Yves here. I have to note that David DeGraw of
Amped Status is widely credited as the originator of “We are the 99%.”
By David Graeber, who is currently a Reader in Social
Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to that he was an
associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author
of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon.
Just a few months ago, I wrote a piece for Adbusters that started
with a conversation I’d had with an Egyptian activist friend named Dina:
All these years,” she said, “we’ve been organizing
marches, rallies… And if only 45 people show up, you’re depressed, if
you get 300, you’re happy. Then one day, 200,000 people show up. And
you’re incredulous: on some level, even though you didn’t realize it,
you’d given up thinking that you could actually win.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across America, and even
the world, I am suddenly beginning to understand a little of how she
felt.
On August 2, I showed up at a 7 PM meeting at Bowling Green, that a
Greek anarchist friend, who I’d met at a recent activist get together at
16 Beaver Street, had told me was meant to plan some kind of action on
Wall Street in mid-September. At the time I was only vaguely aware of
the background: that a month before, the Canadian magazine Adbusters had
put out the call to “Occupy Wall Street”, but had really just floated
the idea on the internet, along with some very compelling graphics, to
see if it would take hold; that a local anti-budget cut coalition
top-heavy with NGOs, unions, and socialist groups had tried to take
possession of the process and called for a “General Assembly” at Bowling
Green. The title proved extremely misleading. When I arrived, I found
the event had been effectively taken over by a veteran protest group
called the Worker’s World Party, most famous for having patched together
ANSWER one of the two great anti-war coalitions, back in 2003. They had
already set up their banners, megaphones, and were making
speeches—after which, someone explained, they were planning on leading
the 80-odd assembled people in a march past the Stock Exchange itself.
The usual reaction to this sort of thing is a kind of cynical, bitter
resignation. “I wish they at least wouldn’t advertise a ‘General
Assembly’ if they’re not actually going to hold one.” Actually, I think I
actually said that, or something slightly less polite, to one of the
organizers, a disturbingly large man, who immediately remarked, “well,
fine. Why don’t you leave?”
But as I paced about the Green, I noticed something. To adopt
activist parlance: this wasn’t really a crowds of verticals—that is, the
sort of people whose idea of
political
action is to march around with signs under the control of one or
another top-down protest movement. They were mostly pretty obviously
horizontals: people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of
organization, non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy, and direct
action. I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I
remembered from some Food Not Bomb event, some college students wearing
Zapatista paraphernalia, a Spanish couple who’d been involved with the
indignados in Madrid… I found my Greek friends, an American I knew from
street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, now
turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist intellectual
I’d known for years… My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her
and we both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing:
“Why are we so complacent? Why is it that every time we see something
like this happening, we just mutter things and go home?” – though I
think the way we put it was more like, “You know something? Fuck this
shit. They advertised a general assembly. Let’s hold one.”
So we gathered up a few obvious horizontals and formed a circle, and
tried to get everyone else to join us. Almost immediately people
appeared from the main rally to disrupt it, calling us back with
promises that a real democratic forum would soon break out on the
podium. We complied. It didn’t happen. My Greek friend made an
impassioned speech and was effectively shooed off the stage. There were
insults and vituperations. After about an hour of drama, we formed the
circle again, and this time, almost everyone abandoned the rally and
come over to our side. We created a decision-making process (we would
operate by modified consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach,
action, facilitation) and then reassembled to allow each group to report
its collective decisions, and set up times for new meetings of both the
smaller and larger groups. It was difficult to figure out what to do
since we only had six weeks, not nearly enough time to plan a major
action, let alone bus in the thousands of people that would be required
to actually shut down Wall Street—and anyway we couldn’t shut down Wall
Street on the appointed day, since September 17, the day Adbusters had
been advertising, was a Saturday. We also had no money of any kind.
Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to
put on our first flyer. Adbusters’ idea had been that we focus on “one
key demand.” This was a brilliant idea from a marketing perspective, but
from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at all. We put that
one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental questions
to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to? Who did
we represent? Someone—this time I remember quite clearly it was me, but
I wouldn’t be surprised if a half dozen others had equally strong
memories of being the first to come up with it—suggested, “well, why not
call ourselves ‘the 99%’? If 1% of the population have ended up with
all the benefits of the last 10 years of economic growth, control the
wealth, own the politicians… why not just say we’re everybody else?” The
Spanish couple quickly began to lay out a “We Are the 99%” pamphlet,
and we started brainstorming ways to print and distribute it for free.
Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape. The core of the
emerging group, which began to meet regularly in Tompkins Square park,
were very young people who had cut their activist teeth on the
Bloombergville encampment outside City Hall earlier in the summer; aside
from that there was a smattering of activists who had been connected to
the Global Justice movement with skills to share (one or two of whom I
had to drag out of effective retirement), and, as mentioned a number of
New Yorkers originally from Greece, Spain, even Tunisia, with knowledge
and connections with those who were, or had been, involved in
occupations there. We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do
was something like had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona,
or Madrid: occupy a public space to create a New York General Assembly, a
body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to
contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as “democracy” by the
US government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone. Still,
it was almost impossible to predict what would really happen on the
17th. There were supposed to be 90,000 people following us on the
internet. Adbusters had called for 20,000 to fill the streets. That
obviously wasn’t going to happen. But how many would really show up?
What’s more, we were keenly aware that the NYPD numbered close to
40,000; Wall Street was, in fact, probably the single most heavily
policed public space on the face of Planet Earth. To be perfectly
honest, as one of the old-timers scrambling to organize medical and
legal trainings, lessons on how to organize affinity groups and do
non-violent civil disobedience, seminars on how to facilitate meetings
and the like, for most of us, the greatest concern during those hectic
weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldn’t turn out a total
fiasco, with all the enthusiastic young people immediately beaten,
arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, simply
looked the other way.
We’d certainly seen it happen before.
This time it didn’t. True, there were all the predictable conflicts.
Most of New York’s grumpier hard-core anarchists refused to join in, and
mocked us from the sidelines as reformist; meanwhile, the more open,
“small-a” anarchists, who had been largely responsible for organizing
the facilitation and trainings, battled the verticals in the group to
ensure that we did not institute anything that could become a formal
leadership structure, such as police liaisons or marshals. There were
also bitter battles over the web page, as well as minor crises over the
participation of various fringe groups, ranging from followers of Lyndon
LaRouche to one woman from a shadowy group that called itself US Day of
Rage, and who we sometimes suspected might not have any other members,
who systematically blocked any attempt to reach out to unions because
she felt we should be able to attract dissident Tea Partiers. On
September 17th itself, I was troubled at first by the fact that only a
few hundred people seemed to have shown up. What’s more the spot we’d
chosen for our General Assembly, a plaza outside Citibank, had been shut
down by the city and surrounded by high fences. The tactical committee
however had scouted out other possible locations, and distributed maps:
around 3 PM, word went around we were moving to location #5—Zuccotti
Park—and by the time we got there, I realized we were surrounded by at
least two thousand people.
The real credit for what happened after that—within a matter of
weeks, a movement that had spread to 800 different cities, with
outpourings of support from radical opposition groups as far away as
China—belongs mainly to the students and other young people who simply
dug themselves and refused to leave, despite the endless (and in many
cases, obviously illegal) acts of police repression designed to
intimidate, and to make life so miserable in the park (refusing to allow
activists to cover their computers with tarps during rainstorms, that
sort of thing) that its inhabitants would simply become demoralized and
abandon the project. And, as the weeks went on, against calculated acts
of terrorism involving batons and pepper-spray. Still, dogged activists
have held out heroically under such conditions before, and the world
simply ignored them. Why didn’t it happen this time? After so many years
of vain attempts to revive the fervor of the Global Justice Movement,
and constantly falling flat, I found myself, like Dina, asking “what did
we actually do right?”
My first take on the question came when The Guardian asked me to
write an oped on Occupy Wall Street a few days later. At the time I was
inspired mainly by what Marisa Holmes, another brilliant organizer of
the original occupation, had discovered in her work as a video
documentarian, doing one-on-one interviews of fellow campers during the
first two nights at Zucotti Square. Over and over she heard the same
story: “I did everything I was supposed to! I worked hard, studied hard,
got into college. Now I’m unemployed, with no prospects, and $50 to
$80,000.00 in debt.” These were kids who played by the rules, and were
rewarded by a future of constant harassment, of being told they were
worthless deadbeats by agents of those very financial institutions
who—after having spectacularly failed to play by the rules, and crashing
the world economy as a result, were saved and coddled by the government
in all the ways that ordinary Americans such as themselves, equally
spectacularly, were not.
