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s
failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it
altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist
one.

This form of “management by crisis” is still the main means used by the Left to advance its agenda, in everything from medical care to the environment.  The Left invites us to live in fear of unimaginable consequences unless we sign over control of our lives to it.

There is a great deal of information and conceptual connection in this article, and I urge you to read it all.

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One Response to “Change Through Orchestrated Crisis”

  1. harmonicminer » Global warming reduction: at what cost? says:

    […] panic and orchestrated crisis is always a good way to get things done […]

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