Time to look again at the Cloward-Piven strategy to wreck the lives of all Americans. It is becoming more popular than ever on the Left.

We repeat part of our earlier (November 18, 2012) post explaining what the strategy is.

This comes from Family Security Matters, by Frank Salvato:

In 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, collaborated on a theory  … referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy”. People who are familiar with the likes of Saul Alinsky and William Ayers are familiar with the strategy, as are the full complement of the Progressive Movement.

In a nutshell, the underlying principle of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to so overload the entitlement system – to add so many to the entitlement rolls, that the country’s economic system collapses, unleashing chaos and violence in the streets, thus effecting radical Leftist political change in government. … To facilitate the fall of Capitalism by “overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse”.  …

In a 1970 New York Times interview, Cloward is quoted as saying that poor people can only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them”. He then theorized that activists should refrain from demanding that government provide more for the poverty stricken and, instead, should strive to pack as many people on the welfare (read: entitlement) rolls as possible, creating a demand that could not be met, facilitating the destruction of the welfare system and massive financial crisis. As a byproduct, rebellion would be ignited amongst the people; chaos would rule the streets and governments would be damaged beyond repair, many falling to history making it possible for new radicals to assume the roles of oligarchs, ushering in new systems of government and the dismantling of the Capitalist system in particular.

Both Cloward and Piven understood that it would take pushing the American citizenry to the point of anarchy, to the point of the populace effecting violent chaos in the streets, for there to emerge an opportunity to damage our Republican form of government and our Capitalist system to the point where people would accept radical political as well as economic change. Cloward and Piven, using the philosophy of Saul Alinsky (who, by-the-by, was their inspiration in fomenting their “strategy”), knew that they would have to achieve chaos, so as to introduce the Progressive political ideology – the ideology of Democratic Socialism – to the masses as a saving grace. 

We’d say, “as a saving system” – but in fact, a doom.

“Democratic Socialism” – remember – is a cover name for Communism.

Is the triumph of Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Barack Obama now near at hand?

Barack Obama did what he could to promote the plan during his two disastrous terms as president.

California is planning to extend entitlements such as health care to the illegal aliens who are pouring into the state. They are encouraged by the state to enter the country illegally and are protected from deportation in its sanctuary cities.

All the Democratic Party candidates for the 2020 presidential election support government provided health care for everyone living in the country legally or illegally.

None of them condemns Antifa violence in the streets.

So is the terrible triumph of Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Barack Obama now near at hand?

Most probably – if the Democrats win Congress and the presidency in the 2020 elections. 

(We do not think they will. We predict the re-election of President Trump, quite possibly with a landslide victory.)

The Left and Islam are at present in alliance against … the West, our civilization, the US, the rule of law, democracy, capitalism … in a word – liberty.

In that, the two ideologies are alike. And both are authoritarian, both demand strict obedience, both strive for domination.

But their prescriptions for government, laws, morals, life-styles are in direct opposition to each other. So the alliance cannot last.

When they clash, which they must, which of the two will prevail? Which is stronger?

A skirmish between them has broken out over a course of study in a school in Birmingham, England. The Leftists want the children to be taught that homosexuality is normal and good. But Muslim parents are angrily protesting that homosexuality is not normal, not good, really very bad, and the teaching – officially designated “LGBT awareness” and “relationship education” – is wrong and must be permanently abandoned. Right now there is a stand-off and neither side can be said to be winning.

However, a surprising event on the world stage indicates that the winner, the super-bully, is likely to be … Communism.

Daniel Greenfield reports and comments at Front Page:

The war of letters began when 22 countries penned a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs and “other Muslim and minorities communities”. 

The letter in defense of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang was signed by France, Germany, Canada, Sweden and 18 other, mostly Western and European, countries.

The case of the missing Muslim signatories was solved when the People’s Republic of China fired back with its own letter signed by 37 countries.

This letter in defense of China’s crackdown on Islam was signed by 16 Muslim countries.

While some of the Muslim signatories were drawn from African countries, the letter was also signed by ambassadors for the leading Arab governments including Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Kuwait. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, also signed on.

While Western governments wailed about Muslim human rights in China, the leading Sunni nations of the world signed off on a letter praising “China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights”.

(At which point Greenfield interjects with sardonic disgust: “Mandatory abortions, organ harvesting and the mass murder of millions are remarkable achievements.”)

… The world’s top Muslim governments … explicitly defended China’s crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.

“Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers,” the letter reads. …

The People’s Republic of China’s idea of de-radicalization measures had allegedly included forcing Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, a ban on beards, hijabs and the name Mohammed.

