By David Marcus
Monday, June 03, 2019
The Occupation Will Be Televised
Over the past decade, a new and virulently illiberal
progressive movement has taken shape in the United States. Centered around
identity politics, control and censorship of speech, and proposed government
takeovers of much of the economy, today’s New Progressive now sounds and looks
almost identical to the radical fringe elements of leftism as recently as the
late 1990s. Although the actual number of these New Progressives may be small,
the movement has broad and approving reach in the media, and has become a
disproportionally large part of the national political debate.
For conservatives it is essential to understand the
origins and nature of this new progressivism. Although the cultural, economic,
and political ideas that undergird this movement can be traced back to at the
least the late 1960s and the emergence of European postmodern philosophy, in
the American context, the most useful starting point for understanding what is
happening today is Occupy Wall Street (OWS).
Occupy brought together three ideas for the first time
that were formerly on the fringe. First is the idea that group identity bestows
differing rights and obligations on individuals, rather than individuals all having
equal rights and obligations. Second, OWS created the concept of a battle
between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, which replaced a more nuanced
approach on the left to how wealth is distributed. Finally, it offered a deep
distrust of and desire to silence corporate entities that OWS claimed are not
persons and therefore essentially have no rights.
Before delving into each, it useful to consider the
backdrop and causes of Occupy Wall Street. On September 17, 2011, a group of
protesters took over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The idea of the protest
was first proposed by the Canadian progressive magazine Adbusters, and quickly
gained the support of the Internet hacking organization Anonymous. From there,
several other national and local progressive groups coordinated to create the
occupation.
I spent a lot of time at Occupy Wall Street, first out of
curiosity, then out of concern. Early on, there was a convivial feeling, a
library was set up, and there was free food and music. The whole thing felt like
an urban Woodstock. The message was “We are the 99 percent,” which placed blame
on a small cabal of super rich and suggested that opposing and defeating them
would be easy given vastly superior numbers.
In any political or social movement, the devil is in the
details. So Occupy did what any good revolutionary group does: it created a
governing body for itself, called the General Assembly. They came up with a
kind of fascistic Quakerism — Quaker because it allowed all to speak and sought
consensus, fascistic because it curtailed what speech could be made and placed
the value of speech on the speakers’ racial, sexual, and other identifiers.
Intersectionality and the Progressive Stack
The primary element of the General Assembly that raised
eyebrows for me was what they called the “progressive stack.” It was a set of
rules that determined the order in which people would speak, giving those who
went in the beginning a huge advantage in framing the discourse. Basically, the
more oppressed groups you belonged to, the earlier in the session you would
speak. A black lesbian would speak near the top; a straight, white man would
wait a very long time to take the microphone.
At the time of OWS the concept of intersectionality was
not yet widely well known, but among progressive activists, artists, and
academics it was, and it lies at the root of the progressive stack. A hierarchy
of oppression, which we now have become familiar with, was just beginning to
establish a foothold in mainstream culture. The General Assembly was one of its
first physical and non-hypothetical manifestations.
While Occupy sought to enhance the voices of the
marginalized, they were remarkably non-diverse. One survey
said 81 percent of participants were white, while only 7 percent were Hispanic,
and less than 2 percent were black. This trend line holds to this day: polls
show the vast majority of far-left Americans are white.
As was always likely, the General Assembly achieved
little and struggled over time to effectively govern the little world it had
created among the gleaming towers of Gotham. But by so publicly advocating for
the rights of the identity group over the rights of the individual, they struck
a major blow for intersectionality in leftist circles, a concept that would
take over an increasing part of the cultural and media landscape.
We Are The 99 Percent
It should not surprise us that the credited creators of
Occupy Wall Street were primarily interested and involved in advertising. Its
symbol, a graceful ballerina poised atop the Wall Street bull statue, was a
stroke of marketing genius worthy of a midtown ad agency.
In creating slogans and messaging, the movement was
wildly successful. They couched a radical agenda in terms that seemed simple
and sensical. Why, after all, should 1 percent of human beings control so much
more wealth than the other 99 percent? Thus, “We are the 99 percent” became a
powerful and successful rallying cry.
The idea of income inequality was a relatively new one in
2011, at least in terms of the widespread public imagination. Throughout the
1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, liberals and Democrats focused
their messaging energy on a shrinking middle class. While American
progressivism has always had a soak-the-rich element, it was generally bounded
in the idea of creating greater opportunity, not such direct Marxist calls for
class warfare.
