The Left Declares Its Independence

By Todd Gitlin, The New York Times

09 October 11

f some aspects of the Occupy Wall Street protest feel predictable - the drum circles, the signs, including "Tax Wall Street Transactions" and "End the FED" - so does the right-wing response. Is it any surprise that Fox News and its allied bloggers consider the protesters "deluded" and "dirty smelly hippies"?

Then again, maybe it is surprising. As more than a few observers have noted, the Occupy Wall Street chant, "We Are the 99 Percent" - a shot across the bow of the wealthiest 1 percent of the country, which includes the financial predators and confidence gamers who crashed the global economy with impunity - seems synonymous with the Tea Party's "Take Back America" ethos.

Those similarities, though, mask profound differences. The two movements both loathe the elite, but their goals, and the passions that drive them forward, could not be more at odds.

The Tea Party, for all its apparent populism, revolves around a vision of power and how to attain it. Tea Partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, graying, married and comfortable; the political system once worked for them, and they think it can be made to do so again. They revile government, but they adore hierarchy and order. Not for them the tents and untucked shirts, the tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks that are eye candy for lazy journalists. ("Am I dressed too nice so the media doesn't interview me?" read one Occupy Wall Street demonstrator's sign.)

In contrast, what should we make of Occupy Wall Street? The movement is, of course, nascent, and growing: on Oct. 5, it picked up thousands of marching supporters of all ages, many from unions, professions and universities, and crowded Foley Square. Its equivalents rallied in 50 cities. Deep anger at grotesque inequities extends far beyond this one encampment; after all, a few handfuls of young activists do not have a monopoly on the fight against plutocracy. Revulsion in the face of a perverse economy is felt by many respectable people: unemployed, not yet unemployed, shakily employed and plain disgusted. A month from now, this movement, still busy being born, could look quite different.

And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the "occupation" three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists. Indeed, some occupiers take the point as a compliment - because that is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the Tea Party. Anarchism has been the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements for nearly the past half century, as it is in Zuccotti Park.

In this recent incarnation, anarchism, for the most part, is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of Lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with the time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time - at least until the first frost.

The anarchist impulse is nothing new in America. There were strong anarchist streaks in the New Left of the 1960s - stronger than the socialist streak, in fact, despite all the work Marxists did to define proper class categories for the student movement. "Let the people decide," one of the early rallying cries of Students for a Democratic Society (of which I was president from 1963 to 1964), meant, in practice, "Let's have long meetings where everyone gets to talk." De facto, this meant that politics was for people who, in a sense, talked for a living - in other words, college types.

It was a revolutionary idea, at least for its time and in certain places: in the Deep South, for civil rights workers and black farm workers just to meet and talk was a dangerously radical, and radically dangerous, proposition.

But the left's distrust of outside authority reached, and still reaches, much further. The bumper sticker of the 1960s New Left could have been Bob Dylan's lyric "Don't follow leaders, watch the parkin' meters," cheekily pairing hierarchy with overregulation. By 1967, its membership soaring, the SDS was so suspicious of leadership, so disdainful of the formal structures of its first five years, as to abolish its own presidential and vice-presidential offices.

As the SDS discovered in 1969, when quarreling Maoist-Guevarist and Stalinist factions tore it apart, chaotic meetings and suspicion of formal procedures didn't keep tiny hierarchies from exercising decisive control. Radical feminists came to similar conclusions. Nevertheless, hostility to elitism remained all the rage. From the early '70s on, activists went into revolt against just about anybody's authority, even their own. Vertical authority had a foul odor: it smacked of colonialism, patriarchy, bad white men lording themselves over voiceless minions. In left-wing activist circles, establishments of all sorts were the immoral equivalents of The Establishment.

Disgruntled by big-talking leaders, turned off by celebrity media, the left of the '70s developed a horizontal style, according limited authority to their own leaders, who were frequently at pains to deny that they were leaders at all. "Affinity groups" and "working groups" replaced organized factions and parties. Even movements that seemed to require some level of verticality - those with concrete goals, like banning nuclear power and weapons, or opposing apartheid - were mostly leaderless.

That explains why, to the bafflement of their ideological opponents, such movements barely paused at the fall of Communism. When Leninist regimes collapsed, and their self-confident social democratic rivals crumpled as well, anarchism's major competitors for a theory of organization imploded.

This new protest style is more Rousseau than Marx. What the Zuccotti Park encampment calls horizontal democracy is spunky, polymorphic, energetic, theatrical, scattered and droll. An early poster showed a ballerina poised gingerly on the back of Wall Street's bull sculpture, bearing the words: "Occupy Wall Street. September 17th. Bring Tent." It likes government more than corporations, but its own style is hardly governmental. It tends to care about process more than results.

