state your name and #occupation
By now, #occupywallstreet has attracted so much commentary that, already, new commentaries are actually meta-commentaries, responding to ideas and criticisms of the movement currently circulating through the media and around the Internet. It becomes an anxious task to write about what’s happening: what can I say that isn’t being said already?
At the same time, the movement intends, I think, to fuel conversations about America, and about its own meaning as a protest against the current state of our society. That’s one reason to write about it. Another is that the commentaries seem to be on the verge of repeating themselves, because of a deadlock on the issue of whether or not this is an incoherent movement, incapable of making concrete, realizable demands.
When I first heard about the movement, I was skeptical of it for two reasons. The first was that the movement seemed to be making what I would call an “infinite demand” of the powers that be. The phrase comes from ethical theories about people’s obligations to one another: it is such a miracle to be sharing the world with other conscious beings that our obligation to them is, essentially, limitless. It follows that there can never be a sufficiently providential, sufficiently democratic, sufficiently just government, and that the demands of conscience will always make us discontented with what exists. I may not know exactly how to fix the suburbs, but I can still be moved by the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. Naturally, there are also finite political demands: a different tax structure, single-payer health care, environmental protections, etc.
In general, I expect art and philosophy to make infinite demands, and protest movements to make finite ones. The two are obviously related, but it is still a useful way of thinking about the difference between, say, bus boycotts (goal: desegregating the bus system) and the Ralph Ellison novel Invisible Man. To the best of my knowledge, #occupywallstreet really has no specific finite demands. There is no piece of legislation that could be passed tomorrow that would get all the protesters to head home.
Rather than making demands, the movement is accomplishing something else entirely: it is making the American Left a much more visible and threatening minority than it has been at any previous point in my life. This is immensely important. Throughout my life, the far right movements in America, including the Christian Coalition and the Tea Party movement, have always been visible and threatening. They gained followers. They demanded “a seat at the table.” They affected political discourse. Libertarians and Christian conservatives have never been even close to a majority in this country, but they have wielded disproportionate influence.
As #occupywallstreet builds momentum, I have been overwhelmed with feelings of relief — as though, for many years, I had been walking paranoid through the cities of America, afraid to be as opposed to the political mainstream as I really was. Remember how lonely it was not to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? How lonely it was to completely reject the death penalty, restrictive abortion laws, and “Megan’s Law”? To support, without reservation, the Endangered Species Act and affirmative action? At one time or another, all of these positions were as American as apple pie, but they have all been demonized since. #occupywallstreet is specifically focused on the financial crisis, but its reach is much larger: it is rekindling, at least right now, a sense of community and solidarity within the American progressive movement.
I have seen many versions of the claim that the movement “is not leaderless, but full of leaders,” and many versions of the related claim that because the current financial crisis is explicable, the movement is therefore a cogent one. These responses are very well-intentioned, but they’re on the wrong track. The moment you decide this is a movement about income disparity, the whole focus shifts to some very practical questions about how to reduce that disparity, questions that most of the protesters would have no clue how to answer. That’s the great thing about a representative democracy: the protesters don’t have to answer such questions. Nor does the movement need advice and leadership. We have leaders aplenty; it is they who need to remember their democratic mandate and be more answerable to us.
There is no escaping the fact that American popular culture, from a political standpoint, has become something of a failure, and that #occupywallstreet is perhaps more like performance art than it is like a sit-in. That is not a trivial thing; it is powerful. The Rally To Restore Sanity, led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, was ultimately sort of tragic, a huge monument to how much political meaning these two comedy teams had been forced to accept, and how little they could actually do to translate that faith into a grassroots movement. One of the (now pleasant) ironies of the #occupywallstreet movement is that it was organized partly by Adbusters, which, as a magazine, is not very successful. I subscribed to it for years, and every issue depressed the hell out of me. It made me feel sick (literally: every issue was about How They Are Poisoning You), disempowered, guilty, and isolated. This movement is doing just the opposite. Culturally, #occupywallstreet is an antidote to a nauseating surfeit of “aspirational” movies and TV shows: one photograph from an OWS article on salon.com shows the protestors occupying Times Square beneath enormous posters for Glee and The New Girl. Probably the closest thing to an artistically important “recession” movie we’ve had this year is Moneyball, about a man who triumphs despite having only $38 million to spend on his two dozen employees. We have no shortage of great American artists, but none of them, from Kanye West to Marilynne Robinson to Frank Gehry, have been able to produce art that truly responds to this crisis.
The movement will not produce the next Bob Dylan. It is the next Bob Dylan.
