POLITICS OCTOBER 18, 2011
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This article is a contribution to ‘Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street,’ A TNR Symposium. Click here to read other contributions to the series.
TNR’s editorial clucking at Occupy Wall Street suffers from weak sociological imagination compounded by wrongheaded stuffiness. Stamping your foot and demanding that the world conform to your standards—cram its demands into the formula you prefer, dress as you prefer, enunciate as you prefer, curb its radicals as you prefer—before you go out to play with it may be, to use the buzzword du jour, “understandable,” but it’s neither adequate to the situation nor helpful. In fact, it’s counterproductive. You do politics in the society you have, not the society you wish you had.
The rudiments of the American political condition can be summed up as follows: A bloated, short-sighted, self-dealing, revolving-door plutocracy owns a large share of one major party (partnering with the evangelical Christians located in the former Confederacy and elsewhere), and somewhat uneasily shares ownership of the other party with progressives. It finances politics and substantially determines and limits outcomes. Three decades of rampaging inequality have followed. The most recent upshot has been the financial calamity that wrecked millions of people’s lives—not only in this country—and produced an unending cascade of calamities. A president who shares the divided soul of the Democratic Party, and whose election stoked the hope that he could achieve—among other things—a substantial reversal of this trajectory, backed off short of full-throated reform, and has, moreover, especially since the midterm elections, been fought to a standstill by a ferocious backlash.
Enter Occupy Wall Street, an initiative of romantic, more or less radical—and crucially, to this moment, nonviolent—bands. Some are revolutionaries of a sort. Many are utopians. Most, in my experience, are sweet-tempered; some are not only apoplectic but apocalyptic, and some are both in succession. Hot-blooded and insouciant, their watchword might as well be: No Future. The icecaps are melting. So are reliable jobs (not that many of them would want corporate jobs in the first place). “Work within the system,” you say. Sure. Some of them worked for Obama or John Edwards in 2008, but when Obama fell into the polluted water they thought he could walk on, they had no trouble returning to everyday life—and nonvoting. They find the entire political system grotesque. They want to occupy. They don’t demand, they encamp, in community. Some are enraptured by comic theorists like Slavoj Zizek or not so comic ones like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
The deeper truth is that they’re in an American vein running back to the early nineteenth century—in fact, all the way back to colonization. They want to talk at length and decide everything together. So what does Occupy Wall Street “actually believe”? This is a question far easier formulated than answered. There are the placards held by the people camping in Zuccotti Park, which, as I wrote in the New York Times (Oct. 9), include such items as “End the Fed” and occasional denunciations of capitalism. There are their statements, as elicited by reporters from men-and-women-on-the-street. Then there are the increasingly numerous supporters who form, for now, an increasingly active penumbra—the outer movement, one might say. These include the thousands of union members, Moveon members, community groups, professionals, and students who made up the vast majority of those who marched on Oct. 5; and the AFL-CIO, Steelworkers and others of organized labor, who have vigorously embraced (at least verbally) the Occupy movement. There are also the citizens—some unknowable fraction of the 99 percent—who send food and donate books, equipment, and money to the Zuccotti encampment, or signal V’s and clenched fists from the upper decks of tourist buses. The bulk of this outer movement is not so actively disaffected from the entirety of the political system. But it’s angry and available.
Now, movements are unruly, often chaotic, confusing, riddled with conflict, and unpredictable. That’s the nature of the beasts. They are large, they contain multitudes. (After writing this, I saw this wonderful quotation from Whitman on a placard at Zuccotti Park Oct. 13.) The larger the movement, in a society whose variety is huge and conspicuous—whose cultural life is decentralized—the more multitudinous. This poses a taxing problem for journalists—and also for liberals, who are suspicious of social movements, which do have a way of getting out of control—anyone’s control. Just what is this strange beast slouching along in such a curious fashion?
Consult the text of the “Occupied Wall Street Journal,” which represents what at least some of the encampment believes. It’s romantic, excited. There are the utterances of all those encamping in Zuccotti Park, and the scores of other encampments around the country. In Tacoma, from a photo I’ve seen, they “look like” unemployed Boeing workers, not hippies, though it’s perfectly possible to be both, of course.
Take the principal slogans of the big Oct. 5 march. First, the park filled up with the modal sign “Tax Financial Transactions,” printed up by the National Nurses United, a union, and by far the most common sign visible on the walk to, and into, Foley Square. By far the most common and longest, and loudest chant on the march was “We are the 99 percent.” This is not hard to decode. Translation: The vast majority has been damaged by the plutocracy and this should stop. The second most popular chant was “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out.” This one lacks the care of a John Judis column, let alone a treatise on modern political economy, and would benefit from a reading of both, but it’s not exactly illiberal.