Even Qatar, whose Al Jazeera propaganda outlet has broadcast claims of Islamist oppression in Xinjiang, was finally forced to sign on to a letter that effectively disavowed what its own media has been saying.

The Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic minority, its Islamists had sought to set up a separatist Turkic Islamic state, and the Islamist regime in Turkey had been vocal about their cause. Erdogan, the Islamist thug running Turkey, had in the past accused China of genocide. This year, the spokesman for Turkey’s foreign ministry had described China’s crackdown on Islamists as a “great cause of shame for humanity”. The spokesman had accused China of engaging in torture and brainwashing in concentration camps.

But then Erdogan, the most aggressive national exponent of Islamist causes in the region, visited China, and declared, “It is a fact that the peoples of China’s Xinjiang region live happily in China’s development and prosperity.” Then he told critics to keep quiet to avoid spoiling Turkey’s relationship with the PRC.

The People’s Republic of China had attained the complicity of the world’s most vocal Turkish nationalist in its crackdown on Turkic nationalism and won the support of the tyrant who had transformed Turkey from a secular democracy into an Islamist banana republic for its enforced secularization of Muslims.

It’s hard to imagine a greater diplomatic triumph.

Finally, the letters humiliated the United States, which had not signed on to either one, but, despite providing protection and billions of dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, has been repeatedly attacked for its limited counterterrorism efforts which fall far short of anything that the PRC has done.

Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have long been thorns in America’s side, backing Islamic terrorists abroad, funding subversion within the United States, and criticizing our counterterrorism.

What does China have that we don’t? …

China was able to get not only Muslim countries, but the worldwide sponsors of Islamism, to sign on to its letter because they understood that crossing the PRC would carry a serious economic price.

The United States hands out foreign aid and trade agreements to countries no matter what they do. …

In the United States, cutting off foreign aid to a country, no matter how awful, is nearly impossible. The worse a country treats us, the harder we work to win that country over with extensive outreach. …

The People’s Republic of China doesn’t view insults and threats as an incentive for outreach. Instead it uses its economic clout to reward or punish countries based on how those countries treat it. …

American diplomacy has a fantastic track record of failure. The only thing it ever really seems to succeed at is giving away money and abandoning our national interests to pursue meaningless global goals. …

The PRC does not dedicate its diplomacy to saving the planet, ending all wars, or any of the delusional nonsense that occupies American diplomats in between expensive lunches and pointless conferences. Its diplomacy is a blunt instrument meant to achieve simple ends. And, that makes it far more effective.

The war of letters demonstrated that China could recruit 16 Muslim countries to endorse forcing Muslims to eat pork, while Western countries couldn’t get even one to sign on in opposition. …

America spends a great deal of time worrying about being loved. Our diplomacy is meant to convince the world to love us. China does not need to be loved. It never apologizes for its strength.

We should stop apologizing for our strength. And start putting our national interests first.

Which is the strongest principle and fixed goal of our president – and for that goal and principle (along with all his others) the Left furiously condemns him.

… and its weird idea of what constitutes liberty.

Yes, of course, the Left hopes to be in power, everywhere and over all of us. It is a vast ambition, to organize the entire human “community” – or organize the entire human race into a “community”, locked under its power.

But why? Surely it has a vision it considers beautiful?

We sometimes go looking for explanations of why the Left opposes individual freedom, free speech, free market prosperity, private property, the US Constitution, objective impartial justice, racial color-blindness, the nation-state and its military defense capability, the family, the rules of the English language, historical monuments and records, civility, and  – coming at last to a word that could be the title of the whole list – happiness.

And from time to time we find an article that gives us a glimpse of  – not a rational argument as to why – but an exposition of what the Left wants which, discussing some of its hates and dreads, clarifies some of its wishes, even though it still leaves the question why unanswered.

Here’s one such article. The Leftist author, reviewing the work of fellow Leftists, is convinced that Marxism is gaining popularity. He  thinks that the financial crash of 2008 brought about “the intellectual rehabilitation of Marx”.

Outside academic precincts, his ideas have been slowly, if not wholly, exfoliated of their association with dictatorship and state-sponsored terror.

Have they indeed? If so they need to be foliated in those associations again as quickly as possible!

What makes him think so?

Recent, if only partial, exonerations have been issued by the Economist and the New York Times …

No surprise there.

