No, Armando, you are not reading any of that right. First of all, I am not lamenting the emergence of the hippie, nor am I punching them. And I am not blaming the loss of the Democrats’ popularity in the South on the Vietnam War, although that war certainly didn’t help.
Let me do my best to explain, since I think it’s easy to misinterpret my meaning in this case. My main point is that Mr. Chait missed an important event during his retelling of history. Liberals may have bitched about FDR and Truman and JFK, but they didn’t see those presidents as illegitimate or as rogues or as evil-doers or as the heads of an out of control imperialist country. What the Vietnam War did was end a period of history in which liberals saw the country as good and in which they wielded considerable power. With good reason, liberals reacted to the Vietnam War by questioning authority, including their own role in the power structure. The tune in, turn on, and drop out ethos of the counterculture is the extreme end of this reaction, but the generalized suspicion of power has become much more mainstream.
At this point, let me also stop to make something clear. I am a great admirer of the counterculture and most people would consider me to have lived a life fully consistent with the values of the counterculture. What I am lamenting is not that people reacted to the power structures of the 1960’s with enlightened rebellion. Nor do I care to critique the shortcomings of that movement. What I am lamenting is an unintended consequence, a hangover if you will. The hangover is that liberals went from being the natural leaders of this country to being the natural critics or gadflies of this country. We are constitutionally suspicious of power to a degree that inhibits our ability, even our desire, to attain power.
Mr. Chait wanted to make the point that liberals are congenitally grumpy and dissatisfied, and therefore there is some illegitimacy to their grumpy dissatisfaction with Barack Obama. I see things differently. I think we are much more comfortable acting like critics than we are actually participating in governance. Some of it is that being on the outside allows us to maintain the purity of our convictions without being sullied by the dirty compromises that all progress requires. But what’s more important is that we don’t feel like power is a good thing. And I believe that people sense this about us. They sense it and they react to it by not taking us seriously. We can be right about all the big issues for years on end while the Establishment is ignoring us and falling on its face, over and over. But no one turns to us and says, “hey, you are the only people who’ve been right about this stuff, maybe you should be in charge.” They don’t do that because we don’t act like we deserve to be in charge or that we want to be in charge,
This can get bogged down in tired old arguments and accusations. The Republicans look at the way that we critique US foreign policy and say we don’t love our country and that we don’t believe that America is special and has a special role to play. They say we hate the military. Those criticisms are always over the top, but they relate back to something true, which is that the post-Vietnam War progressive movement grew out of the counterculture, and you can’t make a very good case for running the country if your disposition is counter to the culture and power structures of the country.
That’s why I say we need to get over being countercultural. I don’t mean that we should change our values. I am talking about our disposition, our attitude, the way we carry ourselves, what we expect of ourselves. When I say that we should make the countercultural cultural, I mean that we should have the confidence to behave like our values are mainstream and that we want to and deserve to govern with our mainstream values. We are winning the culture wars. We proved we could create a society color-blind enough to elect a biracial president. We proved we could turn tolerance for gays into a mainstream position. We proved we could enact a major health care bill. We don’t have to play the victim anymore. We don’t have to be the outsiders anymore. We can seize our place in the power structure again. We ought to be able to believe that the government can do great things again.
But, by and large, we’re not doing any of those things. People are wallowing in self-pity and petty recriminations. There’s a party on the right that is attacking us on every conceivable front, and some that aren’t even conceivable. I am not going to list them because you know the list. And so many liberals just ignore all that and find something they can fault in the president. If liberals want to be ascendant again, they have to embrace power again and step inside the system, take responsibility, get their hands dirty, and cut the holier-than-thou bullshit.
We have to act like the natural leaders of this country. When we do, we’ll discover that people are willing to let us lead.
This is one of the biggest things that concerns me about the Occupy movement. That movement, by and large, has conflated two issues: it has looked at a political system whose leaders are by institutional definition fundamentally corrupt, and it has concluded that leadership itself is a bad thing. Those are two very different statements.
Way too much of the progressive and radical left treat certain basic things that are not going to go away – money, for one, the military and cops, for another – as inherently evil and to be shunned at all costs. Leadership gets this treatment, also, even though in my experience most “leaderless groups” are less, not more, democratic, because leaders emerge anyway, but they aren’t labelled or consciously selected as such and therefore aren’t nearly as accountable.