There is no single leader. True enough. The spirit of this gathering is anti-leadership. Leaderlessness poses lots of problems for movements—including the emergence of de facto but unauthorized leaders—and denouncing it comes naturally to people better suited for hierarchical structures. I harbor such impulses myself. But none of this alters the achievement of Occupy Wall Street. In a dispiriting time, they have put some new facts on the ground. This is no small thing, especially when initiatives come so substantially from the right. It’s a huge thing, in fact, in a twisted political system busy debating the shape of the earth.
Now, the new facts may not last the winter: the inner movement wants to persist as an occupation (of more parks, at least), but they will soon be challenged by the elements. The outer movement, which is now arguing about how to proceed, how to channel the energy of the protests toward progressive reform, also faces difficult choices. But if mainstream liberals follow TNR’s advice to shun the utopians, that will make the radicals in the encampments more, not less, embittered. They already invoke the spectre of “co-optation,” which always haunts radicals whenever mainstream political figures make sympathetic noises. If, as H. L. Mencken said, a Puritan is someone “desperately afraid that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time,” today’s romantics live in fear that someone among the elites might agree with them—and act on their agreement.
Three cheers for skepticism, then—including skepticism about liberals’ own groupthink—the liberal propensity to devolve into what Harold Rosenberg once called “the herd of independent minds.” When idiots drive John Lewis off a platform in Occupy Atlanta, condemn them for that. I do. But pure condemnation is self-defeating. The more conventionally organized had better learn how to engage Occupy Wall Street in friendly discussion. They’ve breathed life into a suffocating polity. So what does Occupy Wall Street “actually believe”? What, in other words, is its essence? A good question to ask all political phenomena: for example, what is the essence of the Democratic Party? This is a good time to find out.
Todd Gitlin is a professor at Columbia, a former president of SDS, and the author, most recently, of Undying, a novel.
14 comments
Excellent post. I agree that the Democratic party is going to have to ask itself the question "what are we" before it can attempt to try and absorb the OWS into the fold. The OWS has to evolve itself and it is doing so, we need to support without finger waving 'this is how you do it' and keep it breathing life into the left and center. We need it. America needs it.
- singlspeed
October 18, 2011 at 12:59am
Useful. But it's helpful to remember that Occupy Wall Street occupied everywhere and I saw a lot of people and activity on Saturday. At this point, we need to start seeing the trappings of deliberative and somewhat communicative organization, for there are the twin tragedies that may kneecap the movement: (1) some violent outburst. This would likely come from a few bad apples, but it could turn the support of majorities of Americans around really quickly--see the 1960s (2) a dissipation of energy; all heat, no light. This is one of the chief reasons it has to look to steps taken by groups ranging from the Tea Party to SDS to SNCC to build a beachhead among the "outer movement" and bring them in in some manner. (Here's a youthful, contemporary one: flash mobs to call House members who are acting more on the side of Big Banks, Wall Street, and the Chamber of Commerce rather than regular people.) OWS may live on in all of our hearts, but its goals are political--if it doesn't show tangible paths to achieving them, it becomes a movement that expresses anger at the political system and unwittingly allows that anger to fester as the system stays unreformed. (1) and (2) are related. The longer a movement of the demos goes on while actively seeing no progress, the likelier some bad apples impatiently try to use violence to move things forward. The Civil Rights Movement became the success it did because of its peacefulness and the moral conviction of its members that others would be able to see them non-violently on the side of the right and the good. Once they started using that moral outrage, popular opinion turned back to scepticism and fear. The Tea Party is a different story entirely; in retrospect, it is clear they astro-turfed their outrage in order to appeal to an outer movement of people angry at the current political order, but blindingly obvious that the core movement are people who have quite a bit of political experience and constituted the conservative vanguard of the Republican Party. Thus, even with the political purchase their movement gained in 2010 and the change of the Republican Party at state and federal levels to respond to their grievances, their grievances are not the grievances of anything near a majority of Americans. They actually have the levers and while in power turn out not to be the change that people could believe in.
