Wednesday, September 28, 2011

When the Street is the Sole Deciderator


I know, I know. Even as the Occupy Together web site edges ever closer to the magical number of 100 cities supporting the continuing Occupy Wall Street actions, it would be all too easy to be as jaded and snippy as Ginia Bellafante, telling us in the Sept. 25 New York Times that the protesters in Zuccotti Square were young, aimless, unsure of goals, and as grubby as the Liberal Hawks of the 1960s charged Vietnam protesters with being. It would be easy to place bets that most of these cities with support actions would be lucky to bring out 100 people, let alone thousands. It would be easy to let our sarcasm be as big as our despair.

And yet, and yet ... When I went to the Sept. 27 General Assembly for Occupy Denver, I saw more than 100 smart and attentive protesters in it for the long haul. We could call this a Children's Crusade of a surprising sort, because the backbone of protesters in Denver were young families in their late 20s and early 30s, dragging babies and toddlers in their wake - not a movement dominated by college students, a movement dominated by young working familes. This doesn't imply that power brokers on Wall Street and across the nation need to start trembling in their boots, but the number of people from all walks of life and every state in the nation, writing in to the New York Times to complain of Bellafante's writing, and to complain of Inspector Anthony Bologna's pepper-spraying of New York protesters, indicates that the protesters speak for a whole lot of people who are fed up beyond fed up. Fine, the jaded say, but does that translate to votes? Maybe not.

And yet, and yet.... the students in Spain, Greece, Israel and elsewhere who are bringing traffic and urban business to a stop do not speak for a particular political party. They simply want to make the economy unmovable and their particular nations ungovernable. More power to them. It's no accident that Occupy Wall Street originally was promoted by Adbusters magazine, which doesn't really promote a left or right line per se. It plays the somewhat nihilist refrain that the entire society and culture is ailing, and needs to fall. This attitude was reflected in a big, sprawling front-page article in the Sept. 27 New York Times (perhaps paying penance for Bellafante's terrible hatchet job), in which the author saw the Arab Spring, Occupy Together, and movements in India, Greece, Spain, Israel, and dozens of other nations as a flat and simple rejection of the electoral process in its entirety, and a desire to take back public space.

Let's look at the >75 cities of Occupy Together in the context of the increasingly irrelevant 2012 elections. Obama's approval rating has now dipped below 40 percent and is heading lower. Meanwhile, each new savior from the Republican Party is pilloried before getting to the second level. Bachmann? Still tied to the Palin-Santorum nutter wing. Perry? At turns, too rash and Texan or too flat to be acceptable as a candidate. Christie? Too overweight, let's face it. We need a buff president to take on a Mayan calendar. No one is electable in 2012. Sound familar? That is what Spain, Greece, and so many other countries are finding.

If the Occupy Together momentum keeps up, I'm not anticipating any major urban area shuts down, or that there will be localized general strikes that will even approach the limited ones of the 1930s. But I do see a melding of street-occupation movements worldwide that will make 2012 a modern equivalent of 1968, a year in which politics as we know it simply won't matter. If the U.S. economy continues to tank, if the Euro stops being a unified currency by year's end, then time will be up for central banks and international institutions and political parties as traditionally defined in any nation, not just the U.S. At that point, the street will be the sole remaining source of legitimacy.

7 comments:

libertyvini said...

It's not so much that the protests are eroding their power, it's that they are eroding the legitimacy of both government and its corporate auxiliary. Both depend upon the consent of the governed. They can withstand as much protest and rock-throwing as the young and disaffected can muster; what they cannot withstand is a significant number of citizens witholding their consent. That's why they are trying to keep it quiet.

Loring Wirbel said...

Consent of the governed is a rare commodity these days, and vanishing quickly! Thx, Vini!

libertyvini said...

It's mostly passive and unthoughtful, and it can't vanish quickly enough for me.

Lynn said...

I find a strange comfort in your words "No one is electable in 2012." Wouldn't it be cool if when they have their election - cuz it sure as hell ain't OUR election - nobody came?

Ruth said...

For a minute back before the 2008 election I had a bumper sticker I was going to produce: No Democracy-No Vote. But I think not voting in this country doesn't work the same as in countries like India where there are multiple (corrupt) candidates with viable chances for election. But in our two party lock-up, I don't know if it works to protest by not voting.

I do like the idea of shutting the economy down. And yeah, who can manage this new age? Well all the systems seem as out of date and certain to become unusable as a PC.

Great write, Loring.

Loring Wirbel said...

Thanks, Ruth, except sometimes I wonder just how hypocritical I am. There was a moment two weeks ago when it looked like the euro would collapse within a day, I lamented it, and a friend said, "Isn't that exactly what you were hoping for?" I replied, "Yeah, until it actually happens. Then it looks a little frightening."

But then, when I see an outdoor square look a little like Tahrir in Cairo, I think, "Hey, this is good, better than the inside of a G20 or NATO meeting, that's for sure."

libertyvini said...

and not that the Arab Spring is devoid of CIA management either, but it's that or bloody repression, so they took the lesser of two evils in their view. They think by allowing the catharsis, they can still keep the lid on. I personally hope its a wrong bet...