And a host of new “journals and websites [that] share certain characteristics. They express a loathing of the war on terror, and disaffection with the precariousness and austerity of millennial life. The London riots in 2010 and the student protests as well as the Occupy protests in 2011-12 were formative moments of dissent that produced new political imaginaries [sic]. Academics, writers, bloggers and journalist-activists began to describe post-capitalist futures …

Above all, these “little magazines” reflected a growing sense of political possibility, a belief that the future wasn’t locked in the image of oligarchic power, but looked simultaneously darker (inequality and ecological collapse) and more hopeful (a recrudescent left). …  [T]he left began to crawl out from the sumps of melancholia.

We derive a certain amount of Schadenfreude from thinking of the Left as in “the sumps of melancholia”.

How does its new hopefulness express itself?

The blurb advertising the article reads: “Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, offers a manifesto for socialism that is thrillingly non-utopian.”

“Thrillingly non-utopian”? So a vision not of an ideally beautiful human world, yet “thrilling”?

An irresistible temptation to read on!

The article, titled The rise of millennial socialism, is by Gavin Jacobson (commissioning editor for the Leftist New Statesman).

He writes at the NewStatesmanAmerica:

Across the world, young activists are turning to old ideas. Why? …

[Bhaskar] Sunkara’s vision is thrillingly non-utopian. When describing the ultimate goal of socialism, he alludes to one of its most brilliant, if saturnine, definitions: “converting hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness”.

Now that’s blunt! Not to be happy is the aim. Achieving “ordinary unhappiness” is the height of the socialist aspiration.

And the prospect is thrilling?

The author expatiates further:

The phrase was originally conceived by Freud, but was adapted by the political theorist Corey Robin in 2013. And while you wouldn’t put it on the side of a campaign bus, it gets to the heart of what a socialist economy might look like: helping people overcome, in Robin’s words, the “immense, and incredibly shitty, hassle of everyday life”. …

There are more provocative theorists than Sunkara on the American millennial left, and more engaging historians, too. But few of them present the arguments against capitalism and for socialism better than he does. He writes with clarity and light-heartedness – something writers on the left hardly ever do well – and has shrewdly repurposed buzzwords from the liberal centre to make the case for the radical left. The usual socialist argot of justice, equality, class war, dialectics, revolution, the 99 per cent, and so on, is either absent or pared down. Instead, Sunkara emphasises how socialism enables greater choice, leaves markets intact, is about participation and democracy, is created through reform, and is ultimately about freedom – safe-words for the politically curious. In style and endeavour, then, if not in politics, Sunkara might be the heir to Michael Harrington, the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, who did so much to promote socialism in the US. …

So this socialism “leaves markets intact”, “is created through reform” (ie. not through revolution – nothing new there, that brand of Leftism used to be called Fabianism) and is “ultimately about freedom”?

At which point we need Sunkara’s definition of freedom. It is not provided.

We are taken back to the familiar politics of the New Left:

Again, this draws on the work of Ralph Miliband, who argued in 1985 that “the exploitation, discrimination and oppression to which women, blacks and gays are subjected is also crucially shaped by the fact that they are workers located at a particular point of the production process and the social structure”.

The Left has not noticed that Europe is governed mostly by women and the men who are allowed to share the seats of power with them have “Feminist” hung round their necks. They have not noticed affirmative action; are unaware that Blacks are admitted to universities on lower academic grades than Whites and Asians. Or that we are forced every day of our lives now to be aware of homosexuality as if it were one of the most important issues in all our lives.

The New Left replaced (to use its own jargon) the Marxist “class analysis” with “race analysis” and – more recently – “gender analysis”.

But we discover here that “class analysis” has not been superseded, only enlarged to take in race and gender:

Prioritising politics over policies is why Sunkara favours Sanders over Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything – “I have a plan for that!” has become her unofficial campaign slogan – but not an alternative politics. It isn’t enough to win the policy argument, nor is it enough to win elections. Today’s socialists speak of the need to win power – not for its own sake, but as the handmaiden of liberty – and that requires a mass movement based on class struggle.

So in that discussion, the Left wants power “not for its own sake” but because it will deliver liberty to women, blacks and gays who are at present – so it analyses – unfree.

No intention there of defining liberty. The author admits that in discussing Sunkara’s view he has told us who must be freed, but not what their freedom will consist of:

If Sunkara asks “Freedom for whom?” Aaron Bastani wants to know “who will benefit?” Specifically, who will benefit from what he calls the “Third Disruption”, when abundance and “extreme supply” in labour, energy, resources, health, and sustenance lead to a post-scarcity world? Just like information, these things “want to be free”, posing grave dangers for an economic system built and sustained by profit.