There are good tactical reasons for the Occupy movement – or any movement that fundamentally challenges the status quo – to be decentralized. But those are tactical reasons, not philosophical. Certainly there’s danger and structural weakness in, say, having a grass roots movement too tied to a single personality – see the fate of the Rainbow Coalition once Jesse Jackson decided it was no longer useful to him – but sneering at the idea that the experience and wisdom of individuals who know what they’re doing should be honored, as opposed to the wisdom of the body of the whole, sounds a whole lot like the celebration of ignorance that is the Tea Party, frankly. It’s a balance – you want those leaders to be accountable, you want a small-d democratic structure, but you don’t want everyone doing whatever the hell they want in the name of the larger movement. In Third World countries, where such self-indulgence gets you (and others) shot, the popular movements are much, much more self-disciplined. And I say that even though countless Occupy sites have shown a remarkable discipline in their nonviolence. It only takes a few.
Back to leaders: One of the lessons of the Tea Party for organizers is that you’d rather have your own people pulling the strings than having powerful outsiders (Karl Rove, Dick Armey, the Kochs) doing it for you. Another lesson is that not all opinions are created equal. For example, a decentralized “diversity of tactics” doesn’t make much sense when one of your tactics advances the movement, and another delegitimizes it, and you’re battling a media echo chamber that will hold the entire movement responsible for any one component’s misbehavior. The left is so conflict-averse that sometimes we’re just not very good at saying “no” to people who need saying “no” to, whether they be well-meaning ideologues, agent provocateurs, or simply crazy folks acting out their private psychodramas in a group.
And in that sense, I get the feeling that OWS is making a mistake that a lot of the New Left groups across Europe and the US were making back around 1967/1968, at least based on my re-reading of writings and manifestos from that era. I think your points regarding leader emergence are solid. I hope that if any Occupiers are bothering to read this blog – there is a small subset who might – that they impart that important idea to their Occupy groups. Power in and of itself is not a bad or evil thing – it is what you do with that power that is important. Whether they want it or not, the Occupiers will find themselves with a vanguard. They’re better off with one that is more rather than less accountable to them. Just my opinion.
Also, I think the bits about not all ideas being equal is one well worth digesting. Again, going back not only to the current OWS manifestos, but also manifestos that circulated in Paris circa 1968, I see a hodgepodge of ideas, some of which are contradictory (thinking Paris in particular) and some of which should never be taken seriously in the first place (anything that even remotely smells of 9/11 Trutherism for example should simply be shot down immediately with prejudice, as it is simple conspiracy mongering and has nothing to do with our current economic and political predicament).
That said, I’m impressed with OWS. When I first saw rumblings of it in my Twitter feed, I was skeptical about it getting much traction. I’m thankful I was wrong. It’s far from perfect – any human endeavor is – but generally (as others have said elsewhere) been strikingly disciplined and focused.
Yeah, and what people have done with power in all of humanity has been on a scale of outright corruption to downright tyranny and murder. So as the saying goes, “Power corrupts…” then you can fill in the blank.
It’s what I mentioned earlier with the actual “far left” blogs I read. They have a point. They want leaderlessness for their own communities, and a focus on local politics (without government). I don’t believe this will work and that power hungry people will fill in that vacuum, and we’ll be right back where we are now (or some version of it). or maybe we won’t…I doubt people of 5,000 years ago expected to see “nation states”. The point is, it is absolutely necessary to view power as a bad thing, but it does matter who fills the vacuum.
Recently, I have seen the Occupy Wall Street movement described by participants as a “leaderfull” movement. So the second part of your statement at a philosophical level is no longer true. Self-understandings evolve.
My reading of its “organic” evolution strategy is that it is first of all an emphatic grassroots group that is intolerant of attempts to divide the 99% using any typology, wedge issue, ideology, partisan commitment or whatever. Second it is self-organizing from below. There is a division of labor, and that creates different types of action leadership; you see that the place needs to be cleaned up, be a leader and do it. You see that the group needs livestreaming; figure out how to do that. Need a way of dealing with the homeless; involve the homeless in defining their relationship to the Occupy encampment, understanding that some will be cantankerous or still on drugs or having mental issues or just living on the streets. Leadership is stepping up to the task and getting it done. Those dealing with logistics are are pretty obvious but do have issues. The general assembly is the venue for dealing with issues and arriving at consensus. There is a tension between the go-get-it-done leadership and the general assembly.
The question that this raises within many difficult general assembly sessions is what is leadership? When is someone acting on the general assembly consensus and when not? What happens when there is a time constraint and the general assembly is divided (for whatever reason) on what to do? This happened dramatically in Occupy Portland on the day after the eviction. Police announcement and beginnings of action force folks to decide with their feet; who were they standing or walking with.
The American Constitution established an elaborate set of checks and balances, and we have seen how those can be gradually corrupted over time. The general assemblies also have checks and balances: hand signals (“temperature checks”) of how hot or cold the division and distance from consensus are; strict facilitation of the process; rules for the order of the open forum stack. And various types of folks have been trying to figure out how to game those.