“We are watching,” I wrote, “the beginnings of the defiant
self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are
looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future,
but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.” Three weeks
later, after watching more and more elements of mainstream America
clamber on board, I think this is still true. In a way, the demographic
base of OWS is about as far as one can get from that of the Tea
Party—with which it is so often, and so confusingly, compared. The
popular base of the Tea Party was always middle aged suburban white
Republicans, most of middling economic means, anti-intellectual,
terrified of social change—above all, for fear that what they saw as
their one remaining buffer of privilege (basically, their whiteness)
might finally be stripped away. OWS, by contrast, is at core
forwards-looking youth movement, just a group of forward-looking people
who have been stopped dead in their tracks; of mixed class backgrounds
but with a significant element of working class origins; their one
strongest common feature being a remarkably high level of education.
It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of the Wall Street Occupation,
and so many others, is an impromptu library: a library being not only a
model of an alternative economy, where lending is from a communal pool,
at 0% interest, and the currency being leant is knowledge, and the means
to understanding.
In a way, this is nothing new. Revolutionary coalitions have always
tended to consist of a kind of alliance between children of the
professional classes who reject their parents’ values, and talented
children of the popular classes who managed to win themselves a
bourgeois education, only to discover that acquiring a bourgeois
education does not actually mean one gets to become a member of the
bourgeoisie. You see the pattern repeated over and over, in country
after country: Chou Enlai meets Mao Tse Tung, or Che Guevara meets Fidel
Castro. Even US counter-insurgency experts have long known the surest
harbingers of revolutionary ferment in any country is the growth of a
population of unemployed and impoverished college graduates: that is,
young people bursting with energy, with plenty of time on their hands,
every reason to be angry, and access to the entire history of radical
thought. In the US, the depredations of the student loan system simply
ensures such budding revolutionaries cannot fail to identify banks as
their primary enemy, or to understand the role of the Federal
Government—which maintains the student loan program, and ensures that
their loans will be held over their heads forever, even in the event of
bankruptcy—in maintaining the banking system’s ultimate control over
every aspect of their future lives.
Ordinarily, though, the plight of the indebted college graduate would
not be the sort of issue that would speak directly to the hearts of,
say, members of New York City’s Transit Worker’s Union—which, at time of
writing, is not only supporting the occupation, but suing the New York
Police Department for commandeering their buses to conduct a mass arrest
of OWS activists blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. Why would a protest by
educated youth strike such a chord across America—in a way that it
probably wouldn’t have in 1967, or even 1990? Clearly, it has much to do
with the financialization of capital. It may well be the case by now
that most of Wall Street’s profits are no longer to be being extracted
indirectly, through the wage system, at all, but taken directly from the
pockets of ordinary Americans. I say “may” because we don’t really have
the numbers. In a way this is telling in itself. For all the endless
statistical data available on every aspect of our economic system, I
have been unable to find any economist who can tell me how much of an
average American’s annual income, let alone life income, ends up being
appropriated by the financial industries in the form of interest
payments, fees, penalties, and service charges. Still, given the fact
that interest payments alone takes up between 15-17% of household
income,[1] a figure that does not include student loans, and that
penalty fees on bank and credit card accounts can often double the
amount one would otherwise pay, it would not be at all surprising if at
least one dollar out of every five an American earns over the course of
her lifetime is now likely to end up in Wall Street’s coffers in one way
or another. The percentage may well be approaching the amount the
average American will pay in taxes. In fact, for the least affluent
Americans, it has probably long since overtaken it.
This has very real implications for how we even think about what sort
of economic system we are in. Back when I was in college, I learned
that the difference between capitalism and feudalism—or what was
sometimes called the “tributary mode of production”—is that a feudal
aristocracy appropriates its wealth through “direct juro-political
extraction.” They simply take other people’s things through legal means.
