The Occupy Wall Street movement is fading now. The mayor of New York has cleared the park of the mother rally; the movement’s leaders say they are trying to figure out their next move; and the polls show the public is sick of hearing about it, though many people were never sure what “it” was.
Most of our political melodrama these days gets a shorter tryout than a TV sitcom — about two weeks instead of 13.
Here are three ways to look at the Occupy Movement.
The first is to view it as public awareness or consciousness raising, like teaching people that cigarettes are bad for you or that recycling is responsible.
The Occupy Movement is simply trying to point out that a few people seem to hold the controls in our economy. They make the rules and the rest of us live by them; they make the money and the rest of us make the products; they get richer and acquire more things as well as more capital and privilege, while the middle class sinks into the lower middle class and the lower middle class sinks into the poor.
OK, we’ll stipulate that all of that’s true. For years now, academics and journalists have been writing about oligarchy, and the maldistribution of wealth, and reverse redistributionist schemes like the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and the end of manufacturing.
What’s the point?
Bringing the message to the masses?
Maybe. Maybe some people still don’t get it and are still voting for the folks who shaft them.
So, this is a teach-in?
Well, that’s better than a primal scream.
But Occupy had better get someone to the rallies who wears blue jeans for work and not style.
They’d better talk to someone other than themselves.
Preach, somehow, to the unconverted.
Having your consciousness raised is not enough. Because awareness is not action.
Remember “The Greening of America”? The idea of that book, so many moons ago, was that awareness eventually makes change.
Not in politics or public policy.
In democratic politics, power makes change.
And power comes from votes.
Barack Obama made change in his first two years in office because he had the votes. He won the presidency by a comfortable margin on a historic night in November 2008 and he had the Congress.
The Tea Party made its kind of change in 2011, because in 2010 it mobilized its vote and won the House of Representatives and, effectively, the Senate.
In 2008, the “Bubba” and elderly vote suppressed itself. Blacks and the young were energized and mobilized.
In 2010. the reverse occurred. Many of Obama’s voters stayed home; the other side spoke with a roar.
Maybe the Occupy Movement is blowback to the blowback; reaction to the reaction: The young, minorities, and the dispossessed are answering the forces of “no” with an insistence upon the inevitability of change. Demographics are destiny. You won’t outlive us. Deal with it.
That’s a second view.
The third view of the Occupy Movement is that it is a liberal Tea Party — ordinary people who are angry, and voicing that anger but as a prelude to something. (For the Tea Party is also composed of people who feel they are cogs in a machine that others own and run.) Maybe the Occupiers are getting ready to organize something.
Alas, there is no sign of that yet. The movement has not yet graduated to the Tea Party’s level of political sophistication.
That is to say, Occupy Wall Street has not yet moved on to recruiting, backing, and electing candidates.
Like it or loathe it, the Tea Party quickly figured out that anger, consciousness raising, and waves of reaction don’t mean anything if the other party has the Congress. The Tea Partiers decided to go after the House and try to elect a number of new congressmen. Everyone said it was impossible. But they did it: They gained 63 seats to make their majority 242-193, the best numbers the Republicans have had in the House since 1946.
You want to get the attention of Wall Street, rock the system, and push the president to the left? Elect 100 progressives to the House. The world will change very quickly.
Whining that you are disappointed and beating on drums all day won’t change the world. Or even your co-pays.
The right to assemble is a First Amendment right, and, like free speech, as nearly absolute as a constitutional right in the United States can be. But, like speech, it is a practical right, not an abstract right. The ultimate end is not to express a mood or raise awareness, or even to honk your horn right back at the other guy even louder than his honk, but to organize politically, to win votes and office, and to achieve change by the responsible exercise of power.
Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
