The Failure of Political Incoherency in OWS

As much as I would like to let Occupy Wall Street embrace the slow, somewhat agonizing death it deserves without more disturbance or attention, I did feel it relevant to counter one particular political philosophy that seemed embedded within the movement: that impulsive desire for "non-binding consensus based collective decision making" (in the words of OccupyWallSt.org). This attractive methodology for enacting whatever form of change the demonstrators hoped for may prove alluring to the quasi-enlightened mind, yet in terms of legislative productivity, it is utterly bankrupt.


The most credible attempt at defending this lack of cohesion is an attempt to connect the "occupiers" with the protests that occurred in the name of the Civil Rights movement and later withdrawing our armed forces from Vietnam. These movements, it is argued, did not have any strong, specific policy proposal or platform, yet achieved a dramatic level of change within their day merely by citing a given flaw in the status quo, which is ultimately how the Occupy protests have been framed. 


Two glaring flaws open up in this argument. First, for all its bluster, the momentum garnered by the various sites of occupation is exceedingly small in comparison with its alleged predecessors. Granted, the widespread and global nature of the protests is a bit of a novelty, but at any given time the actual numbers of such gatherings rarely top over a few thousand, with the most exaggerated claims coming from Oakland, California, where one protestor was cited as believing up to 30,000 people being in attendance (although police estimates were nearly a tenth of that number). Contrast this with the 200,000 minimum estimates for, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington, or protests from 1967 through 1973 against Vietnam, many of which topped the hundred thousand mark or verged on a million in participance. Polling for the movement, with questionable accuracy, has at best ascertained a massive indifference towards the protestors, with majorities of respondents more often than not remaining neutral on the subject. The fact is that the nation's workforce is simply not about to go on a coordinated strike nor will our students ditch en masse over the cries of the protestors, however legitimate one finds their message to be. 


My second point is that the process by which the occupiers could hope to create change, even with a massive base of popular support, is far more murky and prone to failure than any other successful grassroots protest they attempt to emulate. Whereas massive pressure on the federal government could and did change institutionalized forms of racial inequality and led to the withdrawal from Vietnam, one cannot directly apply democratic accountability towards Wall Street. You can't vote out the 1% in the next election cycle so you have to resort to regulatory action on the part of the government in order to accomplish anything. This disconnect between the target of the occupiers' ire and the actual agents of change that could be of assistance is only exacerbated by the fact that they claim no endorsement of any politician or policy proposal. For all the cover ambiguity might give, it allows those individuals who do make up the movement to return to their local ballot boxes come election day willing to punish a fat cat or two but not certain of how to do it. 


Yet success aside, this presents the hidden danger of the co-option such an organic, fluid movement was designed to prevent against in the first place. As much as they might not wish it, there will be a list of candidates to choose from in November 2012, and if the Occupy movement proves as decisively relevant as its believers would like, it isn't much of a stretch of the imagination to see politicians running under the OWS banner, grafting their personal agenda onto juicy rhetoric all too easily spun as fitting within such parameters. Only when an agenda is made public, with the potential for needed scrutiny and evaluation, does it become relevant and hopefully feasible to enact.


Perhaps this is what the protestors feared all along. Indeed, as the Obamacare debates proved, hiding behind a mound of ink that can be rushed in on a whim can be a winning strategy as opposed to legitimate deliberation. In my personal experience of policy debate, it's hard to lose if you are a moving target and don't defend anything specific. "What, you're challenging that? No, no. What I really meant was..."


And so it goes on. I'm intrigued to see how the last fading moments of the movement are spent, specifically given the emerging situation with OccupyLA and questions of those eviction notices. Will the fuss about Wall Street go away? Of course not. But to think it started with OWS is an even sillier supposition. The gridlock on Capitol Hill, worthy of blame on both sides, will not be parted like the Red Sea when a city council or two extends the eviction date on their respective Occupy camps. Hopefully the American people are beginning to catch on that we need policy focus, not impotence, in order to right the legitimate abuses that have been done to our system.