The other issue in leadership that is under dispute is that leadership need necessarily come with perquisites. “Some are more equal than others”. There is a latent inequality of privilege and authority in American (and others as well) society that determines whose words and thoughts are more valuable based on race, sex, education, income, gender, and a whole lot of other distinctions unrelated to topic under discussion. One of those distinctions is the formal authority of being designated a leader.
This discussion of aversion to leadership then comes down to an aversion to a certain type of leadership with certain presumptions about privilege and power. And tends to get lost in abstract discussions about the need for quick decisions (why?) or professionalism (why?) or experience (why?) or risk-taking (why?).
The issue to grapple with is that followers create leaders (in the usual sense). What is the basis on which ordinary people decide to be obedient to someone else on a continuing basis?
This is not the conclusion of a conversation on leadership. It is the beginning. Which is why there needs to be as many and as large of general assemblies as possible. Because you don’t have this discussion at all through the media. And not everyone can afford the technology to have it in the blogosphere. But almost anyone can find a way to get to a general assembly. Which are held out of doors because those who own large meeting venues claim the right to censor the contents of speech or set time limits on the discussion.
More good stuff from the sage of North Carolina.
Also, it provides an excuse for me to plug one of my favorite books on the topic of leadership: Garry Wills’ “Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership”. http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780684801384
Among Wills’ main points:
1 – Leadership is trinitarian. It requires leaders, followers, and action towards a shared goal. Take away any one of the three, and you no longer have leadership being exercised.
2 – There is not one type of leadership. There are many types of leadership—for many different situations. Napoleon was a great military leader—and not such a great political leader. Ross Perot was an excellent corporate leader—and not such a great political leader. Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson shared many characteristics—but their differences made one a great politician and the other not.
Quote: “Recently, I have seen the Occupy Wall Street movement described by participants as a “leaderfull” movement.”
Well, if everyone’s a leader, then no one’s really a leader — at least not one that can get too far ahead of the pack. Hopefully, though, they’ve reached the point where a “leader” could decide to give John Lewis time to speak, and crowd member with the courage to apologize to Rep. Lewis won’t get drowned out by a chorus of inane “mic checks.”
Somewhat off-topic, but I just want to give a shout-out to the UC Davis student (or students) whose leadership led to the nonviolent resolution of the pepper-spray assault by the police last week. Heart-warming and inspiring.
The Council of Elders stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street
I suggest you contact Congressman Lewis’s office to get his opinion of Occupy Atlanta.
Just because rightwingers have Googlebombed a single incident doesn’t mean that they had their facts right.
An interesting idea about leadership in a democratic society. The idea of “leaderfull” recognizes that no leader can do anything and that there is no true leadership without the authentic (as opposed to the manipulated) consent of their followers.
Hear hear. Outstanding and inspiring post, BooMan.
And a terrific discussion in these comments as well.
Great post, Booman. You really cut to the heart of it.
So, next question: how do we make it happen? Where does it start? Who’s involved? And what’s the general process?
I know, that’s a complicated set of questions. But the discussion has to start somewhere.
Here’s one contribution to the discussion I found helpful:
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2011/11/the_civil_rights_movements_suc.php#comment
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Key point: “The Civil Rights Movement’s success was based on a coordinated three-prong strategy of civil disobedience, grass-roots organizing and mass boycotts. To achieve similar victories, a national “We are the 99%” movement must adopt and apply that same approach.”
Basically, use nonviolent direct action, voter education and mobilization, and economic leverage to wield and take back power (political, social and economic).
I’m skeptical of anything that outlines a strategy based on what worked in the past. When the left has succeeded in the past, it’s because they did something fresh for their time and they did it well. If we want to recreate the successes of the past, we have to imitate the radicalness and intelligence of the actions, not the actions themselves.
Yeah, I don’t disagree. I think the more important point is that successful movements rely on a broad array of tactics and strategies.
Also, there are certain “universals” about humans and about politics (broadly defined). In this post, I think Booman is trying to refocus us on one of those universals—power. Without power, without the ability to act effectively on our values and in our own interests, it doesn’t much matter how “right” we are (or think we are).
Good post, very clear. Of course, your last post was clear too, and I find it discouraging that talkleft was so quick to conclude you were “punching hippies.” Seems like it must’ve taken an almost willful refusal to understand what you were saying to get to that conclusion. Further, that kind of refusal to understand seems to have become part of the very problem you’re talking about.
Talk Left are the equivalent of those conservatives who are just certain that white, Christian men are being persecuted.
They are determined that everything is “hippie punching” because they are in love with the idea of being a repressed minority waging a noble struggles against The System, Man.
