Certainly Piven and her ilk are not caught up in all that bourgeois claptrap like the democratic process; I give her credit, if that’s the word, for not hiding the fact that she’s against it.

But her assumption is that if the system breaks down she and people like her will be the ones deciding what the next one will look like. If such a circumstance were to come about it’s likely that Piven would like what results a lot less than she likes the one we have now.

This interpretation is quite fair–Piven is opposed to democracy in its generally understood sense–and the fact that The Nation not only gives her space to make her point but probably agrees with her is noteworthy.

I remember reading that Savio quotation back when it was made and when I was in high school. It’s one of the reasons that I never went off the deep end politically. Even then, and I wasn’t the brightest or most aware high school kid imaginable, I realized that referring to the United States as if it were something like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany was simply unhinged.