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:

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...