Isegoria

Bryan Caplan points to an eyebrow-furrowing 1-star review of an anti-Obama book he hasn’t read:

I guess the reviewer is serious, but you tell me:

There will always be skeptics and nonbelievers. In “The Obama Nation,” Dr. Corsi makes clear he is no believer and harbors suspicions about any messianic figure that appears out of nowhere and builds a fervent following. He warns that misplaced hope is naive and dangerous. He has doubts about any unifying movement that is galvanized by a cult of personality. He has doubts about connections, backgrounds, associations, hidden agendas, oblique messages, word origins, trust faith dreams peace hope change . . . Dr. Corsi certainly is full of doubt.

It’s understandable to show doubt in the face of forces we cannot comprehend. Even Jesus had a Doubting Thomas. Which makes me wonder how Dr. Corsi would respond if Jesus returned and decided to run for the U.S. Presidency? Surely Corsi would target even Him as “unfit” and radical.

So far Corsi sounds like a pillar of sanity. The 1-star review goes on:

Here is the truth: some truths are unknowable. Contrary to what Dr. Corsi exhorts, it’s simply not always black-and-white. There’s a gray area between veracity and faith, and human truths always have two sides. In this realm, Dr. Corsi and his “facts” and footnotes have no relevance. He is rendered tangential and his arguments immaterial.

And people say that no one talks like Ayn Rand villains! Lest you think I exaggerate, the 1-star review goes on:

Here is the truth: the basic ideas that are brought about by any visionary that have positive universal applications in our daily lives can never be destroyed. The words of change, the message of hope and the idea of redemption will endure. We should not be frightened, instead, we should embrace the opportunity to witness the rebirth of optimism.

Sometimes, you just have to put your foot on the water (Matthew 14:29-31) and if your faith is strong, you will not sink.

You could dismiss this review as the work of a demented mind, but that’s hardly fair — the spelling and grammar are well above average. You could dismiss it as the work of an agent provocateur, but that’s pretty paranoid. I’m left with the thought that some smart people think that if we just have faith in our leaders, we’ll witness miracles. Scary.

Yes, scary.

John Avlon, author of Independent Nation: How Centrism Can Change American Politics, says that What Independent Voters Want is independence from special interests guided by a common-sense balance of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism — which sounds like not-so-strident libertarianism:

Back in 1954, only 22% of voters identified themselves as independents, according to the American National Election Survey. Fifty years later the number was nearly double. Now, two out of five Americans can’t name anything they like about the Democrats, and 50% say the same about Republicans.
[...]
Professional partisans in Washington try to ignore this shift, perpetuating the myth that the independent movement is a chaotic grab bag. In fact, the movement has a coherent set of underlying beliefs: Independents tend to be fiscally conservative, socially progressive and strong on national security. They believe in putting patriotism over partisanship and the national interest over special interests.

One year ago, while Republicans named terrorism as their No. 1 issue and Democrats pointed to health care, independents were already feeling the squeeze of the economy. They want a return to fiscal responsibility.

A 2007 study of independents by the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation showed they are not swayed by social-conservative issues. Independents were more likely than either Republicans or Democrats to agree that abortion should be legal in most (but not all) cases, and that same-sex couples should be allowed to legally form civil unions, but not to marry.

The top targets of independents’ anger are illustrative — hypocritical politicians, pork-barrel projects and a lack of bipartisan solutions in Washington, according to a 2008 national survey of independents by TargetPoint Consulting. Then there’s the Bush administration. Independents believe the current president is the worst in recent history, but there is one area of policy overlap: 66% of independent voters believe that the U.S. has an obligation to establish security in Iraq before withdrawing.

James Simpson explains the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis:

I submit to you they [the Democrats] understand the consequences [of failed policies]. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent — the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

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. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their “rights.” According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, “one person was on the welfare rolls… for every two working in the city’s private economy.”

According to another City Journal article titled “Compassion Gone Mad“:

The movement’s impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay’s first two years; spending doubled… The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO’s Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for “an effort at economic sabotage.” He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals’ threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:

Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.

The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven’s thrill that “…the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.”