It’s interesting that Ross Douthat uses his precious space in the New York Times today to praise the #Occupy Movement at the expense of the labor unions and the environmentalists, who he dubs “the decadent left.” Here’s his basic idea. The labor unions succeeded in rolling back anti-union legislation in Ohio and in recalling two state senators in Wisconsin. The environmentalists succeeded by getting a postponement of the Keystone XL pipeline. Therefore, they’re bad. The #Occupy Movement has made no demands and has accomplished nothing. Therefore, they’re good.
I don’t agree that the #Occupy Movement has accomplished nothing, but I don’t have to agree to see Douthat’s point.
Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few.
The union rallies and the Keystone demonstrations, by contrast, represented what you might call the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole.
Douthat is pretending to respect the #Occupy Movement because they truly are fighting for the people while the more effective protesters are fighting for narrow interests.
Better a protest movement that casts itself (however quixotically) as the defender of “the 99 percent” than a protest movement that just represents Democratic interest groups. And better a left that flirts with utopianism than a left that adheres to the dictum attributed to Leonid Brezhnev during the Prague Spring: “Don’t talk to me about ‘socialism.’ What we have, we hold.”
In Douthat’s world, the environment isn’t the air we breath and the water we drink and the food we eat. For him, the environment is a liberal interest group. And labor unions aren’t fighting for working people in both the public and private sectors. For him, unions are just a liberal interest group. It’s not clear why he doesn’t think the #Occupy protesters are a liberal interest group, too. But he’s being completely disingenuous, so it’s probably stupid to ask.
As for the Prague Spring reference, where do we even begin? Who, for example, are the Czechs and Slovaks in this scenario? The Tea Partiers? And are the labor unions and environmentalists the armies of the Warsaw Pact?
Never mind. He’s just wanking. He’s pretending to like the #Occupy protesters because he thinks they’re impotent.
He did a similar thing the other day, crapping all over JFK by deploying left-wing critiques (he was weak on civil rights, he got us into Vietnam, he almost blew up the world over Cuba) for fun and profit.
Without union support in September and October, I don’t know whether Occupy would have attracted enough media attention to become a political force — something I’m sure the Occupy leaders know full well and appreciate. So Douthat is just trying to start that classic technique of undermining a movement by praising the weakest part of it while trashing the strongest.
Douthat’s reaction to Occupy is best described as fear.
Pretty sure I saw this in Webster’s, under the dictionary definition of “concern troll.”
In Webster’s yes, but under “jackass.”
Uh, conservatives do this all the time. Libertarians especially. They see “big unions” and “big environment” on the same plane as “big business”. Thus the conclusion that if we have small government, there are no interest groups after the money.
Boy, you really nailed it with the final sentence, Boo. That said, I’m particularly offended by this bullshit from from Koch thru Douthat:
“The Wisconsin protests didn’t defend American workers’ right to bargain for their fair share of company profits, as traditional union protests have. They defended government employees’ right to negotiate with elected officials over the division of taxpayer dollars — a recipe for profligacy that even liberal icons like Franklin Roosevelt and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s George Meany once opposed.”