What? So the present system – capitalism – is  leading to all that “extreme supply”? To a post-scarcity world? Wonderful! Great! Odd that he expects even more of capitalism than we do ourselves. But then he seems to be saying that because there will be so much in the way of “labour” (does he means robots?), “energy” (from what?), “resources” (such as?), “health” (medical care, he presumably means), and “sustenance” (food”?) that they should be free to everybody, like the sands of the desert, the water of the ocean, the air we breathe. He or the writer he quotes expresses it badly,  saying that “these things ‘want to be free'” rather than that people want to have them without having to pay for them.

This desire on the part of these things to be had freely – or let’s be kind and say it the way it makes sense: the fact that there will be so much of these things that they will be freely obtainable by everyone without it costing them anything, will “pose grave dangers” for the capitalist free market system. He is implying that no one will be able to make money out of enterprises that employ people; or by selling coal, gas, oil, wind-power etc.; or by being doctors; or by growing or retailing food.

That is indeed a utopian vision! And that is what Bastani thinks of as liberty. You are free from having to work to earn money, because you do not have to pay for anything. Everything you need is “free”. So that’s what freedom means. In such a world, such a paradise, women, blacks and gays will no longer be “workers located at a particular point of the production process and the social structure”. They will be free when all things are free to them.

Ah, but in that case, women, blacks and gays must face a most disheartening truth – that they will never be free.

Women, blacks, gays – sorry, but there will never be a post-scarcity world.

But now confusion arises in the article. It seems that capitalism and the free market are not creating a post-scarcity world! We thought that view of our present system was too strange  coming from a Leftist.  No, no – he knows that capitalism is failing. Mark off the constantly repeated failures and disasters:

Bastani’s message is that climate change, resource scarcity, surplus populations, and technical unemployment, are syndromes of a dying socio-economic order.

So what will produce the post-scarcity world where everything and therefore everyone is free?

[T]echnological advances in robotics and AI, as well as renewable energies, gene editing, synthetic meats, cellular agricultures, and (eventually) asteroid mining, provide opportunities to achieve FALC [fully automated luxury communism]. This is when, under a realm of plenty, “labour and leisure blend into one another”, and where work is no longer a means of survival, but a “route to self-development… more akin to play”. …

Actually, Gavin Jacobson thinks Bastani may be a little too optimistic …

Bastani’s book isn’t a complete riposte, and load-bearing statements such as, “once the technical barriers are surmounted”, suggest his arguments require more faith from the readers than he might think. Nor does he contend with the fact that capitalism has so tightly bound our collective sense of meaning to work, that post-scarce societies might become more like JG Ballard’s dystopian leisure world in his novel Cocaine Nights than luxury communism.

… though not too unrealistic:

But in outlining the benefits of decarbonised economies, worker-owned businesses, people’s banks, planet taxes and universal basic services, Bastani is starting to put flesh on the spectre that might one day haunt Europe again.

Note the vocabulary: :”decarbonised economies” (think Green New Deal); “worker-owned businesses” (for the danger of which see our post Darkness descends on South Africa); “people’s banks” (loans without limit without interest, without repayment?) “planet taxes” (taxes paid to a world government?); “universal basic services” (everything free).

However, the author says, just hoping for such a utopian “post-scarcity” world has the power of dynamite. To hope is in itself progressive:

Both his [Bustani’s] and Sunkara’s books represent … “the dynamite of hope that blasts the dead load of ossified systems, institutions, customs, intellectual habits, and closed doctrines. The Left unites those dispersed and often hidden atoms whose movement is, in the last analysis, what we call progress”.

Progress towards “fully automated luxury communism”.

“Luxury communism” is the name of the new Marxist utopian vision.

It may be less believable, but it’s certainly less depressing than “ordinary unhappiness”.

Those (generally unreliable) opinion polls are saying that most Democrats – around 57% – now favor socialism over capitalism. It’s not implausible. Considering that children are indoctrinated by the public schools, most universities, TV, films, and the media to believe that socialism is the supreme and only political good, a mere 57% of Democrats seems an underestimation.

Daniel Mitchell, Libertarian, writes at Townhall Finance:

How do we measure the cost of Venezuelan socialism?

Is it people eating household pets?

Is it people dying of malnourishment?

Is it women selling their bodies?

Actually, it’s all of the above.

And there’s plenty of additional evidence. All of which shows that more socialism results in more misery.

Let’s review some examples.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. But with government running the industry, producing petroleum products has been a challenge. To put it mildly.

Venezuela — home to the world’s largest oil reserves — has started introducing in some areas to tackle extreme fuel shortages. For ordinary Venezuelans, it is a cruel joke without a punchline. A  driver recently died of a heart attack after waiting in line for days to fill his tank. …

Here’s another sign of Venezuela’s descent into third-world status.

