Why wasn’t Occupy Wall Street more successful?
AEIdeas
The legacy, says Walter Russell Mead, of OWS might be little more than a few catch phrases: “1 percenters,” “the 99 percent” and “occupy x.” But beyond that? Not much, which is curious to WRM:
But as a populist left wing fight back against the biggest economic disaster since the 1930s, it was dismally lame. At its height it failed to match levels of popular mobilization and outreach that earlier movements achieved in past episodes in American history– and it fell quickly from that height.
To some degree, it was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. …
It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. … OWS’s popularity continues to plummet. Many pollsters haven’t even bothered to ask the public about OWS since the protestors were kicked out of Zuccotti Park. …
Occupy Wall Street brought important issues into a national discussion. The group had a range of complaints, some reasonable, others not so much, about a variety of policies and social conditions in the United States. Many of the concerns and the grievances they voiced were and are widely shared.
This makes the failure of the movement more striking, not less so. It is easy to understand how someone can go broke selling umbrellas during a drought, but OWS was peddling leftie economic ideas and the politics of redistribution in the middle of the worst economic times in eighty years.
Certainly there was a scattered quality to OWS—”What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” “Whaddaya got?”—that made it far less relevant and effective than if it had just focused on Wall Street and the big banks.
But imagine if the movement had coalesced around an agenda of a) breaking up the TBTF banks and b) getting rid of corporate welfare and tax subsidies? More of an anti-crony capitalist agenda than an anti-business, anti-wealthy agenda?
Then OWS may have had some staying power given the current national mood. But not possible, really. The OWS people I met last fall, at least the ones that weren’t homeless looking for a meal, were just anti-capitalist leftists who seemed unaware of the great prosperity capitalism has created over the past two centuries. Wreckers, not reformers, with a hardcore subset that just wanted to see America burn.
I think the rest of the 99% got a pungent whiff of that and decided not to buy what OWS selling. A really epic fail.
Occupy has three major issues.
First, knowing where to kick. You don’t hurt the 1% by sleeping in the parks they don’t care about public parks. Figure out what they do care about and mess that up for them.
Second, activist for the 99% need appropriate camouflage. All Occupiers should march down to the thrift store and buy the nicest suit they can afford. A suit lets you get into places that someone dressed as an activist could never get into.
Third, individual action either only by a single individual or multiplied by thousands of individuals can be more effective than mass action. A single good question in the right environment which shows the emperor has no clothes can be more effective than 10,000 people in the street outside. 500 well dressed people in congressional offices asking tough questions could have much more affect then those people marching in the street outside.
Oh please Jim. You did everything to try and smear the movement and now are whining it did not do more?
Also “anti-crony capitalist agenda”…
1. Wasn’t that supposed to be the agenda of the Dick “I can’t stop spending money” Army co-opted Tea Party? You know the one that has achieved nothing in that department
2. Aren’t those “crony-capitalist” businesses the same ones that fund AEI?
I have to agree with Jim. I listened to OWS and while the message is somewhat clear it seems they have a scattered agenda. Quite frankly OWS agenda goes after MANY of the so called 99%. I am not wealthy. I have two kids in college and we wonder how we are going to make it. But as part of the so called 99%, I am frightened that we will become bigger targets. Yes, some of the “reforms” OWS calls forWILL hurt the 99%.
Jim’s statement, “But imagine if the movement had coalesced around an agenda of a) breaking up the TBTF banks and b) getting rid of corporate welfare and tax subsidies?” I agree!
Yet when I heard some of what the OWS movement is fighting for would hit any investments I have in the pocketbook, I became a non-believer and a detractor. AND . . . many people in my economic class – middle income yet stuggling to make it, feel OWS is more harmful than helpful. It is a movement which is going to kill itself off due to scattered, unfocused agenda.