Occupy brought Marxism and socialism a kind of
respectability that it had not enjoyed before in the United States, at least
not among the creators of our news and culture. Although Occupy did not achieve
any of its specific policy goals, to the extent they had any, it did take the
stigma out of socialism in the media. It is worth remembering that the young
occupiers in 2011, in their early 20s, had no memory of the Soviet Union or the
Cold War. For them a direct attack on the capitalist class taken basically out
of the Communist Manifesto did not carry the dark images of communism’s past.
Just as many of the occupiers were in their 20s, so were
many of the journalists covering the occupation. Language about class warfare
and attacking the rich had to be couched in niceties about the virtue and
victory of capitalism when spoken of in the 20th century. Occupy Wall Street
changed that. Marxist rhetoric clothed as concern over income inequality became
not only acceptable outside of the pages of leftist magazines, it became quite
fashionable.
Corporations Are Not People
Occupy Wall Street took place about a year after the
Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case. In that case the court
confirmed that corporations have a First Amendment right to engage in political
speech. This was not a new concept in American jurisprudence — in fact it goes
back to the earliest days of the republic — but this decision outraged and
sparked the left’s imagination. It was a perfect fit for Occupy’s platform.
What made it so perfect was that corporations could be
portrayed as the means by which the 1 percent exerts control over the rest of
us. Fresh off scandals that helped lead to the great recession, corporations
were vulnerable and easy targets for rhetorical abuse. Just like “We are the 99
percent,” “Corporations are not people” is a great slogan that almost sounds
axiomatic. But, of course, corporations are people — it’s not like there
are bunch of ducks owning shares or sitting in boardrooms.
It very quickly becomes a bait and switch situation.
Asked if super PACs should be able to spend unlimited money on political ads, a
lot of people will say no. Asked if theater companies or movie studios should
have their political content limited by the government, most people would also
say no. But both are corporations.
One of the Occupy flags was an American flag but instead
of stars it had corporate logos, like those of McDonalds and Exxon. The idea
was make the term corporation seem only to apply to these giants, when
in fact the vast majority of corporations are small entities, made of small
groups of people who don’t check their constitutional rights at the door when
they cooperate.
Citizens United and the fight over corporate personhood
provided Occupy a perfect foil for their effort to weaken First Amendment
protections and the idea of free speech itself. The attack on corporate speech
was an early iteration of what would grow into the censorious deplatforming
culture on the far left. It’s an early form of the idea that some speech, in
fact quite a bit of speech, is so dangerous that it must be shouted down and
stopped at any cost.
“I abhor your views but defend your right to speak them”
went out the window. Leftists came to take the narrowest view possible of free
speech, arguing that it only applies to actions the state takes to limit
speech. But of course freedom of speech is not just a constitutional
protection, it is, at least for most conservatives, a good in and unto itself.
For progressives, this was starting to no longer be the case.
By the end of the Occupy experiment, things got ugly.
Since early on, the encampment had been divided between the West side, where
the library and General Assembly were, and where the intellectuals of the
movement congregated, and the East side, where drum circles were peopled by
anarchists and scumpunks. Tensions were already high when reports of rape
started to surface.
At first, OWS insisted they could handle the rape
problem, even erecting a safe tent for women. But for the authorities in New
York City, including an increasingly frustrated Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that
was not at all an acceptable remedy. It became clear that the occupation’s days
were numbered, and then on November 15, the New York Police Department shut it
down.
By most measures at the time, Occupy Wall Street was a
failure. In the political short term, seven years later, even with the loss of
the House of Representatives, conservatives hold historic levels of political
and judicial power. While Occupy organizations still exist, they are a bit
player, dwarfed by movements like the Women’s March. But it is almost certain
that without Occupy Wall Street, there would have been no Women’s March, at
least not in the intersectional progressive form we see today.
Occupy created an agenda, which would ultimately flower
into the platform and policies of organizations like Justice Democrats with
their cadre of socialist congresswomen. But it wouldn’t happen overnight. In
part two, we will examine the new progressive movement’s incubation period
under the last four years of the Obama administration. During that time, out of
the ashes of Occupy, something was starting to grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment