Impact of The Strategy
Cloward and Piven themselves, in papers published in 1971 and 1977, argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969, did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for. Political scientist Robert Albritton disagreed, writing in 1979 that the data did not support this thesis; he offered an alternative explanation for the rise in welfare caseloads.
In his 2006 book Winning the Race, political commentator John McWhorter attributed the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s to the Cloward–Piven strategy, but wrote about it negatively, stating that the strategy "created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction."
According to historian Robert E. Weir in 2007, "Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired."
Some commentators have blamed the Cloward–Piven strategy for the near-bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.
Conservative commentator Glenn Beck referred to the Cloward-Piven Strategy often on his Fox News television show, Glenn Beck, during its run from 2009 to 2011, reiterating his opinion that it had helped to inspire President Barack Obama's economic policy. On February 18, 2010, for example, Beck said, "you’ve got total destruction of wealth coming... It’s the final phase of the Cloward-Piven strategy, which is collapse the system."
Richard Kim, writing in 2010 in The Nation (in which the original essay appeared), called such assertions "a reactionary paranoid fantasy..." but says that "the left's gut reaction upon hearing of it--to laugh it off as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery--does nothing to blunt its appeal or limit its impact." The Nation later stated that Beck blames the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" for "the financial crisis of 2008, healthcare reform, Obama's election and massive voter fraud" and has resulted in the posting of much violent and threatening rhetoric by users on Beck's website, including death threats against Frances Fox Piven. For her part, Piven vigorously continues to defend the original idea, calling its conservative interpretation "lunatic".
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