Why Liberals Should Embrace Occupy Wall Street
- October 13, 2011 | 12:00 am
“A
mixture of undesirables—thieves, plug-uglies, degenerates.” That’s how
in 1932 a newspaper described the veterans who were marching upon
Washington, demanding their promised bonuses. There was some truth in
the description: The marchers included a few undesirables. But the
majority were simply people who were struggling and wanted their fair
share. Their actions would lay the groundwork for what became the 1930s
left, which helped revive a floundering liberalism and make possible the
New Deal.
Stop by Zuccotti Park or any of the other spaces
across the country that Occupy Wall Street has claimed in recent weeks
and you’ll find a similarly motley group, with some modern-day
“undesirables”—not thieves and degenerates, perhaps, but at least a few
anarchists, communists, and bigots, along with plenty of funny-looking
people making funny-sounding music. That’s how protest movements almost
invariably emerge: The first to join them are the ones most willing to
break with the conventions of mainstream society.
But at these demonstrations you’ll also find plenty of
people who’ve come simply because they belong to what has come to be
known as the “Other 99 Percent.” They are among the growing number of
Americans struggling financially, even as the very wealthy flourish.
They can't find jobs. They can't pay their student loans, their
mortgages or medical bills. They've fallen way behind and see no way to
get ahead. Their agenda is muddled and in many cases their thinking is,
too. But they know that something has gone very wrong in their country
and instead of blaming illegal immigrants or Barack Hussein Obama, they
are pointing their finger at America’s plutocratic minority.
Many of the same people joined groups like Moveon.org
in the early decade. They protested against George W. Bush and the Iraq
War, and they thronged to the Obama campaign in 2008. More broadly, they
are part of the progressive ferment that began fifty years ago,
subsided during the great conservative counter-reaction that began in
the 1970s, but that has begun to swell again in the last two
decades. They care about human rights, clean air, gay marriage. They put
“people before profits,” as the Clinton campaign put it in 1992. They
are egalitarian, sometimes to a fault. After Obama took office, they
rested their hopes for change on his presidency. He was, after all, the
candidate of change. But they have been sorely disappointed, and in the
wake of the sordid negotiations over the debt ceiling, some of them have
taken their frustration to the streets.
The protesters are better at generating slogans than
programs. There’s no clear agenda, but instead a hodgepodge of
grievances and demands. Some of those demands, like a reform of campaign
finance, speak directly to the matter at hand. Some of them, like
protecting animal rights or ending alleged American colonialism, do not.
But the heart of the movement is its focus on the inequality of wealth
and power, and the way that it has undermined American democracy. Many
liberals recognize those values and have, with some caution, embraced
the movement. They are wise to do so.
LIKE THE LABOR MOVEMENT, or the old Populists and
Socialists of Eugene Debs, liberalism arose in the early twentieth
century as a reaction to the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. But
instead of trying to overthrow capitalism, as radicals did, it sought to
create a more egalitarian version of it.
In that way, liberals and the left have always had a
complicated, symbiotic relationship. Franklin Roosevelt disdained Huey
Long’s Share the Wealth movement and was probably not excited about
armed farmers preventing foreclosures or about striking workers. But
unlike Herbert Hoover, who turned to Douglas MacArthur to drive the
Bonus Marchers out of Washington, Roosevelt responded to these pressures
from below not with troops, but with positive legislation—indeed, it
was precisely Roosevelt’s liberalism that inclined him to do so.
The movements saw it as their task to force
Roosevelt’s hand; he, in turn, understood his mission as the
transformation of their sometimes unreasonable demands into the great
reforms of the Second New Deal. And that is how it was throughout the
20th century. Social security, the minimum wage, Medicare, environmental
protection, the government’s commitment to civil and sexual
equality—all these came out of liberalism’s interaction with the left.
Sometimes, liberals have hemmed and hawed about
protests, pleading that things were complex and that change was too
difficult. The left, on the other hand has sometimes dismissed liberals
as tools of corporate capitalism. But this kind of suspicion and
derision has not benefitted either side. Without liberalism, the left
and its movements slip into extremism that ends up validating their
harshest opponents. That happened in the 1920s when the Communists vied
with the Socialists for leadership of the left; it happened again during
the late 1960s when the New Left veered out of control. The converse is
equally true: Without leftwing ferment from below, liberalism becomes
powerless in the face of business and the organized right. That happened
in the 1920s and the 1980s and in the early part of this century—and it
threatens to happen again now.
Don’t some of the Wall Street protesters show
illiberal impulses? Yes —and more will do so in the future. What is
there to say about an assemblage of protestors in Atlanta denying
Congressman John Lewis the right to speak because, in a fit of
egalitarian pique, they didn’t want to acknowledge that one voice might
have more authority than others? Or members of an extreme antiwar clique
free-riding on the Occupy protests and invading the Air and Space
Museum, a favorite weekend destination for visiting tourists and their
children, in order to protest a display of drones?
These actions are not on a par with Tea Party members
spitting on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver or heckling gay congressman Barney
Frank. They pose no serious threat to civility or order. Most important,
they do not seem emblematic of the movement as a whole. But they sully
the left and, by the way, alienate would-be supporters. Those actions,
and the minority of people behind them, deserve condemnation.
Parsing out genuine grievance and popular protest from
the sectarian eccentricity, adolescent theatricality, and narrow
self-interest will be an ongoing project—a difficult one, yes, but also a
worthwhile one. The world is in the grips of severe economic downturn,
causing considerable human misery; an alliance of business and
conservative Republicans threatens to make matters much worse. The
Occupy Wall Street movements may not survive the onset of cold weather
and rain. But, along with Elizabeth Warren’s fledgling Senate campaign
in Massachusetts and the continuing protest against autocratic
government in Ohio and Wisconsin, they represent a genuine spark of
grassroots political action—a chance, finally, to redeem the promise of
Obama’s 2008 campaign. We have to make sure we don’t squander it.
Jonathan Cohn and John B. Judis are senior editors at The New Republic.
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