Capitalism was supposed to be a bit more subtle.[2] Yet as soon as it
achieved total world dominance, capitalism seems to have almost
immediately begun shifting back into something that could well be
described as feudalism.[3] In doing so, too, it made the alliance of
money and government impossible to ignore. In the years since 2008,
we’ve seen examples ranging from the comical—as when loan collection
agencies in Massachusetts sent their employees out en masse to canvas on
behalf of a senate candidate (Scott Brown) who they assumed would be in
favor of harsher laws against debtors, to the downright outrageous—as
when “too big to fail” institutions like Bank of America, bailed out by
the taxpayers, secure in the knowledge they would not be allowed to
collapse no matter what their behavior, paying no taxes, but delivering
vast sums of culled from their even vaster profits to legislators who
then allow their lobbyists to actually write the legislation that is
supposed to “regulate” them. At this point, it’s not entirely clear why
an institution like Bank of America should not, at this point, be
considered part of the
federal government, other than that it gets to keep its profits for itself.
Still, this might explain the outrage at government’s alliance with
the financial sector—the fact that bribery has, effectively, been made
legal in America, a country that nonetheless presumes to go around the
world pretending it is some sort of beacon of democracy. It does not
explain the comprehensive rejection of existing political institutions
of any sort.
This is where I must admit my own position is particularly confusing.
On the one hand, this is exactly the kind of attitude I have been
arguing for for years. I like to describe myself precisely as a “small-a
anarchist.” That is, I believe in anarchist principles—mutual aid,
direct action, the idea building the new, free society in the shell of
the old—but I’ve never felt a need to declare allegiance to any
particular anarchist school (Syndicalists, Platformists, etc). Above
all, I am happy to work with anyone, whatever they call themselves,
willing to work on anarchist principles—which in America today, has
largely come to mean, a refusal to work with or through the government
or other institutions which ultimately rely on the threat of force, and a
dedication to horizontal democracy, to treating each other as we
believe free men and women in a genuinely free society would treat each
other. Even the commitment to direct action, so often confused with
breaking windows or the like, really refers to the refusal of any
politics of protest, that merely appeals to the authorities to behave
differently, and the determination instead to act for oneself, and to do
what one thinks is right, regardless of law and authority. Gandhi’s
salt march, for example, is a classic example of direct action. So was
squatting Zuccotti Park. It’s a public space; we were the public; the
public shouldn’t have to ask permission to engage in peaceful political
assembly in its own park; so we didn’t. By doing so we not only acted in
the way we felt was right, we aimed to set an example to others: to
begin to reclaim communal resources that have been appropriated for
purposes of private profit to once again serve for communal use—as in a
truly free society, they would be—and to set an example of what genuine
communal use might actually be like. For those who desire to create a
society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply
the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
Small-a anarchists such as myself were at the core of the
anti-nuclear movement in the ‘70s and the global justice movement
between 1998-2001, and over the years, we have put much of our creative
energy into developing forms of egalitarian political process that
actually work. I should emphasize that this is not just an anarchist
project. Actually, the development of consensus process, which is
probably the movement’s greatest accomplishment, emerges just as much
from the tradition of radical feminism, and draws on spiritual
traditions from Native American to Quakerism. This is where the whole
exotic language of the movement comes from: facilitation, “the people’s
microphone,” spokescouncils, blocks; though in the case of Occupy Wall
Street, augmented and transformed by the experience of General Assembly
movements across the Mediterranean.
Obviously, what happened is exactly what we hoped would happen. The
politics of direct action is based, to a certain degree, on a faith that
freedom is contagious. It is almost impossible to convince the average
American that a truly democratic society would be possible. One can only
show them. But the experience of actually watching a group of a
thousand, or two thousand, people making collective decisions without a
leadership structure, let alone that of thousands of people in the
streets linking arms to holding their ground against a phalanx of
armored riot cops, motivated only by principle and solidarity, can
change one’s most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for
that matter, human life, could actually be like. Back in the days of the
Global Justice movement we thought we might expose enough people,
around the world, to these new forms of direct democracy, these
traditions of direct action, that a new, global, democratic culture
would begin to emerge. Of course it didn’t quite happen that way.