#occupywallstreet is not the Left version of the “Tea Party” phenomenon. Notwithstanding the right-wing coalitions that induced me to list it earlier, the Tea Party movement remains primarily a media event produced by Fox News; to call it a popular movement would be like calling the popularity of Starbuck’s a movement. This is a popular event, with a significance that preceded mainstream news coverage and that will continue to resonate whether or not the reporters go home. It is not akin to the rightist politics of the libertarian movement, because it is not a protest against the government. It is the government, our American democracy, in the process of being reborn.
I agree with a lot of this, but… there’s an important sense in which it isn’t like performance art, either. Making performance art teaches you how to make art. The important concerns of Occupy, as I’ve been involved in it in a small town, are mostly practical, and involve how to set up a communal camping space, how to work towards consensus among very different people, how to convince police not to suppress your demonstration, how to set up and use an Email list. Occupy is largely, in practice, a movement about developing skills in setting up a movement.
I’ve written a bit more at my blog if you aren’t tired already of this kind of thing.
Hey Rich! Nice to hear from you, heading over the read the post now. I totally agree with the distinction you’re making here, and I think it’s great to highlight the kind of practical re-learning of political action that is happening as a result of this movement.
In terms of my comparison to performance art, one point of reference for me was the “flashmob” movement, for two reasons. First of all, flashmobs have been incredibly successful at organizing a bunch of laypeople to do something pretty technical and complicated (i.e. choreography), with the result being democratic art. On the other hand, as soon as the flashmob movement really became something big, and started showing up in Modern Family and Friends With Benefits, it became, like the Rally to Restore Sanity, a little bit depressing, since by implication the only way to express the popular will was by dancing, and the headlines just weren’t anything to waltz about.
Let me wager an alternative explanation for the meta-commentary on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although you’re probably right that no single piece of legislation would send all of the protesters home, they do seem to share some fairly precise policy positions. For example, there seems to be some consensus against the financial industry bailouts. While this is admittedly backward looking (TARP and Maiden Lane already happened and the financial industry is already well on its way to repayment), there’s at least a forward looking policy principle there that has direct implications for existing legislation like the orderly liquidation authority under Dodd-Frank. Not that most of the protesters have ever heard of the OLA, but that’s besides the point. The protesters seem to be committed to at least some principles for what government should and shouldn’t do as a matter of policy.
The problems is that many of these proposals lack broad consensus among the left. A lot of us believe, for example, that the bailouts staved off an even larger economic collapse at little cost to the taxpayers (who are actually set to profit from TARP and Maiden Lane). I suspect that a lot of the metacommentary you’re hearing is from people like me who disagree with many of the policy positions of the movement but are nonetheless excited that it might energize the democratic party for 2012. Or people who, like me, agree with a few isolated positions associated with the movement (like, say, progressive taxation and increasing tax revenue by closing loopholes) and think that if we put up with the bad, we can maybe channel the movement towards more sensible aims.
Metacommentary, in short, is a way to express support for the movement’s potential without having to choose between identifying with, and revealing disdain for, the movement as it currently stands.
Matt! Thanks for the comment.
There are several threads to follow here. The first concerns the specific position of the protesters toward the financial crisis and the bailouts. I really don’t think this position is sharply defined; while I agree that the protesters seem frustrated that the financial industry “got away with murder,” I’m not sure how they would respond to a question like “Do you think that the bailouts prevented an even more disastrous financial collapse?” You could certainly answer that question “yes,” while still having serious reservations about how the bailout proceeded and whether the various relevant pieces of legislation went far enough. Speaking just for myself, I think that Wall Street did get away with murder and I also think that the government response prevented an even more catastrophic outcome.
However, it does seem critical to me not to reduce this movement down to something like how these assembled people feel about Dodd-Frank. “We are the 99%” is not a statement about Dodd-Frank; most of the issues to which it refers (like stagnant wages and income disparity) were well-known long before the current disaster. This is why I don’t consider the movement a threat to any pragmatic efforts to define, implement, or protect such legislation, either.
I agree that a lot of what is being written about OWS represents attempts to channel the movement toward (what we might consider) more sensible aims. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that these writers have any business trying to channel this movement. They’re not camped out and in danger of being arrested, for the most part, and even the ones who are have to accept consensus decision-making and a defiantly leaderless structure. Pretty much everyone, from the lowliest op-ed writer to Barack Obama, thinks that he or she knows more than the protesters, but there is a certain justice to the argument that if they really knew better, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.
There is a time and a place for pragmatic responses to concrete problems; by expressing support for the movement, I’m not saying I place any less value in that work.
As for the Democratic Party — to hell with the Democratic Party. It fed like a vampire on the energy of its “far left fringe” in 2008, getting everyone behind Obama and taking control of the legislature. Then, predictably, it failed. Obama failed. The legislature failed. They courted the center, compromised on behalf of monied interests, and looked weak in confrontations with Republicans. If the Democratic Party — which is a nebulously defined political abstraction, not something useful like the OLA — wants to begin courting the OWS movement, then I’m sure it will reap the rewards, just as the Republican party was energized by its ideological activists. If, on the other hand, the Democratic Party is looking to create another fake coalition with another will.i.am song, the answer will probably be “fool me twice…won’t get fooled again.”