- chaitless
October 18, 2011 at 6:02am
I didn't know it possible to write an essay on OWS and never include "middle class", because that's what the protests are all about, a weakened and weakening middle class. Which is the same for the tea party protests, it's just that reporting on those protests, as with reporting on OWS, focuses on the fringe. As for the condition of the plutocracy, I must share my weekend, spent at one of the nation's leading universities, where I can report there is no shortage of money (being spent on facilities and students) and no shortage of optimism about the future, their future, the students who attend the university. Compare that with all the second tier and below universities, from which many of the protestors graduated. Yes, the polarization of America will soon be complete, an aristocracy composed of the best and brightest (yes, some selected by birth, but most selected by ability), educated at the best universities, being prepared for a rewarding career, and everybody else, ill-prepared for what's ahead. Like I said, a weakened and weakening middle class.
- rayward
October 18, 2011 at 7:50am
It's still happening this morning rayward, I couldn't even get through the latest drivel on the front page of the NYT, it's still All Hippies All the Time - so tedious.
- WandreyCer
October 18, 2011 at 10:53am
rayward and chaitless...all salient points. I would add this. Looking at the demographics of the OWS, it's not just community college or second-tier university graduates that make up the bulk of the OWS's youth demographic but a growing segment of people who now aspire to simply be or even attain "middle class" let alone become the next Mark Zuckerberg. The power elites will always send their progeny to their alma mater and the elites will continue to chitter chatter amongst themselves. I find myself floating along the edges of that group because of the nature of my profession and see plenty of money floating around looking for investment opportunities. While at the same time dealing with the lower end of the economic spectrum of folks working to make ends meet and just try to enjoy what little they have. New Orleans seems to amplify this stratification. The polarization has set in among older generations already though. But for the youth, I see plenty of well-educated, upper tier university grads working in careers that aren't focused on finance, power or managing their family's wealth. The sad reality is, we see an entire generation and up & coming generation of youth that have been told since birth - get the best education possible and the world is your oyster. But they've also grown up in the aughts - a decade of decadence, turmoil and economic decimation. Where steady, single-employer careers are a myth. Where being a permanent "consultant" or "free-lance contractor" is the norm now. 2-month, 6-month or 1-year contracts are steady. The current crop of graduates are entrepreneurial because they have to be and many because they want to be. The 'American Dream' is no longer working hard, getting rich and owning a home. That's my parent's version. The current dream is "gainful employment, being able to afford to live without living paycheck to paycheck, and working to live not living to work." The one thing the OWS has going for it is that youthful energy and optimism about the future because that's all these kids really have left going for them. Pouring themselves into something as nebulous as the Occupy movement is giving them the chance to focus and perhaps, I hope, affect political change on a system that has ossified into a sclerotic system that serves the elite, the old, the powerful and the crony capitalism.
- singlspeed
October 18, 2011 at 11:54am
"Occupy Wall Street Is Chaotic, Romantic, and anti-Semitic? Is that a Good Thing? "One Percent" "Anti-Semites are a tiny fringe at the Occupy Wall Street protests. But an inability to quiet them shows the limitations of a leaderless movement." By Michelle Goldberg http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/80922/one-percent/?utm_source=Tablet+Magazine+List&utm_campaign=21b9c3ab99-10_18_2011&utm_medium=email
- arnon
October 18, 2011 at 2:20pm
Arnon. Did you even read past the opening paragraph or headline of the article you posted? Quoting from the same article: "The charge that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism is dishonest and deceptive." "“Clearly there’s been tension for the last couple of decades between Jews who identify as supporters of Israel and the radical left that views Zionism as an extension of American imperialism,” said Sieradski. But groups like ANSWER aren’t running things at Occupy Wall Street—no one is. For progressive Jews, that’s opened up new room for involvement. Thus Sieradski, who has been alienated from much of Jewish communal life, suddenly feels “on fire again” about the possibility of specifically Jewish activism. “After the service, I had a line of 100 people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you, that was the most meaningful Jewish experience of my entire life,’ ” he said. The conservative Jewish magazine Commentary has noticed the ecstatic Jewish involvement in Occupy Wall Street. “The turnout the event generated, as well as the discussion it has so far provoked, are deeply troubling trends that all who care about the Jewish future would do well to take seriously,” Matthew Ackerman wrote on the magazine’s blog. Rarely, he wrote, “has a movement so radical in its aims been tied so explicitly to a religious tradition as was the case with this past Friday’s service.”" And yes...there are some fringe groups like ANSWER and the loose-end connection to Anonymous hanging around the edges of OWS but apparently condemning the whole movement as being anti-Semetic is easier than working to push such groups like ANSWER out and the retard holding the "Zionists control Wall St." sign
- singlspeed
October 18, 2011 at 2:50pm
Of course, did you understand the article?