The Center for Malaria Studies in Caracas is not immune to Venezuela’s economic crisis and is struggling to treat patients. … Scientists who would later work for this clinic contributed in 1961 to helping Venezuela become the first country to eradicate malaria. … Today the clinic is in a sorry state: yellowed microscopes, a dishwasher stained by purple chemicals, refrigerators corroded by rust. …According to the World Health Organization, Venezuela registered more than 400,000 malaria cases in 2017, making it one of the hardest-hit countries in the Americas. .. The true extent of the epidemic [could be] close to two million people affected. …

Reuters reports on how parts of Venezuela are descending into autarky and barter.

At the once-busy beach resort of Patanemo, tourism has evaporated … These days, its Caribbean shoreline flanked by forested hills receives a different type of visitor: people who walk 10 minutes from a nearby town carrying rice, plantains or bananas in hopes of exchanging them for the fishermen’s latest catch. With bank notes made useless by hyperinflation, and no easy access to the debit card terminals widely used to conduct transactions in urban areas, residents of Patanemo rely mainly on barter. It is just one of a growing number of rural towns slipping into isolation as Venezuela’s economy implodes amid a long-running political crisis. …In the mountains of the central state of Lara, residents of the town of Guarico this year found a different way of paying bills – coffee beans. Residents of the coffee-growing region now exchange roasted beans for anything from haircuts to spare parts for agricultural machinery. …

What can you say about a country that’s so poor that even criminals are suffering?

Venezuela’s crippling economic spiral is having a negative impact on an unlikely group in society: criminals, who are struggling to afford bullets, and unable to find things to steal as the country’s wealth declines rapidly. …While bullets are widely available on the black market, many muggers cannot afford the $1 price tag anymore, a criminal known as “Dog” told the news organization. …Another gangster, “El Negrito,” who leads a gang called Crazy Boys, has found it increasingly hard to support his wife and daughter with assaults. Firing a bullet is a luxury now, he said. … [The] homicide rate  … went down by nearly 10% last year— though Venezuela remains one of the most violent countries in the world. The non-profit which aggregates the data from morgues and media reports, partly attributes this decrease to the reduction in muggings — because there is nothing to steal. …

What a perfect symbol of socialism! People are so poor that there’s nothing left to steal.

In a postscript, the writer adds:

Venezuela in 1970 was ranked in the top 10 for economic liberty.

Will it take less or more than 50 years for the US to become as poor as Venezuela if the Democratic Socialists come to power in both houses of Congress and in the presidency?

The Democratic Party is promoting abortion as the defining right of women. The enfranchised woman must have a right not to be forced into a woman’s “gender role” – which is to say, not to be a mother. 

The Left considers it a health right to have free contraception provided under insurance policies. Though male and female must be equal in sexual behavior, women can change their minds after intercourse and ruin the reputation of men through meetooism, an auxiliary right to special women’s justice which does away with due process. 

Democrats will probably not go as far as the mandatory, forced abortions of China. The one child policy there resulted in mass female infanticide. It is more important to abort boys in the “patriarchal” West. There is no need to feel compassion for the babies. Compassion should be kept for black murderers of white cops. 

Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News show (Monday May 14, 2019): “We have a political party that believes having children is a punishment.” It’s true. When Barack Obama was president, he said he didn’t want his daughters to be “punished with a baby”. Many “progressive” intellectuals, including spokesmen for the medical profession, argue for abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and even advocate infanticide. A movie actress asks women to adopt absolute chastity as a form of protest because some states are not allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy on demand.

A  female Democrat in the House of Representatives, said: “There is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question. Is it OK to still have children?” That same Democrat, referring to the same “scientific census” (which does not exist) believes that the world is coming to an end in 12 years from now. It would be so unfair to give birth to a child who will have less that a dozen years to live.

Such a laudably unselfish view, that. But not common on the Left. The view that abortion is the defining right of women is the politically correct orthodox Democratic position. Children are invaders who would enter the world through the womb, occupying a woman’s body without her permission. Even though she knows how the invader gets in there, and almost always opens the door herself, she is being exploited. The invader must be evicted.

Those children who are so impudent and far-right, so bigoted, xenophobic, undiverse, uninclusive and Trumpian as to get born despite all efforts to abort them – or if their mother in collusion with a Democratic doctor does not kill them when they actually arrive in the world – then they must be made unhappy.

If they are white, they must be made to feel bad about it. Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – an exemplary anti-human – has said that she is proud of her grandson for saying that he wished he was brown like his friend.