We are constitutionally suspicious of power to a degree that inhibits our ability, even our desire, to attain power.
Well, duh!! Look at all the stupid wars we’ve waged in the past 60 years!! And that includes shit like the overthrow of Mossadegh and Allende.
Don’t forget about Arbenz in Guatemala.
Don’t forget that it’s Two Thousand and fucking Eleven…
Or attempts to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela early in the previous decade.
Well, duh!! Look at all the stupid wars we’ve waged in the past 60 years!! And that includes shit like the overthrow of Mossadegh and Allende.
If you think that such actions are the inevitable outcome of political power, rather than the decisions of particular individuals that could have gone the other way if we’d had better people in power, then why even bother with politics?
For my part, I think the differences between Clinton and Bush on, say, Iraq policy were pretty damn stark, and that who in particular was in power mattered a great deal.
“If you think that such actions are the inevitable outcome of political power, rather than the decisions of particular individuals that could have gone the other way if we’d had better people in power, then why even bother with politics?”
That is the central question.
“For my part, I think the differences between Clinton and Bush on, say, Iraq policy were pretty damn stark.”
Depends which Bush you’re talking about.
By the way, I wanted to mention that there’s something to be said for the The Fourth Turning‘s arguments about how the process of moving from the counterculture to the culture and back again is a natural and cyclic one that has occurred throughout history.
(For those who aren’t familiar with the theory: they posit that history proceeds in ~80 year cycles which have four distinct phases, each of which you could analogize to a season of the year. The fourth turning is the process of entering the fourth phase, which is a crisis period. In 1997 when the book was written they argued that we were likely to enter a 20-year crisis in 2007 – seems pretty right to me given the still-ongoing financial crisis that started in 2007, combined with major energy challenges we’ll be facing in just a couple of years.)
By their reasoning, after the crisis, if we meet the challenges that are coming our way, the country will come out more unified on the other side, just like we did after WWII. This also suggests that if we survive the crisis society as a whole will be less countercultural. The challenge then is to ensure that the culture that emerges on the other side isn’t a right-wing one. This, as Booman points out, is important and given the Fourth Turning’s reasoning, pretty urgent.
I agree with the main thrust of Chait’s piece. And I agree with where you’re coming from. Since 68, we’ve all been living in Nixonland. My main hope after the 2008 election was that Obama would figure out the antidote to Nixonland, put the country on a new path. Doing so would take incredible political skills, I knew that, but I recognized that Nixon was incredibly talented and that’s how he forged Nixonland. Obviously Obama didn’t end Nixonland, it exacerbated it. Perhaps liberals were asking too much for Obama to end Nixonland, but if not him, then who?
One other point: correct me if I’m wrong, but nowhere in Chait’s piece did he talk about the real possibility of Obamacare being overturen by the supreme court. A lot of the reason liberals can’t just sit back and say, thanks Obama for doing universal health care, is because it’s not done. We have one of the most political supreme courts in our history, ruling on a highly political piece of legislation, in a highly politicized environment leading up to the election. And, by the way, the polling on the bill has stabilized, but its still pretty awful. So is health care done and in the bank? I think that’s wishful thinking and to admonish liberals for not waking up each day and thanking Obama for health insurance reform is ridiculous. And Obama either knew that or should have known that- they decided that going after the center by looking serious on the deficit issue, rather than craft the legislation in a way that liberals would love.
I think you give too much credit to the powers of the presidency in general, and to Nixon and Obama in particular. Part of Rick Pearlstein’s talent as a historian is that he make clear how much politicians like Goldwater and Nixon are as much (if not more) creations of social and political movements as they are creators of those movements.
As for health care, we liberals are fooling ourselves if we think Obama could have crafted, and passed, health care legislation “in a way that liberals would love”.
I disagree with some of what Obama’s done on deficit reduction this year, but the real issue there (in my view) is the election results of 2010. Once there’s a Republican House and only a slim Democratic majority in a minority-constrained Senate, then Republicans get to set the agenda—at least for a few months.
As a matter of tactical politics, it’s impressive how quickly Obama has discredited the leadership and agenda of congressional Republicans, and how much he’s blunted that agenda.
It’s worth working to re-elect him if only so he can do that for four more years.
The left’s discomfort with power appears in different places to me than it does to a lot of other people. I thought it was expressed with the gnashing of teeth over Hillary Clinton’s decision to keep fighting after she couldn’t win, with every time Obama spoke of bipartisanship, and with every Republican filibuster.
As for countercultures, I can’t speak about the 60’s, but if I know anything about the current political scene, it’s that OWS is the most powerful liberal movement in my lifetime, and I don’t know how it can embrace alternative governance any more than it does. They’ll go through contortions to disavow any right to speak for the movement, but they’re the most driven, goal-directed activists on either side of the street.
