I respectfully but emphatically dissent from your well expressed reply.
I remain fully committed to Nathan Bedford's second Maxim of American politics: Failed socialism is invariably "reformed" with more socialism.
That is simply a new way of describing Cloward and Piven. I do not think that the public's perception of government or of Washington is central to the outcome, the great mass of voters who are ill-informed but who decide elections vote their pocketbooks, vote their perceived self-interest, and see those interests often as personalities rather than issues.
Hence, the more tragic the consequences of failed socialism the more likely the man on horseback.
I know of no institution beginning with the media, running through academia, continuing on to our churches and our eleemosynary foundations, which will support true reform or even begin to educate the electorate about what really is going on. These are the institutions which inform and shape our culture and it is culture which trumps politics.
This is an occasion in which I deeply hope that I am wrong and you are right.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I see what you're saying - that Cloward-Piven is a good strategy for the Communists, since people will perceive the feds as their friends in the face of a crisis. You're right that essentially all of our social institutions would back up that perception.
But I don't think that when the dollar crashes, inflation takes off, and the feds open the borders to illegals to take what few jobs there are that people will look to Washington for answers. No, they'll look to their neighbors, to their counties, to their States.
In short, the problem with Cloward-Piven is that it seeks to centralize federal power while pursuing a strategy that undermines the actual levers of federal power itself - things like a sound national currency, reliable and even-handed regulation of interstate commerce, federal courts exercising power within their Constitutional jurisdiction, zealous protection of the States from things like invasion, managing a sane foreign policy that recognizes real threats like the rise of Islam. Our Marxist overlords do none of those things. Indeed, they undermine each and every one of those things point for point.
By the time they achieve their Cloward-Piven moment, there won't be any real federal power to centralize. What will the federal government be by then? A centralized bank account for printing worthless dollars and then circulating them through the tax-and-spend system? All they will be is a make-believe bank printing up Monopoly money that they pay to people who do nothing but vote. They sure don't work. They sure don't produce anything. Nobody will care - at least not anybody who counts.
If the Marxists were serious about it seizing power, they'd do what Lenin did and actually create infrastructure. They'd build things like the Keystone Pipeline and the other big infrastructure projects. Now there's a lever of power - a transnational pipeline carrying life-giving energy across the entire midsection of the country and to an international port where it would be refined and shipped to everybody around the globe thus making our dependence of foreign oil less and everybody else more dependent on us for to keep their wheels turning.
But they don't do that because that would make them feel bad. They're not ruled by reason. They're ruled by emotions. For liberals, politics is all about making them feel good about themselves.
In short, they're deluded. Like a monkey with a hand grenade they can do terrible damage, but ultimately they can't run things, as has become abundantly clear after 5 years of libtard rule.
It's unavoidable. They can concentrate all the feel-good bee-ess into federal hands that they want. Ultimately, it's just unicorns and fairy dust. They can't hope to win.
I hope you are wrong, too ... but I doubt it.
Once progressives had a lock on education, it was only a matter of time until the population was so dumbed down they didn’t know any better, nor had the intellectual capacity to look for historical examples of what works and what doesn’t.
And the media simply reinforces their ignorance and shapes what our culture is and should be. We have a long battle ahead of us, on so many fronts. The task is daunting to say the least.