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.