- arnon
October 18, 2011 at 3:48pm
Quotes from the article: “The charge that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism is dishonest and deceptive. But it’s built around a kernel of truth. There are a few Jew-baiters at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, though they are marginal, particularly compared to the large numbers of Jewish activists taking part. Yet the leaderless, diffuse nature of the movement, in some ways its greatest strength, also makes it hard to police bigots, bullies, and cranks. This isn’t just about Jews—Occupy Wall Street’s ability to find some measure of unity and discipline amid a commitment to anarchy will determine whether it is able to grow beyond demonstrating widespread disaffection with the status quo. Occupy Wall Street, as you’ve surely learned by now, is organized, for lack of a better word, around non-hierarchical principles derived from anarchist thought….. Occupy Wall Street lacks tools for enforcing any sort of discipline, or ostracizing troublemakers. When someone at a Tea Party rally holds a particularly offensive sign, as many have, the movement can denounce them. But there is no one at Occupy Wall Street to do the denouncing….. …………. This inability to enforce some kind of order, or to even recognize a mechanism for doing so, could cause problems for Occupy Wall Street. Such issues have bedeviled left-wing movements before. In the early 1970s, Jo Freeman wrote an important essay [8] about the self-sabotaging distrust of organization in the women’s movement, titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” “Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done,” she wrote. “It is when people get tired of ‘just talking’ and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation.” Such movements, she argued, awaken people’s energy without channeling it. “Some women just ‘do their own thing.’ This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort.”” This is similar to my critique of the demonstrations thus far. I liked the phrase "the tyranny of structuralness." If there is a sense that rigid structures are tyrannical, and there is, so too is there a strong sense that lack of structures imposes its own tyrannies. I hope the Tablet Mag. article is reprinted here.
- arnon
October 18, 2011 at 4:12pm
I did read it Arnon. The last paragraph captures the issues that OWS needs to address to get beyond it's supposed march towards a "tyranny of structuralness." "There are lessons here for Occupy Wall Street. The movement has been enormously successful at capturing people’s imaginations and giving them a place to gather, air deep and legitimate grievances, and be invigorated by the power of group solidarity. But coming together and creating a counterculture is ultimately not enough to effect real and lasting change. For that, leadership and structure are ultimately needed. Occupy Wall Street is not anti-Semitic, and the presence of a few odd Jew-haters is not the movement’s fault. Its inability to quickly shut them up, though, may augur problems for its future." I hardly see the OWS become a force of tyranny anytime soon. I would like to see the blob-like nature of its non-hierarchical structure coalesce sooner rather than later. Does it need to be vertical or horizontal? It is still in its infancy and getting its feet and is like trying to herd cats at the moment. I'm just not willing to condemn the OWS yet for its failure to structuralize itself immediately.
- singlspeed
October 18, 2011 at 5:06pm
"I hardly see the OWS become a force of tyranny anytime soon." They'd better think of something or they will become old news sooner than they think. This is where organizations with similar goals in mind can help.
- arnon
October 18, 2011 at 5:34pm
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/10/anti-semites_with_signs.html
- zardoz67
October 18, 2011 at 6:14pm
The history of the twentieth century shows one thing clearly. That is, when "chaotic, romantic and utopian" becomes politicized the results are catastrophic. Political romanticism is the soil out of which Communism, Nazism, and fascism grew. The result: the Soviet Union, where tens of millions died in slave labor camps. Nazi Germany, a regime which in 13 years murdered six million Jews and four million others. Not to mention World War II, the war which Hitler and Stalin collaborated in starting, and which resulted in 50 million deaths. After World War II we had Chairman Mao, who was personally responsible for the deaths of 80 (or so) million deaths of his own subjects. The Chairman, a favorite in the "idealistic" sixties, holds the all time record for homicide. All of the totalitarian regimes grew out of the soil of chaos. romanticism and utopianism. This isn't controversial. A lot of the best literature on the subject comes from the left. Todd Gittlin of all people should understand this. He lived through the sixties, where the underlying identity of romantic political idealism and totalitarianism became plain for all to see. All the totalitarian movements had simiiar themes: creating an ideal society, getting rid of the bourgeois plutocrats and creating
- bulbman1066
October 19, 2011 at 12:42am
continuing the previous post: a perfect society of peace, justice, and equality. All of those movements resulted in human misery beyond our ability to imagine.
- bulbman1066
October 19, 2011 at 12:49am