If they are male, it is worse.  If they are male and white they are the guiltiest of the guilty and must be accused, abased, cut up, punished.

Boys should be changed into girls. Or at least a parody of girls. And why should not all girls be changed into boys? Or at least a parody of boys. Start the process when they’re 4 years old. (A British judge just overruled a school’s objection to a 4 year old being treated as a transgender.) They hold that “gender” is only a “social construct”.

So feed them on hormones. Mangle their sexual organs. Make them sterile. Make them wretched.

And since the curse of children is upon the nation, make use of them. Have them vote – for the Democrats. The party that knows it can rely on the votes of felons, illegal aliens, and lunatics, believes just as reasonably that it will get the votes of children.

There are many other uses for children too. The Left recommends that they be taught how to make their parents worried about “climate change”. (And to report the parents to the Totalitarian Authorities if they are obstinate?)

On the Mexican border, migrant men rent children and pretend to be part of families that are not theirs in order to enter the US.

Hamas, the terrorist organization passionately supported by two Congresswomen, uses children as living shields against Israel’s retaliatory bombs and guns. The Palestinians train children to be suicide bombers.

Of course (we hope) the Left will not go as far as Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who made children kill and eat their own parents and then be footsoldiers and sex slaves.

Children can even take the initiative in leading campaigns that advance the agenda of the Left. A Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg, 16, is leading a children’s crusade against the mythical curse of “man-made global warming”. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So we can be optimistic and surmise that the Democrats will probably not make it illegal to have children.

Marx and Engels despised the Lumpenproletariat, “the social scum” they said it consisted of, “that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society”. It formed no part of the “revolutionary class” they wrote. That was the proletariat, the class of the workers. At best, they averred, the Lumpenproletariat “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution”.

But the Left lost its faith in the proletariat after the Second World War. Communist theorists glumly concluded that the workers of the world were not, after all, going to unite, lose their chains and win the world, as Marx had encouraged them to do. In Europe – most particularly in Germany – they were doing far too well in the capitalist system to want to change it.

So the New Left was born. Not in the Communist Second World, the Soviet Union and its empire. But in the First World, the Free West. The newness of the New Left lay in its shift of expectation from the workers to the Lumpenproletariat. The social scum became the new “revolutionary class”, would take over the historic role, the sacred task, and enact the earthly apocalypse. After which human beings, their nature transformed and standardized, would live in blissful equality ever after, everywhere on earth.

Marx and Engels’s Lumpenproletariat consisted of “beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes”. With the change, tricksters, entertainers, and buskers have had their membership in the new revolutionary class quietly canceled. Vagabonds and criminals remain. And new members have been added: Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”, the denizens of the poor Third World;  Herbert Marcuse’s “outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and colors, the unemployed and unemployable”. Blacks, who had not been classed by Marx as proletarian revolutionary material, are prime members. (Marx despised Blacks, though they were mostly workers; and he and Engels both opined that Slavs – a category that includes Russians, mark you, comrades! – should be annihilated. See for instance here and here.) All “persons of color” are included. Also the sexually abnormal. And women – all women, whether they like it or not. And, very recently, in dramatic opposition to original Marxism, people who are “unwilling to work”.

In Marxist terms, what the Democratic Party has become is a party of “scum”. What can be expected in the way of probity and competence from human scum? Not much. But it’s okay, the scum is not expected to rule. The rulers are still, and are expected to be White men.

And this new, vastly expanded revolutionary class is no longer to be thought of as a Lumpenproletariat, its  members as human scum. By virtue of their “oppression” they are the chosen, the best. Their oppressors are the White race. White men. A category that includes the theorists of the New Left themselves, the very makers of the new social order.

So the White men still in leadership positions on the ever-more-communist Left in America are performing public rituals of self-abasement. (Entertainers of a sort – re-admitted to the chosen class?)

Both the leading choices of the Democratic Party to date for the 2020 presidential election are White men.

One of them is a Marxist, a man of the Old Left, Bernie Sanders. The other, former Vice-President Joe Biden, though he has not yet declared his candidacy, is on tour with apologies for being a White man with a “White culture”.

What will he do about it?

Dominate from below?

“I wouldn’t be my mother’s son if I was capable of one drop of what I have been accused of,” Jussie Smollett declared in a tone of righteous indignation after being acquitted of his malicious crimes by a corrupt court.

Who is his mother? What does it mean when he invokes her to advertise his own virtue?

She is Janet Smollett née Harris. She was a member of the Black Panthers. Angela Davis was a fellow member of the terrorist group, and they are still close friends.

