By Victor Morawski
Many of us have from time to time fallen victim to the common human frailty of trying to do too much too soon, usually with negative results. We have made ourselves very sore or by diving into that new exercise program with a little too much fervor. Trying to take off some of those extra pounds in record time we have actually undermined our health and affected our alertness. In making too many changes too quickly in that new position to which we were promoted we ended up angering and alienating our coworkers.
It would not be hard to charge members of Obama Administration and other prominent Democrats with the same human frailty. In taking on comprehensive health care reform, two major stimulus packages, auto industry bailouts, major environmental cap and trade legislation, nationalization of the student loan program, privatization of NASA and initiating steps for illegal alien amnesty they may easily be charged with taking on too much too soon, out of an innocent and all-too-human excess of enthusiasm. And such a dizzying succession of actions is bound to get them into trouble.
But there is a far more insidious light in which the initiatives of this Administration and its Congressional supporters during the first year and a half of their tenure can be viewed—one which, while it may have the improbable ring of a far-fetched conspiracy theory, should not be dismissed out-of-hand and deserves serious consideration because, if true, it has some serious and profound implications.
Some have plausibly suggested their actions to date may be part of an overall plan to undermine and overwhelm American free market Capitalism using the Marxist-inspired Cloward-Piven Strategy (CPS). Named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and wife Frances Fox Piven, CPS is a strategy for forcing the collapse of an organization or economic system from within by overloading it with an unrelenting series of burdensome demands.
Directly inspired through their own admission by avowed Communist Saul Alinsky, their CPS primarily focuses on two of his famous Rules for Radicals. The first is RULE 4, “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” His whole approach for bringing about change in the direction of socialism is often referred to as “boring from within.” Like termites that bring about collapse of a home’s foundation from the inside, Alinsky-inspired radicals are urged to undermine the basic structures of Capitalism by working from within them to bring about their collapse. And the President, who received his early training in community organizing from Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation and who represented ACORN, an organization whose voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy is arguably just such an Alinsky-inspired radical.
The second Alinsky rule—“RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” —explains why Obama and his followers are trying to do so much so quickly and it isn’t due to youthful enthusiasm. This rule, according to one Midland blogger suggests, “Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest…”
In Backgammon, my hobby, there is a game plan that parallels this strategy. It is even called a Blitz or Attacking game and consists in relentlessly pressuring your opponent until you have entirely overwhelmed them. It can only be employed, however, in certain specific situations. Most Backgammon games do not employ a Blitz strategy but are relatively even-handed affairs of give and take with opponents having positions of more or less equal strength where one opponent finally gains enough of an edge to pull off a close win.
Most politics, like most Backgammon games, usually proceeds in a give and take arena of mutual compromise. As Progressive Richard Rorty once noted, gains made by the left are often achieved in this plodding two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion.
The key to a successful blitz is knowing when the game situation is right to employ it. And who can doubt that, for the new Obama Administration, the situation was right in the political arena. With a Democratic President and significant Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress—including a filibuster proof super majority in the Senate—the time was right to mount a blitz to fundamentally transform America into, at minimum, a European style social democracy.
The key to a successful defense against the Blitz is to, first of all, recognize what your opponent is trying to do, and to put all of your efforts into first establishing an anchoring point to stop the attack.
Our strategy to stop the Obama Administration’s blitz is first to elect in 2012 leaders who will hold true to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded as an anchor. In Backgammon it can be deadly not to recognize that you are being Blitzed. In politics it can be just as deadly not to recognize the attach that our nation’s foundations is under and to instead elect people who misread the politial arena as calling simply for more give and take quiet business as usual.
Victor Morawski, professor at Coppin State University, is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer for Americans for Limited Government.