I agree that the movement isn’t a threat to any particular policy commitments. I guess a better way to put it is that the movement seems fueled by a narrative of the current economic state of the country that relies on a lot of unstated assumptions about the consequences of different policies and practices. Being a leaderless movement means that you can never put the movement on any particular set of assumptions, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there percolating in the background (say, held by x% of the participants and y% of the supporters), influencing the impact that the movement will ultimately have. And I think the mixture of skepticism about those unstated assumptions and optimism about the movement’s potential impact is a big reason that there’s so much metacommentary. Whether the commentators have a right to try to channel the protesters, that’s likely where the impetus for metacommentary is.
As for the Democratic Party, the party has been expending political capital trying to pass a health care bill since Truman, and we have one now. Maybe you wanted the bill to look different, but we didn’t have the votes, and frankly the version we got may be better. If the Democratic Party does poorly in 2012, health care will likely be repealed before it ever gets off the ground, and we’ll spend the next 30 years trying to pass a replacement. If Obama wins in 2012, since I’m fairly confident the Court will reject the constitutional challenge, health care will go into effect, people will see that the world didn’t end, and it will probably be around for good.
Meanwhile, in this term the Democratic Party was also responsible for one of the most substantial financial reforms in decades. If the Republicans win, the legislature is going to fight tooth and nail to dismantle Dodd-Frank and the agencies are going to interpret it out of existence.
I’ll also add the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone and DOMA’s on its way out the door. Maybe the administration didn’t act fast enough, but they did act. And the administration has stepped out of the way for democratic revolutions in the Middle East and had the guts to criticize Israel. And we now have Sotomayor and Kagan on the Court. If we can get a string of democrats in office, maybe a republican appointee will actually retire while a democrat is in office–imagine, what, Breyer? Kagan? Sotomayor? as the median vote! Oh, and some liberal appellate judges outside of the Ninth Circuit would be nice, but that takes sustained success in election after election.
Sure, the administration looked weak during the Republican’s game of chicken with the debt ceiling and the default, but it looked weak because it WAS weak. It was held hostage by a House that’s only goal was to make sure Obama was a one-term President. I’m holding out judgment on how Obama played that one until I see how he leverages the budget debates during the campaign. We have an opportunity to change the conversation about taxes in this country, and Obama’s strategy during the debt ceiling fights is partially responsible. Keep in mind that part of the reason that he’s looked weak is that he (wisely) hasn’t spent the past three years campaigning. He’s mostly kept his mouth shut, done the best he could with the options available to him, and saved the campaigning for campaign season when it will actually matter.
Maybe the Democratic Party hasn’t lived up to your wishlist–I’m certainly not saying that it couldn’t have done better–but it’s done a hell of a lot over the past 3 years, and the alternative if the base doesn’t get energized in 2012 is bleak. Personally, I think who’s sitting in the white house matters quite a bit, and if OWS is indifferent to that outcome, you can’t blame me for being skeptical.
Matt, I don’t think you’re wrong about Democratic victories leading to better on-the-ground results than Democratic losses, especially over the long term. And I don’t think most of the OWS protesters would disagree (and I don’t think those who *do* disagree would feel differently if it weren’t for the protests). And I do agree with you on some of Obama’s accomplishments: I like the health care law, for instance. At the same time, and meaning no offense, your post sums up a lot of why I think these protests are necessary.
I wasn’t the biggest activist in the Bush years, but I went to my share of marches and volunteered for a couple campaigns and gave money to the Democrats. Once Obama was elected, though, even though I still followed politics I felt weirdly powerless. All I had wanted for eight years was a Democratic president and Congress, and now I had one, so what could I complain about? When the Administration defended Bush-era civil liberties violations, which had been one of the biggest reasons the Bush years seemed so nightmarish to me, I felt a disturbing quietism: if this is the guy I wanted, what options do I have other than acquiescence? And when Obama made decisions that I *could* get riled up about, like extending Bush’s tax cuts or conceding that the deficit was a problem or dropping the environmental agenda entirely, my anger was expressed entirely through muttering in my car. I never tried to do anything, even to the point of talking to friends about it. And other people have reported the same response. The protests are the antidote.
