JAMES TARANTO:PIVEN AND THE NYTIMES UNCIVIL CAMPAIGN FOR CIVILITY

Posted By Ruth King on January 25th, 2011

By JAMES TARANTO

In the olden days, Frances Fox Piven was a cutting-edge social theorist of the hard left. In a 1977 book, she and her husband, Richard Cloward, argued “that the poor and unemployed are so isolated from the levers of power in America that their greatest potential impact is to withhold ‘quiescence in civil life: they can riot,’ ” as Stanley Kurtz reports in National Review Online:

At the heart of the book, Cloward and Piven luxuriously describe instances of “mob looting,” “rent riots,” and similar disruptions, egged on especially by Communist-party organizers in the 1930s. Many of those violent protests resulted in injuries. A few led to deaths. The central argument of Poor People’s Movements is that it was not formal democratic activity but violent disruptions inspired by leftist organizers that forced the first great expansion of the welfare state.

Toward the end of the book, when Cloward and Piven describe their own work with the National Welfare Rights Organization, they treat the violent urban rioting of the Sixties as a positive force behind that era’s expansion of the welfare state

Piven is now in the autumn of life, 78 and widowed nearly a decade. But she still dreams of revolution, as evidenced by this article in the Jan. 10 issue of the soft-core hard-left periodical The Nation:

Before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. . . .

An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.

The first paragraph of this passage could describe the Tea Party movement. But the Tea Party is nonviolent, and the second paragraph makes clear that is not what Piven has in mind. In fact, Piven has nothing but scorn for the Tea Party, which is the subject of a bigoted rant she delivered last month, which you can hear on Glenn Beck’s site TheBlaze.com:

These voters . . . are older. . . . They’re white, they’re all white. . . . These are the people in American society–and you know, they are always there. . . . For them, change is for the worse. After all, there’s an African-American in the White House. That’s sort of beyond their cultural experience. The American population is darkening. That’s also beyond their experience. . . . And you know, I don’t have any data on this, but I am absolutely sure that sex is very important in what is happening to older people.

No doubt the Tea Party’s individualistic orientation also makes it anathema to the superannuated socialist. Piven has gained a degree of notoriety of late thanks to Beck, who has frequently and harshly criticized her ideas on his radio and TV shows. In a Saturday news story, the New York Times reported that “her name has become a kind of shorthand for ‘enemy’ on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program.”

A three-part, 15-letter, five-syllable name is “shorthand” for a five-letter word? As we shall see, that isn’t the only thing the Times got backward about this story.

This passage in the Times story sums up the Piven-Beck ruckus:

Her assertions that “an effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece,” and that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones,” led Mr. Beck to ask on Fox this week, “Is that not inciting violence? Is that not asking for violence?” Videos of fires in Greece played behind him.

“That is not a call for violence,” Ms. Piven said Friday of the references to riots. “There is a kind of rhetorical trick that is always used to denounce movements of ordinary people, and that is to imply that the massing of people itself is violent.”

It must be said that the answer to Beck’s question is no. Piven is not inciting violence.

YouTube/”Democracy Now”Piven: “Sex is very important.”

The legal standard for incitement was spelled out by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. A local Ku Klux Klan leader was convicted of “criminal syndicalism” for “advocat[ing] . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.”

Brandenburg had been filmed at a KKK rally, where he said: “We’re not a revengent organization, but if our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken.” He also spoke of his desire to “return” blacks–to whom he referred by a now-unprintable six-letter slur–to Africa and Jews to Israel.

In a unanimous unsigned opinion, the justices overturned Brandenburg’s conviction: “The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

There was no risk of imminent lawless action when Piven wrote her piece in The Nation. It is highly unlikely that the magazine’s readers are numerous and energetic enough to stage an actual riot. Thus Piven, like Brandenburg, was merely advocating violence, not inciting it. She crossed no legal line.

She did, however, cross a moral line. In the past few weeks we’ve heard a lot, especially from the Times, about the dangers of violent rhetoric. Most examples of such “rhetoric” consist of innocuous metaphors: a political action committee’s map of districts whose congressmen are targeted for defeat, or a representative’s urging her constituents to be “armed” with information. Piven’s statement that “protesters need targets,” taken on its own, would fall into this category. But her endorsement of European-style riots constitutes actual violent rhetoric.

The Times, however, inverts the story. In the paper’s telling, Piven, the advocate of violence, is the victim; Beck, her critic, is the villain. The headline reads: “Spotlight From Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats.”