A reminder of who Angela Davis is, from Discover the Networks, will reveal the ideas which these comrades embraced and the causes they served:

Angela Yvonne Davis is a tenured professor in the “History of Consciousness” program at the University of California – Santa Cruz. A former member of the Black Panther Party, she is currently a “university professor”, which entitles her to a six-figure salary and a research assistant. This income is supplemented by speaking fees ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 per appearance on college campuses, where she is an icon of radical faculty, administrators, and students. Davis has also taught at UCLA and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Born into a middle-class family in Birmingham, Alabama on January 26, 1944, Davis attended segregated schools in that city until she enrolled at New York’s Little Red Schoolhouse (LRS), famous for its Communist faculty and student body. (Future Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin attended that school during the same period as Davis).

After having been exposed to the Marxist classics at LRS, Davis moved on to a full scholarship at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York, an adjunct of LRS. While attending these schools, she was a house guest of Herbert Aptheker, the Communist Party’s chief theoretician, and his family.

In 1961 Davis enrolled at Brandeis University, where she majored in French. She spent her junior year studying in Paris, where she came into contact with Algerian revolutionaries. Davis graduated from Brandeis in 1965 and then spent two years on the faculty of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She returned to the U.S. to take another teaching position at UCLA, where she worked with radical professor Herbert Marcuse.

Herbert Marcuse was one of the chief philosophers of the New Left, the 1968 student protest movements in Western countries, and the terrorist groups that emerged from them.

In 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague spring”, Davis joined the Communist Party, voicing her belief that “the only path of liberation for black people is that which leads toward complete and radical overthrow of the capitalist class”. 

Davis supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, just as she would support its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

In September 1969 Davis was fired from UCLA when her membership in the Communist Party became known. This resulted in a celebrated First Amendment battle that made Davis a national figure and forced UCLA to rehire her.

In 1970 Davis was implicated by more than 20 witnesses in a plot to free her imprisoned lover, fellow Black Panther George Jackson, by hijacking a Marin County, California courtroom and taking hostage the judge, the prosecuting assistant district attorney, and two jurors. In an ensuing gun battle outside the court building, Judge Harold Haley’s head was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by Ms. Davis.

The way that’s worded implies there is no proof of who it was who pulled the trigger that killed the Judge. It is known that Angela Davis supplied the gun. In whose hands was it when it was used to kill? It doesn’t strain credulity to imagine it was hers. But …

To avoid arrest for her alleged complicity in the plot, Ms. Davis fled California, using aliases and changing her appearance to avoid detection.

Two months later, Davis was arrested by the FBI in New York City. At her 1972 trial, Davis presented her version of where she had been and what she had been doing at the time of the shootout. Because she was acting as her own attorney, she could not be cross-examined. She presented a number of alibi witnesses, almost all Communist friends, who testified that she had been with them in Los Angeles playing Scrabble at the time of the Marin slaughter. Prosecution witnesses who placed her in Marin were dismissed by Davis and her fellow attorneys as being unable to accurately identify blacks — because they were white.

Following the announcement of the verdict that acquitted Davis, one juror faced news cameras and gave a revolutionary’s clenched-fist salute. He laughed at the justice system, saying that prosecutors had been mistaken to expect that the “middle-class jury” would convict Davis. He and most of the jurors then went off to partake in a Davis victory party.

In 1979 Davis was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize (formerly named the International Stalin Peace Prize) by the East German police state. This honor was given by a Soviet government-appointed panel that sought to recognize individuals who had “strengthened peace among peoples” by advancing the agendas of the Kremlin and its totalitarian regime.

Wherever the Soviets used the word “peace”, always read “Communism”.

Davis ran for Vice President of the United States in 1980 and 1984, alongside Gus Hall, on the Communist Party ticket.

Gus Hall was the candidate John Brennan voted for. The John Brennan, that is, who was appointed head of the CIA by Barack Obama.

What lessons are to be drawn from the story of the murdering Black Panthers, from the manner in which its members conducted themselves, actively assisting the enemy of their country during the Cold War between the United States and the tyrannous dictatorship of Communist Russia? Are rising generations likely to look to them as models of probity, loyalty, patriotism, veracity, decency, humanity?

The right and chilling answer to that question is, in full, no, but as political heroes, all too probably yes.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “can do anything – if somebody else pulls the string.”

Is somebody else pulling her string?

If the alarming information given in this video is true – and we think it is – it would explain a lot: the woman’s glibness with ready-made phrases and slogans; her contrasting inability to utter a grammatical sentence in answer to a question in an interview; her extraordinary self-assurance. It is easy to sound sure of yourself when what you say has been scripted for you.

Have you yet picked a victim group with which you “identify”?

