The New Republic recently published (unwittingly, no doubt) a right-wing alarm about a curse that's supposedly been cast on African-Americans and all of us by the leftist-activist professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who, their critics say, tried to bring down capitalism by flooding the welfare rolls in the 1960s.

TNR's purveyor of this long-exhausted half-truth is John McWhorter, a young black linguist-turned-conservative racial bargainer who casts Piven and Cloward among the crackpots he'd love to erase from public memory: "Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent....., helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives."

Such power? Wow! McWhorter is certainly on-message here with recent thunderings about Piven and Cloward by Glenn Beck and by the right-radical provocateur David Horowitz, who's everyone's source on the horrors perpetrated by these two. But there's a wrinkle: Horowitz's own source on Piven and Cloward was me -- in The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 3, "The Politics of Polarization." I know this because Horowitz told me so. And thereby hangs a tale and, with it, a sobering lesson.

Piven, Cloward and many on the left in those years were in thrall to an ideology about American capitalism's dependence on racism that carried an immense burden of truth. But it nevertheless needed some deconstruction, as I showed in my Chapter 3 and on pp. 159-162, drawing on my long immersion in inner-city Brooklyn. In 1990, soon after my reckoning was published, Horowitz, whom I did not know, called to tell me that he loved the book and had a black in-law who could testify to its profound truth.

Easing myself off the phone with a polite "Thanks, but no thanks," I didn't realize that I was about to learn the danger of racial truth-telling in polarized times. The Closest of Strangers was slammed by the Piven-oriented left and showered with sloppy wet kisses from neo-cons. That helped me to understand how George Orwell felt when he tried to tell the London left what was really going in within the anti-fascist struggle in Spain, which wasn't as pure a social movement as some young idealists believed -- and as cynical Stalinist operators wanted them to believe. For telling a more difficult truth, Orwell was promptly accused of giving aid and comfort to Franco and Hitler.

A lot of leftist ideology was similarly disingenuous in presenting black disruptions of America's postwar bourgeois and white working-class paradise as the cat's paw of revolutionary change. Most of America had, indeed, consigned blacks to a "reserve army of the unemployed." making their resistance to it a humane and liberal as well as progressive imperative, but Piven and Cloward's call for a racialized "Politics of Turmoil," which they celebrated in a book by that name, held no solutions for American political culture, unjust and hypocritical though that culture often was. They certainly offered no sound strategy for a socialist agenda by relying on a politics of racial paroxysm.

Neither, however were Piven and Cloward and their admirers the powerful, malevolent conspirators they're now being made out to be. They certainly weren't the main reasons why the liberal capitalist welfare state, such as it was, did so much damage to its supposed beneficiaries.

The Closest of Strangers makes all this clear, as it does some deep, formative, moralistic, ideological and tragic reasons why many on the left still cling to overly racialist strategies for tackling broader structural problems that, we now see, are engulfing millions of whites as well as blacks. Some on the left dismiss, as neo-liberal mystifications, Obama's reliance on less-confrontational approaches to race like those I'd been commending since the early 1990s. Back then, most people scoffed at them, except for some piously hypocritical conservatives who loved preaching black "moderation" for reasons of their own.

Obama's successes (such as they are), including his 2008 election, are maddening to racist losers. But so was the demise of segregation, which drove such losers to flail at liberals and to bomb black churches in the 1960s. That wasn't a reason for those who were winning, however painfully and slowly, to behave just like the losers, as a lot of racial protest artists certainly did.

Anyone who wants to consider these arguments more seriously than a blog post can do should read the book or at least this TPM column from the 2008 campaign, in which I assess what both well-meaning progressives and black conservatives such as Shelby Steele and, by implication, McWhorter.

I rather admired Steele's The Content of Our Character, published in 1990 just before The Closest of Strangers, and my book I quoted observations of his that were and remain profoundly right. In TPM, I sketch what those were, and where he's gone wrong. Real life is like that.

I rather admired McWhorter's Losing the Race, too, in a review for The Washington Monthly in 2000. But I cautioned McWhorter then against becoming the conservative-movement water-carrier that he is, at least in his facile New Republic piece, which also dismisses the Brazilian radical educator of the 1960s and early 1970s, Paolo Freire. Unlike Piven and Cloward, Freire has been one of my inspirations (as I once had occasion to explain by quoting Freire in a pained meditation on some of my early encounters with poverty, race, and a rich congressman in Brooklyn).

The frightening effects of conspiracy mongering about the Piven and Cloward should give McWhorter pause. Those effects are described in The Nation by Richard Kim, who also disproves any Piven-Cloward conspiracy by noting (as McWhorter did, too, but not in their defense) that The Nation itself published their manifesto for a revolution in welfare and income support quite openly in 1966.

But Kim's account also seems to me to carry an almost-eager anticipation of still worse from the right -- hoping, perhaps, that such eruptions will vindicate progressive virtue and wake everyone up to the real, right-wing dangers facing the country. It's almost as if each side is succumbing to the empty temptation to egg the other on.

To which I say, Beware stripping bare the Evil in others, unless you have a larger, longer-range strategy. Yes, the Evil Ones are out there. But just as George Kennan was right to urge containment of the Soviets rather than a desperate rollback, we keepers of the American civic-republican faith and flame had better develop new ways to stand strong against the racist and capitalist abuses without lashing out histrionically and widening William Butler Yeats' gyre.

LATE NOTE: The morning after this column was posted, a fragment of it was quoted to Piven on NPR's New York Station, WNYC, by show host Brian Lehrer. Here's the link. In response, Piven did an old-left dodge, calling me a "wobbler" between "the liberal left and the conservative right." She'll never understand that, as a civic-republican, I am occasionally scathing of both left and right, not because I think that both sides are equally bad but because Piven's left plays inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right. They do it every time, and they know not what they do.

Someone who does know posted a comment on the WNYC site. "Jimmy of Staten Island," one of the New York City boroughs where many "Archie Bunkers" live isn't fodder for the Tea Party movement, but neither will he ever be reached by people who think as Piven does or who write him off as a racist or "enabler" of racists. Read what he says, below. And remember that the welfare-rights histrionics that Piven and Cloward touted as "the politics of turmoil" was a lot like the Tea Partying -- just as orchestrated and demagogic, despite Piven's pretensions otherwise.

Jimmy from Staten Island:

"Still a Democrat, still Union, but Lord Almighty, folks like Ms. Piven do little but alienate the folks in my local, and weaken their allegiance to the Democratic Party.

"Her 'strategy' to cause rifts within the voting blocs that make up Municipal Democratic Parties, ostensibly to force LBJ's hand, did nothing but bring about Nixon-Reagan, and the long-term kneecapping of the greater, national Democratic party.

"To still spout that 'rights' without 'responsibilities' is 'humiliating' is just sad, and does nothing to retain a cohesive Democratic majority."

I rest my case -- against Piven & Co. for being so hapless, but, even more, against Beck, Horowitz, and McWhorter for trying to make political hay out of their and others holding "such power over the lives of innocents," as McWhorter puts it. Only perversely hypocritical conservatives -- and perhaps a few well-meaning neo-liberals at The New Republic -- would fall for phony indignation like that.

But then, perhaps McWhorter will now trot out the relatives whose lives he says were ruined by Piven and Cloward's power, not by the capitalist racism they challenged so ineptly and counterproductively.

Apr. 06 2010 11:35 AM