Everything you say about countercultures might seem to apply to OWS, except it doesn’t.
Good post. I have to question the wisdom in characterizing OWS as “counter-cultural” in the first place. The impression of it I get is one of all-inclusiveness, such that anyone from any walk of life can participate. Just within my local OWS, the impression I have is of people who more often than not are very much a part of the mainstream of my community – students, workers, merchants, etc. These are NOT folks who might mistake OWS for a Rainbow Family gathering.
It’s more convenient to the 1% if the media trope of Occupiers as “hippies” or whatever sticks, as then the rest of the public’s attention becomes deflected from some glaring problems that face the rest of us. Truth is the Occupiers – and I’d offer that many of us who consider ourselves allies to one degree or another – are very much a part of the culture within which we are embedded, and that more than a few of us see ourselves not as counter-culture.
It’s like Burning Man — you see people creating wearing doing outlandish things and then realize that a lot of them have degrees in engineering. If anyone at Deloitte were smart, they’d send someone to OWS full time just to take notes. Yes, the GA consensus building goes on and on, but the movement’s strategy so far has been pitch perfect.
On the other hand, there are encampments that have nowhere near the energy of Zuccotti. They tend to be imitating NY or falling back on the same tired methods of marches, sit-ins, die-ins. The potential for change that OWS brings to the equation is in their governance. A vanguard will emerge if it hasn’t done so already, but the more that OWS can beat that back from the daily dynamic, the better.
Labeling OWS protesters as hippies is important because the hippies failed and no one wants to align themselves with people who failed.
I read this post and Armando’s as suffering from two central misconceptions. The first is that that liberals and the left share more positions than they actually do. The second is that this dispute has any real world consequence.
Let’s start with the first misconception. Since the terms are not accurately defined, confusion results. Who are these liberals? Are they the “new Left” of the 60’s? The SDS, which ended at a convention with different factions chanting Mao slogans? I am liberal: I have damn near nothing in common with the “New Left” of the 60’s except a belief that Vietnam was wrong and the Civil Rights movement was right. But the fact that I agreed with them on two issues is misleading: there is a huge ideological gulf between liberals (and no, I don’t mean DLC types) and those well to my left.
Aramndo’s broader argument is lacking in any real sense of chronology (the North did not move to the Democrats until at the earliest the late 80’s, well after the South had moved right) or an understanding of the forces at work that lead to the Reagan Majority. Reagan Democrats were real 30 years ago, they left the Democrats not only in the South, and the Vietnam War had a lot to do with it. To argue otherwise is to spout nonsense.
Because both you and Armando fail to define your terms, you engage in an argument that is to some extent beside the point. Of course the left is unhappy – they don’t agree with him on any number of issues for the simple reason that Obama is not on the left himself. Why anyone should expect that the left should be quiet is beyond me. It’s actually quite unfair and unreasonable to expect that. Any alliance they form with Obama is purely tactical.
What about us boring liberals? We have much to be unhappy about as well. Perhaps most critically, Obama’s choice of economic advisors lead him to severly underestimate the economic crisis he faced, and as a result the stimulus was inadequate. This increadible misjudgement has handed the right an enourmous opening, and was largely responsible for our losses in the House and the Senate. But make no mistake, liberals want to make capitalism work and the left wants to overthrow it.
The second misconception is that your dispute matters. It doesn’t. In 2010 liberals voted in their highest percentage for Democrats since exit polling began. You can look at poll after poll and their is just damn near little evidence that the left in this country is on the verge of abondoning Obama electorally. Now you can argue whether from the left’s POV they SHOULD abandon Obama, but as of this moment the argument seems have little support. Do not confuse the front page of FDL or talk left as representations of the true state of politics, even among the left rank and file.
The blogs may be wallowing in self pity. The evidence is that the rank and file are not. The two should not be confused.
Thank you! You are a liberal. I am “on the left,” for lack of a better term. We probably disagree on a lot, but I completely agree with your comment.
And please, can we stop trying to diagnose the problem with liberals and/or the left? Its simplistic to blame the various disagreements on policy and tactics on our discomfort with authority or our unrealistically high standards for our leaders or whatever other tired trope you want to trot out.
It reminds me of the typical media hand-wringing about the death of bipartisanship — blaming it on a change in the culture of Washington rather than admitting that there are fundamental differences in the ideologies and policy positions of Republicans and Democrats. (Yes, I’m on the left, and I can see that).