And oh, how it loves to talk. It is no surprise that it makes fervent use of the technologies of horizontal communication, of Facebook and Twitter, though the instinct predated - perhaps prefigured - those tools. Not coincidentally, this was also the spirit of the more or less leaderless, partyless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt that are claimed as inspiration in Lower Manhattan. An "American Autumn" is their shot at an echo of the "Arab Spring."

Occupy Wall Street, then, emanates from a culture - strictly speaking, a counterculture - that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline.

So where do these romantics go from here? The Zuccotti Park core doesn't seem to have a plan, or even to take kindly to the idea of consolidating a list of demands. And yet, by taking the initiative, they have aroused, as with the Oct. 5 march, less romantic and more conventionally organized allies who do not disdain political demands. Such is the cunning of political history. Having set out to be expressive, the anarchists have found themselves playing, willy-nilly, a most strategic role.

Such movements hope to remain forever under construction, fluid, unfixed. They slip laughingly through the nets of journalism, which prefers hard-and-fast answers to the question "What do you people want?"

But the interesting, difficult, even decisive moment in the career of such a movement comes when allies arrive, especially allies not so enamored of horizontal democracy and more taken by the idea of getting results. These forces showed up on Oct. 5. De facto, there is an alliance in the cards.

It makes sense. Here, finally, is what labor and the activist left have been waiting for. For two years, Barack Obama got the benefit of the doubt from fervent supporters - I'd bet that many of those in Lower Manhattan during these weeks went door-to-door for him in 2008 - and that support explains why no one occupied Wall Street in 2009. Now, as Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School, said of Zuccotti Park: "This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration."

By allying itself with the protest, the left at large is telling the president that a campaign slogan that essentially says "We're better than Eric Cantor" won't cut it in 2012. "We are the 99 percent" would be more like it. If President Obama takes this direction, the movement's energy may be able to power a motor of significant reform.

That raises the question, though, of whether the inchoate quality of the Occupy Wall Street movement can continue. Probably not, since an evolving alliance demands concrete goals, strategies and compromises. But perhaps something of the initial free spirit can flourish. There is plenty of public sentiment to nourish it. It doesn't take public opinion polls to detect American anger at the plutocracy and the impunity with which it lords it over the country.

The culture of anarchy is right about this: The corporate rich - those ostensible "job creators" who somehow haven't gotten around to creating jobs - rule the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party as well, having artfully arranged a mutual back-scratching society to enrich themselves. A refusal to compromise with this system, defined by its hierarchies of power and money, would be the current moment of anarchy's great, lasting contribution.

Until now, fury at the plutocracy and the political class had found no channel to run in but the antigovernment fantasies of the Tea Party. Now it has dug a new channel. Anger does not move countries, but it moves movements - and movements, in turn, can move countries. To do that, movements need leverage. Even Archimedes needed a lever and a place to stand to move the world. When Zuccotti Park meets an aroused liberalism, the odd couple may not live happily ever after. But they can make a serious run at American dreams of "liberty and justice for all."

The Wall Street Occupiers and the Democratic Party

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

08 October 11

ill the Wall Street Occupiers morph into a movement that has as much impact on the Democratic Party as the Tea Party has had on the GOP? Maybe. But there are reasons for doubting it.

Tea Partiers have been a mixed blessing for the GOP establishment - a source of new ground troops and energy but also a pain in the assets with regard to attracting independent voters. As Rick Perry and Mitt Romney square off, that pain will become more evident.

So far the Wall Street Occupiers have helped the Democratic Party. Their inchoate demand that the rich pay their fair share is tailor-made for the Democrats' new plan for a 5.6 percent tax on millionaires, as well as the President's push to end the Bush tax cut for people with incomes over $250,000 and to limit deductions at the top.

And the Occupiers give the President a potential campaign theme. "These days, a lot of folks who are doing the right thing aren't rewarded and a lot of folks who aren't doing the right thing are rewarded," he said at his news conference this week, predicting that the frustration fueling the Occupiers will "express itself politically in 2012 and beyond until people feel like once again we're getting back to some old-fashioned American values."

But if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it than the GOP has had with the Tea Party.

After all, a big share of both parties' campaign funds comes from the Street and corporate board rooms. The Street and corporate America also have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do their bidding - not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey's and Karl Rove's SuperPACs. Even if the Occupiers have access to some union money, it's hardly a match.

Yet the real difficulty lies deeper. A little history is helpful here.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party had no trouble embracing economic populism. It charged the large industrial concentrations of the era - the trusts - with stifling the economy and poisoning democracy. In the 1912 campaign Woodrow Wilson promised to wage "a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development ... that have determined our lives ... that have set us in a straightjacket to so as they please." The struggle to break up the trusts would be, in Wilson's words, nothing less than a "second struggle for emancipation."