If you haven’t picked one at least, you’re doomed, comrade!

You’ve gotta be one of the oppressed in America now, or you’re nothing. No, of course you don’t have to actually be oppressed, you’ve just got to belong to a group that can say it’s oppressed because it’s not white and male.

Why should only those who have actually been oppressed have all the kudos? It’s enough that some women – or all women some time ago – were kept down. If you are a woman, that’s all you need to stake your claim. Same goes of course if you’re black, brown, homosexual, lunatic, or criminal. Others like you had it rough, so you are owed.

If you’re currently homeless, an illegal resident, an alcoholic, a drug addict, or a member of M-13 or al-Qaeda, you can pass jail and go straight to the community chest for your hand-out.

But our advice to you is choose a race complaint. The most solid claim, the claim recognized as being top priority right now, is a race claim. Then you have only to put a finger in the political breeze – the one blowing from the left – to learn which race is commonly agreed to be most “unsafe” while whites occupy the seats of power.

It will be better still if you also “belong” to a radical ideology. It’s an add-on, but could make all the difference to how much respect and promotion you have a right to demand. You could probably hit the jackpot this season if your chosen ideology is Islam or Communism. Being Muslim or Communist might even get you a pass for a while if you are still white and/or male.

But hurry. The wind changes often. More often than the weather changes (though it all tends, they say, towards heating the earth to destruction within 12 years). It could, for all you know, change before you can say “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

For progressives that revolutionary purity now is defined by race is an ironic return to the values of the Old South, which sought to calibrate privilege by skin color. The reprehensible Confederate idea of the whitest has now morphed into the least white being the most authentically grieved and thus deserving of the greatest reparatory privileges — the constant, of course, remains that superficial appearance based on race trumps all individual characteristics.

What started with affirmative action became “diversity’, which in turn during the Obama Administration was redefined not as minority groups with either historical grievances against the majority or accepted claims of ongoing racial victimization. Instead authentically diverse were all who claimed to be racially or linguistically distinguishable from the white majority.

Then diversity as a revolutionary moment was further expanded by including gays and woke women, which essentially took the initial African-American population whose plight was the aim of affirmative action and expanded it to in theory a majority of about 200 million Americans who were either non-white or women or both.

Now the revolution cannot figure out its own hierarchy of authentic grievance groups. So it has agreed on a loose “intersectionality”, in which over a dozen and often overlapping victim cadres agree that each degree of non-white-maleness adds authenticity and become a force multiplier of left-wing radicalism.

Among leftists, Kamala Harris, as black and female, trumps Cory Booker who is just black, who trumps Elizabeth Warren who is exposed as just female, who trumps Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders who are reverse threefers as white, male, and heterosexual. …

In such a revolutionary scramble to be the most diverse and hard left, the logical trajectory ends up with a race to transcend the physical limits of victimhood.

So now appears Jussie Smollett.

He is not just left-wing, but a rabid hater of Donald Trump. And he is not just black, but gay as well. And he is not just a victim, but a hyper-victim of white bullies. And not just bullies, but bullies with MAGA hats. And he is not just a victim of white red-hats, but a victim of ski-masked racists. And not just of their blows, but of (frozen?) bleach. And not just of bleach and blows, but of lynch rope as well. And they did not just hit, but smeared and slurred. And not just MAGA sloganeering, but anti-gay, anti-black—and perhaps, worst of all, in our performance society, they slandered his “Empire” TV show!

Progressives are like a worn rope being pulling apart at both ends. At one end, there is an effort to radicalize prior radicalization, and on the other end victimhood is heading toward parody.

And what is left is the emblematic Jussie Smollett—the logical result of the revolution, who alone has staked out the only authentic and ultimate revolutionary stance: nihilism—a state where no one can possibly rival Jussie’s revolutionary grievance credentials because they cannot exist in a reality based world.

Or put another way, when no one is revolutionary enough, the revolutionary auditors end up ridiculous in their zeal for power and celebrity — sort of like Orwell’s radical pigs finally prancing about on two legs and feasting on silver, sort of like Jussie Smollett leveraging the ultimate state of victimhood for a better deal on “Empire”.

Parody, yes.

Come to think of it, parody is the non-stop Performance Art of the American Left.

Parody of oppression. Parody of victimhood.

Of leadership. Of scholarship. Of justice. Of femininity and masculinity. Of diversity. Of inclusion. Of tolerance. Of equality. Of anti-racism. Of anti-fascism.

Of being revolutionaries. Of being liberal. Of being democrats.

Of being Americans.

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(Hat-tip to Cogito for the VDH article)