The same is true — to a lesser extent — re liberals and the left. There’s a lot of common ground, but there are also real differences, both on what results we want and how best to get there. I’d love to have substantive discussions and debates about that, but instead we just ignore the substance and blame the left for “wanting a pony” and being holier-than-thou. Ditto to all the stereotypes about the cult follower of Obama claiming everything is 11-dimensional chess and punching hippies etc.
Excellent comment, thank-you.
One minor point about Obama and the Great Recession: Yes, he and his advisers underestimated the depth of the economic crisis—partly, because the data they had at the time was inadequate and underestimated the depth and rapidity of the economic decline.
In Obama’s defense, if he’d been able to enact the policies he wanted over the past 2+ years, then we’d be in better shape than we are. The Recovery Act would have been modestly (10-15%) bigger and more effective (fewer tax cuts, more money for jobs, states, and infrastructure). There would have been a larger second round of stimulus. And the American Jobs Act would have passed Congress last month.
Wow, that is one awesome brainfart by Armando. You were perfectly clear in the Chait article Booman. And an explanation from you isn’t really needed – what is needed is for Armando to read with a bit more attention.
I think you had some really insightful things to say in that piece and it is one of the pieces I will be thinking about for a long time.
Posts like these, conversations like these, are just really, really funny to me these days.
“Counterculture” and “the establishment” and “authority” and “revolution” and “leadership” and “working within the system” and on and on and on. And then I look around at the rest of the world and just laugh.
The events in Europe and the Middle East this year would seem to have a lot to say about all these things. Or you can keep talking about ‘Nam.
There are some parallels between the Occupiers (and arguably some of the other movements to which you allude) and some of the movements that emerged in many parts of Europe and the Americas in 1967-8. Although I think that these earlier movements have some lessons for us, you are right that we’re no longer there and that at some point what happened back in the day is no longer so darned relevant. We’re here in a different historical context, and these current movements are largely a reaction to austerity and chronic unemployment/underemployment that has been imposed upon so many of us throughout the globe. It’s a different fight on a different playing field.
and the fact that dick cheney is not being prosecuted. Wall Street loves the dude, too; free casino money at taxpayer expense, decriminalized, de-supervised, and de-regulated.
Many on the left really, really wanted Obama to lead as if government could do great things. It’s what he led people to believe, what everyone expected. Calling out his failure is hardly nit-picking; nor is it self-pity. It’s anger.
When the criminal power structure starts radicalizing gee-golly boomer suburbanites like me, it means they are pretty far out there; that I’m not alone; when “law and order” becomes a counter-cultural rallying cry, things must be pretty fucked in the head.
In this sense, OWS is the logical response to being stymied electorally, and thwarted culturally by commercial propaganda and the war on terror. OWS is taking power and history into its own hands, precisely by bypassing the existent, utterly non-responsive (and criminal) power structure.
We wasted eight years on Bush, all the time since at least 2006 on Democrats generally, four on Obama, and probably four more on Obama (will it never stop?), who has more in common with Bush and Bernanke than he does average Americans.
Screw that. And screw coloring within the lines. No one else does.
There is no reasonable “middle ground” on the most critical issues.
Where is the middle ground on aggressive war?
Where is the middle ground on torture?
Where is the middle ground on indefinite detention without trial? Regardless of trial outcome?
Where is the middle ground on the illegal use of chemical weapons?
Where is the middle ground on indiscriminate slaughter using sky robots?
Where is the middle ground on assassinations of foreign leaders, US citizens, nuclear scientists, and innocent bystanders?
Where is the middle ground on the divine rights of kings and the bill of rights?
Where is the middle ground on trillions upon trillions of dollars of financial fraud?
Where is the middle ground on climate change?
Where is the middle ground on mass extinction?
Can reasonable people disagree on these issues?
No. They can’t. Not really.
Trying to deflect these issues as “tired old arguments and accusations,” or cowing people with threats of republican name-calling, has zero traction. Why even go there?
Show me the middle ground on issues I named, and maybe I’ll see the light on my “holier than thou bullshit,” which I suspect is merely another irruptive lashing out devoid of meaning, i.e., that you can’t back it up by demonstrating a reasonable middle ground.
You said:
you can’t make a very good case for running the country if your disposition is counter to the culture and power structures of the country.
Yes, you can make an excellent case: when accountability and the rule of law are the new “counter-culture.”
That’s really where we are at.
Compound F, I share your anger. So do lots of people on the left.
So…great. We’re angry. And we can demonstrate that we’re angry.
But are we using our anger to show how outraged we are? Or are we conserving our anger to use as fuel for our organizing and activism and campaigning?
In my experience, being “right” is of limited value—don’t get me wrong; it has some value—without the power to act effectively on one’s agenda and issues, and in defense of one’s values.