Basically, the two responses for the left since Obama was elected have been either “Obama has no choice” or “I have no choice.” As far as the former, I don’t disagree with you that the filibuster has constrained Obama’s choices to a large extent, but the choices he’s made within that framework have often been bad. I knew back in 2008 that the Republicans were not going to be won over to anything; didn’t you? Yet with the stimulus, with the tax cuts, with the debt ceiling, Obama seemed to believe that if he was reasonable the Republicans would owe him one–or, at least, the electorate would see how reasonable he was being and reward him for it. But that’s not how it works, and unfair though it may be Obama may well have cost himself a second term.
But whether Obama had a choice or not is actually less relevant than the choices *we* have. If the Left had stayed angry in early 2009, rather than sitting back and waiting for the good things to come, it could have been a progressive agenda that was energized rather than a libertarian one. We missed our chance, just like Obama did, but maybe it was worth it to realize that electoral politics are not about waiting for your team to win, and to say that, if our political leaders aren’t going to take advantage of the crisis to make real change, we will, or at least we’ll try to make them do it. None of that is incompatible with re-electing Obama. But it is incompatible with simply crossing our fingers while refreshing fivethirtyeight.com over and over again..
Just want to say that the double-period after “again” is a typo–I know it’s a small thing but it really changes the tone of the final sentence, makes it sound haughty. One period is enough for a simple guy like me.
What a great discussion.
First of all, I want to point out that these protests, as I understand them, aren’t necessarily incompatible with a certain level of respect for what Obama has accomplished. That was my point in comparing them to a work of art — Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine were still important to me, and expressed real discontent on my part, during the height of the Clinton years and the dot-com boom. Similarly, none of the specific, strategic protests that Martin Luther King participated in during the Civil Rights Movement were intended, in one fell swoop, to realize the vision he articulated in the “I Have A Dream” speech.
Unfortunately, I do feel there’s a lot of slippage between our idea of what the country needs, and our estimates about what the current Congress will vote for. I’m uninsured right now; if I get seriously ill or injured, that is going to be a huge, possibly insoluble problem for me. If I was Canadian, this would not be the case. So I’m not willing to adjust my idea of what a good healthcare bill might be by trying to account for the influence of (for example) the insurers’ lobby.
Yes, I’m pleased about Sotomayor. However, I will point out that getting a liberal Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court was such an overdue, middle-of-the-road move that it was literally a plot point on The West Wing years before it happened in real life.
Over and over again, when I read accounts of why the Democrats are struggling, it feels as though there’s an unstated assumption that somehow the Republicans just aren’t fighting fair, or playing by the rules, or something. I think tomemos did a good job commenting on this issue: what do we expect from them, at this point in history? Bipartisanship? A practical concern for the economic results of defaulting on our national debt? I expect them to be ideological, vicious, and hypocritical, and I don’t think we should negotiate with terrorists. What happens when we “negotiate” (i.e. reach deals on these various national issues) is that the Democrats lose ground.
The Democrats are eager to take credit for anything they manage to accomplish, but sometimes that’s a bit like Lee taking credit for emancipating the slaves on the grounds that HE was the one who surrendered. Gay rights activists have been tireless on behalf of their issues for decades, and when Obama showed signs of hedging on DA/DT and DOMA, they savaged him. They weren’t afraid to totally withdraw their support from him on the basis of this one issue. They went on the media and, in so many words, accused him of lying during his campaign. He responded by taking action.
I think the implicit metaphorics of these discussions about the OWS protests is something like a wild, raging river that could perhaps be fitted with a Democratic hydroelectric plant. If so, great. If not, then it’s just a destructive river that floods homes and fields. It’s actually not a terrible metaphor, but if the Democrats want to “harness” this energy, they have to make concessions to the movement. At this point that’s how we have to think of them — as concessions to the Left by the center. There are a lot of party functionaries who like the big-ticket contributors, who think “undecided” voters are to the right of Obama, and who are no doubt ready to blame OWS if the Democrats suffer another Kerry-like, Gore-like, predictable defeat next year.
“who are no doubt ready to blame OWS if the Democrats suffer another Kerry-like, Gore-like, predictable defeat next year”
Joseph, progressives are in a no-win situation with regard to the next election no matter what happens. I briefly went through the major options last year. I have yet to meet a person in OWS who doesn’t think that the failure of the Democratic Party is a large reason for the existence of OWS in the first place.
The discussions about OWS from the Democratic Party side are nicely symmetrical with the discussions about OWS from previous radicalisms. (Sorry to keep linking to my blog — but here are some examples.) Everyone wants to feel superior to these naive people and explain to them how if they just kept throwing more effort into an old-time failure, it wouldn’t be a failure after all. I can sort of see these complaints from people who really control things in the Democratic Party and who bear actual responsibility for people losing the advocacy of that party. But from random bloggers?
I missed you guys. Good to be hashing things out in the comment field of the Kugelmass Episodes again.
More later…
Thanks for the update on the protest, i spend my day researching this stuff..so it’s always nice to come across a blog like this.