With the midterm elections four weeks away, we spend the rest of the hour with the sociologist, the activist, the legendary Frances Fox Piven. She turned 90 on Monday. Frances Fox Piven is a longtime social movement scholar, distinguished professor emerita of political science and sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her groundbreaking books include Regulating the Poor and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail with her late husband and collaborator Richard Cloward. Her other books include Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America and Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way.
we’re at a kind of crisis juncture in American development and in the world’s development. But we’ve been there before. Democracy — we think of the United States as a democratic country. It’s always been a very limited democracy. And what kind of — what democratic rights we have have always been fought for. We didn’t get them automatically, and we didn’t get them with the agreement of the propertied classes in the United States. So, American history is punctuated by bitter fights over the contest between a kind of authoritarianism and democracy. And we’re at another juncture of a bitter contest about democratic rights.
And it’s complicated because it isn’t necessarily all the people, the ordinary people, who fight for democracy. People — all sorts of cults have a grip on American development. And the very complexity of
— source democracynow.org | Oct 11, 2022