If we’d rather be right than exercise power (and make the inevitable compromises that come with any real world action), then lots of Americans will conclude that it’s best not to let us anywhere near the reins of power…and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.
The only power we have — the one trump card the 99% holds — is the threat of a general strike. It can only be played once, and by everyone, and we all have to agree on the goal, so … yeah, it’s an incredible risk and a long shot.
But without that threat, however empty or full it may be, what leverage do we have?
Gotta disagree that a general strike is our only power, and if you say it’s a one-time risky long shot, it doesn’t sound that smart.
IMO, OWS isn’t about anger or outrage. The reported mood at every reassembly after eviction has been buoyant. Being at Zuccotti made me understand the affection with which a lot of people talk about the 60’s. You’ve got tents being held by balloons. How cool is that?
You’ve got a bag of tools over here — sit-ins, general strikes, voter registration — and over here you’ve got a forge. And when they take the forge away, they build a press. No one knows what’s going to happen next week. That’s where their power is.
Gotta disagree on this one, tom allen. The 99% have literally hundreds of nonviolent tactics available for use.
Again, Gene Sharp has done more than anyone I know of to document and articulate this—and he’s done so in a very pragmatic and non-ideological way throughout his career.
Here, http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations103a.html , for example, is a list of 198 methods of nonviolent action first compiled by Sharp in 1973. (The “general strike” is just one of over 20 entries in the category of strikes.)
Really great couple of posts, Booman.
Good posts, Booman, and great discussion by your readers. Perhaps I might be permitted, as a European and Irishman to make a few observations:
There are two distinct processes at work here:
Can I suggest that both approaches are necessary, complementary, but also necessarily distinct. It is a mistake to expect the left or the OWS movement to endorse (or refrain from criticising) Obama. Equally, it is only to be expected that Obama supporters and pragmatic liberals to be anything but exasperated by continued criticism from the left. Both movements are necessary, and one can reinforce the other. Leftists can change to political climate in a way that makes it possible for Obama to consider options which would have been unthinkable otherwise, and Obamaists can consolidate and make concrete progress on some of the issues of concern to leftists without which they would be little more than despairing prophets in the wilderness.
However there is also a word of caution required for Obama supporters. The Vietnam War was largely started and escalated by the Liberal elite led by JFK and LBJ. It wasn’t started/escalated by hard core Republican religious fundamentalists. The liberal establishment which came to power with FDR lost legitimacy in the eyes of its own natural supporters by pursuing an agenda created by the hard core military right – no doubt trying to triangulate and avoid being outflanked by the right. In so doing it created the hard core counter-cultural left and destroyed its own legitimacy – dividing its natural constituency and leaving the road clear for the Reagan counter-revolution. There have been signs that Obama flirted with the same dangers – escalating Afghanistan and continuing the crack-down on civil liberties. More recently he has shown signs of reversing course and consolidating his own base and natural constituency, but it could have been a close call. The issue now is whether he will become a creature of Wall street or whether he can reform it by channelling the huge anti-Wall street sentiment that extends even to some tea-partiers.
The jury is still out as to whether Obama can reverse the Reagan counter-revolution, and whether a more liberal governing consensus can again take power as the natural party of Government. But remember too that the world has changed since the 1960’s and the USA has lost much ground in the meantime. What passed for a liberal foreign policy in the past – including the overthrow of legitimate governments – won’t pass for anything more than neo-liberal imperialism in the future. The shining city on the hill is no more and much respect and economic power has been lost worldwide. The hubris of Reagan/Bush has done huge damage and US power will never again be the same as it was post WW2.
I say this without any shadenfreude. We in Europe are also busy destroying ourselves…
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and end military involvement by the end of 1965 in order to accomplish his domestic agenda.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I do tend to the view that JFK would have de-escalated at the first opportunity and that it was his successor (and hardly a bosom buddy) LBJ who made the tragic escalation decisions. However LBJ was also the hero of the Great Society, and thus, although very different from JFK, was nevertheless inside the great tent of US liberalism (heavily spiced with Texan conservatism). However those were also the days when US foreign policy was at its most imperialist – as epitomised by Defence Secretary McNamara who was common to both.
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His gifted mind was poisened by the modeling of Rand Corp in the cold war standoff with the communist world and ideology. Links to Robert McNamara and Daniel Ellsberg from RAND corporation.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Excellent comment.
Two things motivate liberal elites to go to war. The first is the interests that commercial elites have, but that is often checked by prudence. What stampedes liberal elites into wars is the accusation that they are soft on national defense. That liberal elites are, in effect, traitors. Then they seek to prove their patriotism by being willing to exert national power in a way often as reckless as nationalistic elites.