Certainly, the movement did inspire thousands, and played a major role
in transforming how activist groups in Europe and North America
conducted meetings and thought about politics; but the contagion was
largely contained within pre-existing activist ghettos; most Americans
never even knew that direct democracy was so much of what we were about.
The anti-war movements after 2003 mobilized hundreds of thousands, but
they fell back on the old fashioned vertical politics of top-down
coalitions, charismatic leaders, and marching around with signs. Many of
us diehard kept the faith. We kept looking for the moment of revival.
After all, we had dedicated our lives to the principle that something
like this would eventually happen. But, like my Egyptian friend, we had
also, in a certain way, failed to notice that we’d stop really believing
that we could actually win.
And then it happened. The last time I went back to Zuccotti Square,
and watched middle aged construction workers and Latino hip hop artists
using all our old hand signals in mass meetings, one of my old anarchist
comrades—a one-time tree-sitter and inveterate eco-activist who used to
go by the name Warcry, and was now established in the park as video
documentarians—admitted to me, “every few hours I do have to pinch
myself to make sure it isn’t all a dream.”
So the social scientist in me has to ask: Why? Why now? Why did it actually work?
Again, I think the answer is generational. In politics, too, as in
education, we are looking at a generation of young people who played by
the rules, and have seen their efforts prove absolutely fruitless. We
must remember that in 2008, the youth vote went overwhelmingly to
Barrack Obama and the Democrats. We also have to remember that Obama was
running, then, as a candidate of “Change”, using a campaign language
that drew liberally from that of radical social movements (“yes we
can!”, “be the change!”), and that as a former community organizer, he
was one of the few candidates in recent memory who could be said to have
emerged from a social movement background rather than from smoke-filled
rooms. This, combined with the fact that Obama was Black, gave young
people a sense that they were experiencing a genuinely transformative
moment in American politics.
All this happened in a country where there was such a straightjacket
on acceptable political discourse in the US—what a politician or media
pundit can say, without being immediately written off as lunatic
fringe—that the views of very large segments of the American public
simply are never voiced at all. To give a sense of how radical is the
disconnect between acceptable opinion, and the actual feelings of
American voters, consider a pair of polls conducted by Rasmussen, the
first in December 2008, right after Obama was elected, the second in
April 2011. A broad sampling of Americans were asked which economic
system they preferred: capitalism, or socialism? In 2008, 15% felt the
USA would be better off adopting a socialist system; now, three years
later, the number has gone up, to one in five. Even more striking was
the breakdown by age: the younger the respondent, the more likely they
were to reject a capitalist system. Among Americans between 15 and 25, a
thin plurality still preferred capitalism: 37%, as opposed to 33% in
favor of socialism (the rest were unsure). But think about what this
means here. It means that almost two thirds of America’s youth think it
might be a good idea to jettison the capitalist system entirely! This in
a country where most have never seen a single politician, TV pundit, or
mainstream “expert” use the term “socialism” as anything but a term of
condescension and abuse. Granted, for that very reason, it’s hard to
know exactly what young people who say they prefer “socialism” actually
think they’re embracing. Presumably not an economic system modeled on
that of North Korea. What then? Sweden? Canada? It’s impossible to say.
But in a way it’s also beside the point. Most Americans might not be
sure what socialism is supposed to be, but they do know a great deal
about capitalism, and if “socialism” means anything to them, it means
“something, pretty much anything, other than that!”
In 2008, young Americans preferred Obama to McCain by a rate 68% to 30[4]—again, an approximately 2/3 margin.
How, then, do you expect a young American voter to feel, after
casting a vote for a fundamental change to our political and economic
system, on discovering that in fact, they have elected a man who twenty
years ago would have been considered a moderate conservative?
I mean that word, “conservative,” in its literal sense by the way.
This literal sense is now rarely used. Nowadays, in the US,
“conservative” has come to mean “right-wing radical,” but it used to
mean someone whose main political imperative is to conserve existing
institutions, more or less exactly as they are—and this is precisely
what Obama has turned out to be. Almost all his greatest political
efforts have been aimed in one way or another at preserving some
institutional structure under threat of radical transformation: the
banking system, the auto industry, even the health insurance industry,
since Obama’s main argument in pushing for health care reform was that
the US health care system, based on for-profit, private insurers, was
not economically viable over the long term, and indeed, what he ended up
doing was preserving exactly that for-profit system in a way that it
might endure for at least another generation. Considering the state of
the US economy in 2008, it required genuinely heroic efforts not to
change anything. Yet Obama did expend those heroic efforts, and the
result was no structural change in existing institutions of any kind at
all.
