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Digging their own movement’s grave

Thomas Jovanovski - 10/19/2011

For the preceding several weeks, much of the American population has been at once bemused, perplexed, and perturbed by the contra-Wall Street protesters — not to say loiterers or squatters — in larger cities from New York to Seattle. Fortunately, most of the protests outside of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan have already fizzled, and are now well on their way to becoming a distant nightmarish memory in the American collective conscience.

While most of these protesters are persuaded that — inspired by the so-called Arab Spring (2011) flare-ups throughout the Middle East — they are establishing the foundations of a revolutionary social and economic change in the United States (and from there perhaps even the world), what they do not seem to understand is that their movement is already on its deathbed. Ironically, it is the protesters themselves who have already dealt their movement a mortal blow. Several factors have contributed to this premature demise.

1. The protesters never did, nor does it appear that they will presently, formulate a clear and decisive statement of precisely what they are, or were, demonstrating against. Nor, aside from some ambiguous statements about “sharing the wealth,” “raising taxes on the super-rich,” and “ending capitalism,” have they provided a recognizable vision of the new society they seem to have in mind.

2. The electronic and print media have bombarded us with videos and images of mostly younger individuals looking more like a large gathering of homeless people than a disciplined crowd of dedicated revolutionaries. At least in appearance, then, these protesters resemble the lumpen proletariat that Marx derides in the German Ideology. In that sense, they may be said to have provided a sort of (clown-like) entertainment for the American public than people who might inspire others into joining them.

3. Interviews with protesters have, moreover, revealed the very navel of the soft underbelly of this movement, namely, people who, aside from not having a good grasp of why they are there, an appalling inability to articulate a single coherent plank of what might pass for an ideological platform. This should, I suppose, be expected, insofar as the general population’s ability to express itself in a literary fashion, as did the youth of the late 1960′s protesting the Vietnam War, passed away with the establishment of a shockingly inferior educational system. (Worse yet, the American teacher’s union still seems to pretend that the 1983 white paper on the state of American education, most descriptively titled “A Nation at Risk,” was never issued.)

4. The movement, despite the fact that it temporarily spread from one large town to another, never really grew in hard numbers. The “new blood” that many extreme leftist politicians (including President Obama), commentators, and entertainers hoped for, simply never materialized. In fact, one sees a steadily declining number of several hundred, disaffected individuals, such that once the New York protesters leave their garbage-covered park, theirs and all the sister protest throughout the country will have nothing more than betrayed their merely sandy foundations.

Aside from producing neither a statement that might resemble something of a Declaration of Independence, nor anyone that might pass for the movement’s Thomas Jefferson, most of us seem to have already merely grown bored with (as well as angered for having our daily commute to and fro work impeded by) these protesters. As such, not only are they not frightening any more, they are simply annoying — and annoyance has never been a good recipe for what might pass for a successful socio-economic revolution.