Piven claims to have received at least three threatening emails, which an editorial in The Nation quotes (warning: obscene language at link). None include a direct threat, but all are hostile and offensive, and two wish her dead. It is wrong to send such foul communications, and if police conclude that any of these are true threats, the senders should be prosecuted. Neither the Times nor The Nation reports that such a determination has been made.

Years ago, we covered a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York. The 16 Klansmen who showed up were vastly outnumbered by the scores of police on the scene to protect them from thousands of angry counterprotesters. The event must have cost the taxpayers a bundle, but that is the price we pay for freedom of speech, even morally repugnant speech. If Piven is genuinely under threat, the New York City Police Department should provide her with extra protection.

But the idea that Beck is to blame for these alleged threats is baseless. That is why the Times makes this accusation only indirectly, through insinuation and innuendo, consistent with its recent journalistic modus operandi. Indeed, what exactly is Beck supposed to have done wrong here? There is no allegation that anything he has said about Piven or her ideas is untrue, save for her denial in the Times that she has advocated violence, which is contradicted by her own quote in the previous paragraph.

Nor is there any claim that Beck has advocated threats against Piven. Quite the contrary, the Times reports that his website has suppressed them:

One such threat, published as an anonymous comment on The Blaze, read, “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back.” (The spelling and capitalizing have not been changed.)

That comment and others that were direct threats were later deleted, but other comments remain that charge her with treasonous behavior.

Now, “treasonous behavior” is strong language, but it reminded us of something we read in 2009:

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason–treason against the planet.

That was Paul Krugman, star columnist of the New York Times. Glenn Beck’s website enforces on its commenters a standard of civility comparable to the standard the Times imposes on staff columnists for its op-ed page. That may be an indictment of Beck, but it is not one that the Times can credibly hand up.

(We should note here that Beck’s TV program appears on Fox News Channel, which, like The Wall Street Journal and this website, is owned by News Corp. His radio show and TheBlaze.com have no connection to News Corp.)

The Times story on the Beck-Piven conflict is in furtherance of a public relations campaign launched last week by a group styling itself the Center for Constitutional Rights. Its press release announcing the effort accomplishes a Times-like inversion in the very headline: “CCR Appeals to Fox News President for Help in Silencing Glenn Beck Misinformation Campaign Against Progressive Professor.”

They may not agree with what you say, but they’ll fight to the death for your right to remain silent.

And the New York Times will cheer them on in that fight. Why is a newspaper that has been posturing as the scourge of violent rhetoric now siding with a purveyor of such rhetoric, and blatantly slanting the news as it does so? Because her opponent is a prominent media figure from outside the old media establishment. Because Glenn Beck is a threat to the authority of the New York Times.

Don’t Know Much About History
Last week was the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. It was also the 70th anniversary of FDR’s third inaugural, the 30th anniversary of Reagan’s first, and the 10th anniversary of George W. Bush’s first. But the JFK myth still looms large, especially since people who were children at the time of his assassination are now at the peak of their influence, so it’s not surprising that the media would focus on his semicentennial.

Nor is it surprising, two weeks after the attempted assassination of a politician, that media figures would draw unwarranted parallels between JFK and Gabrielle Giffords, between 1963 and 2011. It’s an easy, lazy thing to do.

NewsBusters.org criticizes ABC News’s Christiane Amanpour for doing just that, but misses her worst howler, in a question to Jean Kennedy Smith, JFK’s sister and only surviving sibling:

A family bound tightly together by power and later, grief. John F. Kennedy was assassinated less than three years after his inauguration, in November 1963. His brother, Bobby, in 1968. Two acts of political violence so traumatic that the country has never fully recovered. It’s an episode eerily relevant today in the wake of the assassination attempt against Gabrielle Giffords less than two weeks ago. A congresswoman was targeted. No matter what the reason, how would you describe the atmosphere, the political atmosphere today in the country?

In truth, “the political atmosphere” in 1968–when Robert F. Kennedy became the last sitting member of Congress to be assassinated in the U.S.–was vastly different from that in 1963. The 4½ years between JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations had seen a series of momentous events: the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the rise of the New Right, Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat, the assassination of Malcolm X, the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, the creation of Medicare, the declaration of War on Poverty, the rise of the Black Power movement, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the rise of the antiwar movement, Lyndon B. Johnson’s withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race, the assassination of Martin Luther King, race riots in various American cities.

No doubt this list is less than all-inclusive. Does Amanpour mean to suggest that the political climate today is similar to that in 1963 or 1968? That the distinction doesn’t even seem to have occurred to her shows you just how lazy the parallel is.

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