I am a frequenter of the liberal blog Daily Kos. Reading it regularly
is probably the best way to get a sense of what the “progressive
community” in the US—left-leaning voters and activists who still believe
in acting through the Democratic Party—are currently thinking. Over the
last two years, the level of hatred directed against Obama is
extraordinary. He is regularly accused of being a fraud, a liar, a
secret Republican who has intentionally flubbed every opportunity for
progressive change presented to him in the name of “bipartisan
compromise” with a rabid and uncompromising Right. Others suggest he is a
well-meaning progressive whose hands are tied; or, alternately, blame
progressives for not having mobilized to provide sufficient pressure to
his Left. The latter seem to forget the way the grassroots activist
groups created during the campaign, which were expected to endure
afterwards for just this purpose, were rapidly dismantled once Obama was
in power and handing the economic reigns of the US over to the very
people (Geithner, Bernanke, Summers) responsible for the crisis, or how
liberal groups that actually try to mount campaigns against such
policies are regularly threatened with defunding by White-House friendly
NGOs. But in a way, this feeling of personal betrayal is pretty much
inevitable. It is the only way of preserving the faith that it’s
possible for progressive policies to be enacted in the US through
electoral means. Because if Obama was not planning all along to betray
his Progressive base, then one would be forced to conclude any such
project is impossible. After all, how could there have been a more
perfect alignment of the stars than happened in 2008? That year saw a
wave election that left Democrats in control of both houses of
congress,[5] a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Change”
coming to power at a moment of economic crisis so profound that radical
measures of some sort were unavoidable, and at a time when popular rage
against the nation’s financial elites was so intense that most Americans
would have supported almost anything. If it was not possible to enact
any real progressive policies or legislation at such a moment, clearly,
it would never be. Yet none were enacted.[6] Instead Wall Street gained
even greater control over the political process, and, since Republicans
proved the only party willing to propose radical positions of any kind,
the political center swung even further to the Right. Clearly, if
progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it
simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very
large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.
Say what you will about Americans, and one can say many things, this
is a country of deeply democratic sensibilities. The idea that we are,
or are supposed to be, a democratic society is at the very core of what
makes us proud to be Americans. If Occupy Wall Street has spread to
every city in America, it’s because our financial overlords have brought
us to such a pass that anarchists, pagan priestesses, and tree-sitters
are about the only Americans left still holding out for the idea that a
genuinely democratic society might be possible.
————-
[1]
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/housedebt/default.htm.
[2] Similarly, Max Weber argued that the “irrational political
capitalism” of “military adventurers … tax farmers, speculators, money
dealers, and others” of, say, the Roman world, was an historical dead
end, since it was ultimately parasitical off the state, and had nothing
in common with the rational investment of production of modern
industrial capitalism. By Weber’s logic, contemporary global capitalism,
which is dominated by speculators, currency traders, and government
contractors, has long since reverted to the dead-end irrational variety.
[3] See
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/underlying-ideology-of-the-99/ for a nice essay on Occupy Wall Street and “neo-feudalism.”
[4]
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27525497/ns/politics-decision_08/t/youth-vote-may-have-been-key-obamas-win/
[5] The conventional response to this was to insist that the
Democrats didn’t really control both houses because the Senate rules had
changed, irresponsible use of the Filibuster meant that a 60-vote
majority was required. This only makes sense if one assumes that any
minority party, at any previous period of American history, could have
gotten rid of majority rule and moved to a 60% system had they really
wanted to, but somehow chose not to do so—which is obviously absurd. If
the Republicans got away with it in 2008 it’s because the Democrats
decided not to make a major issue an unprecedented opposition policy of
systematically violating all previous tacit Senate rules.
[6] Obama’s health care legislation, I will repeat, does not count
since it is not comprehensive and effectively reproduces Bob Dole’s
Republican health plan of 2006.
