Here at thatotherconservative, I generally consider myself pragmatic and consequentialist when it comes to views on political change and the avenues one must choose between to effectuate change. Yet it must be said that the way we come to make these choices has to be based on some sort of general principles to guide those specific case-by-case analyses we then attempt. One such principle which the American system of politics has seemed time and time again to ignore is that virtue generally known as patience. The ability to step back and wait for the opportune time to act based on the best information or recommendations seems generally forgotten by the mainstream media or the general public to whom they cater. Despite the casual disregard for thoughtful decision-making as a thing of the past and the more credible urgency with which politicians must act to avert impending socioeconomic crises, I will make the case that a return to simple patience must be the first step in getting to the root of our current problems, whether these patient moments manifest in the early formations of law-making or a campaign or even as the ballots are cast in the polling places or within a Congressional chamber.
No, this is not passivity or even political incoherence (as I have recently indicted the Occupy movement for falling victim to) but rather the forceful and immediate transition of political focus away from the cycle of bartering and compromise to a genuine discussion of political opinion schemas at their core. To take pieces of legislation and inject into them not merely the back and forth rain of sound bytes but rather real and responsive debate of the kind we seldom see anymore.
"How is this patience?" one might ask. Well, perhaps what I'm calling for is not patience in and of itself. At least not patience in some conventional definitions of the word. My point is that I am just as guilty as you when it comes to easily becoming plugged into Fox News or whatever ideology channel you tune into which, while entertaining, fails to accomplish much of anything except leaving a bad taste in my mouth about the way this country is headed. As such, we need the patience to turn off the TV, read through those propositions on your local ballots, and not take someone else's word for it that X policy or X candidate MUST be passed/elected now. I plan on discussing in the future more about the failure of our capitalism system to develop a truly functional system of consumer awareness to actually enforce democratic accountability where the government has so utterly failed. It is this same collective compulsion to be patient and to understand the issues for themselves that must be realized here and now.
Barack Obama rammed through the stimulus like it was a cake walk. Nancy Pelosi declared that Obamacare could be evaluated just as soon as it was passed. And who can blame them? In such an immature fashion, the American people fell for that ever elusive lure of "change" and in doing so wrote the Democrats a blank check to wreck havoc on the political sphere for as long as they did. And now we're reaping the rewards.
But it doesn't have to be this way. We can and should hold those in Washington accountable for all the experimentation with which they have clogged our economy, our culture, and our values. I sincerely hope that in these presidential debates all those watching, left or right, have an open mind toward the positions these candidates articulate. Many of us have pre-conceived notions of candidates, and they may very well be right. Yet it's not that hard for inclination to turn into devotion (as I have noticed in many supporters of certain candidates thus far). And such a cult of personality is what got us into this socioeconomic mess in the first place.
In a nutshell: Don't be passive. Don't be shy to speak your mind. But have some patience, please, in all your political decisions. The future of our country is, quite literally, at stake.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
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.
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.
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