I have often been struck by the apparent fact that Republicans talk tough on National security and Democrats (and their children) end up doing most of the actual fighting. Then the Democrat Vets get swift-boated by Republican National Securicrats who generally operate from think tanks rather than fighting tanks. Why do Democrats get suckered and snookered into this game?
This is an excellent point, BooMan:
This might be directly proportional to the degree to which one has to check ones principles and kowtow to the 1% in order to get elected and the weakening of parties as the primary source of campaign funding. There were changes made in Democratic Party operations between 1968 and 1976 that intended to eliminate the buying of Democratic politicians; my memory is vague about what exactly they were. The result was that many Democrats started seeking funding independently.
And then in the Reagan Administration, a reform in campaign finance intended to take money out of politics resulted in the creation of political action committees.
And now that trend is on steroids with Citizens United.
It’s not exactly an absolutist concern about purity (although with a few lefty voters it is, and they don’t vote at all). It’s the feeling that there is no way that one has real power to accomplish any part of an agenda.
Criticism of Obama is legitimate. He has not leveled with the American people about what constrains his action or about what his own views are about legislation. That is a part of the “above it all” positioning he has taken in trying to pull the country back together even as the GOP drives the wedges deeper. And the President doesn’t have the neutral press that would allow him to say what needs to be said without partisan ridicule. While the criticism is legitimate, it tends to underestimate the difficulties of being the first black President in a time of extreme economic and political dysfunction.
Folks who launch scurrilous attacks claiming that the President deceived them, or seeing the President as a tyrant, or attributing every outrage of any government agency as a Presidential order–those folks generally aren’t Democrats to begin with. Even though some might have voted for him.
It is interesting how much those who attack the President with the most vitriol give Democrats in Congress a pass.
The rot however extends to legislatures and county commissions and city councils–not to mention governors and mayors. Until 2010, there was hope that Democratic office-holders could make a difference outside DC. But with the influx of Koch (and others) money into state and local politics even that is doubtful.
Armando, being Armando, makes absolutely no effort to understand or engage with your argument. You wrote something about the SixtiesMan that lamented something bad, so he jumped up to defend the people he’s decided are “his team.”
The South? You didn’t write a word about the South.
Booman, this is a very thoughtful post. Back in the summer of 2008, Van Jones delivered the Ware Lecture at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I believe that the video of his speech is available online and worth watching.
He identified the biggest challenge for the left as learning to govern. He said that for the past 40 years the guiding story for the left has been of David vs. Goliath–with the left as David. He said that we are not used to being in power, to having the responsibility for governance and that if we don’t find a new definitional story for ourselves, we will turn our slingshots on each other and fail to lead the nation. His speech was infinitely more eloquent than my brief retelling.
“I believe that the video of his speech is available online and worth watching.”
Van Jones Ware Lecture here. Runtime is about 60 minutes.
MomSense, thanks for this. Great stuff.
As for a “new definitional story”, this is by no means the only one out there, but it’s probably worth mentioning that Barack Obama took a crack at this early in his candidacy.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/obamas_selma_speech_text_as_de.html
He contrasted the “Moses generation” of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement with the “Joshua generation” that is following it, and spoke about the challenges and responsibilities of the Joshua generation. (He also implicitly made the case for himself as the “Joshua” of the Joshua generation.)
Here’s the thing: the Book of Joshua is the story of the conquest. The People of Israel coming out of their 40 years in the wilderness, Moses and all his generation having died, cross over Jordan and into Canaan, a land flowing with “milk and honey”.
It’s also a land occupied by other people, and Joshua leads the fight to seize control of the land from its previous inhabitants. It’s not a pretty story.
But whether it’s David and Goliath, Moses v. Joshua, A. Lincoln and F. Douglass, or some other story, I agree that we need stories that force us to confront and wrestle with the consequences of wielding (and the consequences of refusing to wield) power.
I have to believe that the “questioning of authority” meme is rooted in the development of the A-bomb, then the H-bomb and the arms race which yielded more powerful bombs and lots of them and all of that leading to the novel and horrific concept of mutually assured destruction. You wake up one morning and you realize that leaders of the two empires, their scientists and their generals — all authority figures at that time — have brought humanity to an unprecedented morbid milestone: the ability to kill us all in just a matter of minutes. Upon facing this how could we not wonder how we found ourselves here? How could we not question authority?
I know the phrase didn’t appear, or at least become popular, until sometime in the 60’s. I just think it took some time for full awareness of this horrific new reality to permeate the collective consciousness.
I have no quarrel with what you are saying. But I think overlooking the impact of the introduction of WMD’s on personal and collective psychology and on politics is a significant omission.