Wilson lived up to his words - signing into law the Clayton Antitrust Act (which not only strengthened antitrust laws but also exempted unions from their reach), establishing the Federal Trade Commission (to root out "unfair acts and practices in commerce"), and creating the first national income tax.

Years later Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security. FDR also instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street and big business went on the attack. In the 1936 campaign, Roosevelt warned against the "economic royalists" who had impressed the whole of society into service. "The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship," he warned. What was at stake, Roosevelt thundered, was nothing less that the "survival of democracy." He told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him. "Never before, in all our history, have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred!"

By the 1960s, though, the Democratic Party had given up on populism. Gone from presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers. This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity grew the middle class and reduced the gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers got generous wage and benefit increases.

By then Keynesianism had become a widely-accepted antidote to economic downturns - substituting the management of aggregate demand for class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed "we're all Keynesians now." Who needed economic populism when fiscal and monetary policy could even out the business cycle, and the rewards of growth were so widely distributed?

But there was another reason for the Democrats' increasing unease with populism. The Vietnam War spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much if not more than it distrusted Wall Street and big business. Richard Nixon's electoral victory in 1968 was accompanied by a deep rift between liberal Democrats and the New Left, which continued for decades.

Enter Ronald Reagan, master storyteller, who jumped into the populist breach. If Reagan didn't invent right-wing populism in America he at least gave it full-throttled voice. "Government is the problem, not the solution," he intoned, over and over again. In Reagan's view, Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement.

The Democratic Party never regained its populist footing. To be sure, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 promising to "fight for the forgotten middle class" against the forces of "greed," but Clinton inherited such a huge budget deficit from Reagan and George H.W. Bush that he couldn't put up much of a fight. And after losing his bid for universal health care, Clinton himself announced that the "era of big government" was over - and he proved it by ending welfare.

Democrats have not been the ones to engage in class warfare. That was the distinct product of right-wing Republican populism. Anybody recall the Republican ad in the 2004 presidential election describing Democrats as a "tax-hiking, government spending, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak Show"?

Republicans repeatedly attacked John Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal" who was part of the "Chardonnay-and-brie set." George W. Bush mocked Kerry for finding a "new nuance" each day on Iraq - drawing out the word "nuance" to emphasize Kerry's French cultural elitism. "In Texas, we don't do nuance," he said, to laughter and applause. House Republican leader Tom DeLay opened his campaign speeches by saying "Good morning or, as John Kerry would say, Bonjour."

The Tea Party has been quick to pick up the same class theme. At the Conservative Political Action Conference of 2010, Minnesota Governor Tom Pawlenty attacked "the elites" who believe Tea Partiers are "not as sophisticated because a lot of them didn't go to Ivy League Schools" and "don't hang out at ... Chablis-drinking, Brie-eating parties in San Francisco." After his son Rand Paul was elected for Kentucky's Senate seat that May, Congressman Ron Paul explained that voters want to "get rid of the power people who run the show, the people who think they're above everyone else."

Which brings us to the present day. Barack Obama is many things but he is as far from left-wing populism as any Democratic president in modern history. True, he once had the temerity to berate "fat cats" on Wall Street, but that remark was the exception - and subsequently caused him endless problems on the Street.

To the contrary, Obama has been extraordinarily solicitous of Wall Street and big business - making Timothy Geithner Treasury Secretary and de facto ambassador from the Street; seeing to it that Bush's Fed appointee, Ben Bernanke, got another term; and appointing GE Chair Jeffrey Immelt to head his jobs council.

Most tellingly, it was President Obama's unwillingness to place conditions on the bailout of Wall Street - not demanding, for example, that the banks reorganize the mortgages of distressed homeowners, and that they accept the resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act, as conditions for getting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars - that contributed to the new populist insurrection.

The Wall Street bailout fueled the Tea Party (at the Utah Republican convention that ousted incumbent Republican Senator Robert Bennett in 2010, the mob repeatedly shouted "TARP! TARP! TARP!"), and it surely fuels some of the current fulminations of Occupy Wall Street.

This is not to say that the Occupiers can have no impact on the Democrats. Nothing good happens in Washington - regardless of how good our president or representatives may be - unless good people join together outside Washington to make it happen. Pressure from the left is critically important.

But the modern Democratic Party is not likely to embrace left-wing populism the way the GOP has embraced - or, more accurately, been forced to embrace - right-wing populism. Just follow the money, and remember history.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," "Supercapitalism" and his latest book, "AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.