The sane Burkean impulse when it comes to the Occupy movement is nervousness (in anticipation of Terror). If there were the slightest possibility of these protests resulting in actual regime change, believe me: I would be standing at the barricades with the Tea Party, polishing my retro musket. The chances of this, however, are nil. Occupy Wall Street is not going to kindle a revolution. The reason is not a lack of means -- and they do lack the means. The reason is that most of the protestors are simply not revolutionaries.
Drum circles are irritating, no question, and the occasional masked anarchist is worse than irritating, but for the most part this movement seems to be devoted -- with increasing focus -- to the reform of radical capitalism. Apart from the occasional loon with a Kropotkin T-shirt, very few of these people are looking to overthrow the capitalist system; I suspect a poll of the protesters would reveal an overwhelming admiration for Steve Jobs, bordering on idolatry. (Troubling in itself.)
Edmund Burke was not much of a hippy drummer, but institutional decline on Wall Street would have disturbed him. He was a reluctant capitalist to begin with, and the idea that business should be unfettered by legal and social responsibility would have appalled him. Burke would have found the rabble on the trading floor as distasteful as the mob in the park. My guess is that he would have been happy to see the nation's drummers and investment bankers stuffed into a single doomed ship on a one-way voyage to France.
Of course, Occupy Wall Street is not finally Burkean. It is, like the Tea Party, a messy populist movement. The concern is real that it refuses to recognize an essential tragic component of human affairs: inequality is an indelible stain; unfairness is the abiding fact of our condition; and the battle for utopia is a recipe for its opposite.
When it comes to certain forms of inequity, however, we have options between the extremes of revolution and quietism. They are imperfect options, and some of them are uncomfortable, but they can be effective: the Civil Rights Movement comes to mind.
Moreover, we know precisely which inequities are being addressed. The protest is not, as some would have it, a cri de coeur aimed at the unfairness of the universe. Nobody is proposing that we mend the cracks in the cosmos.
I suspect that most people would agree, in fact -- after a minute or two of reflection -- that this is a fair summary of the complaint: "The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich."
Coincidentally, that is precisely the statement tested on the American public by the most recent WSJ/NBC Poll. A full 60 percent of Americans "strongly" agreed with it. Another 16 percent of Americans "mildly" agreed. In short: more than three-quarters of Americans identify -- whether they know it or not -- with Occupation Wall Street.
How often do 76 percent of Americans share the same profound complaint about something this fundamental to the nation? This is hardly a trivial critique: read the statement again. Read it, in fact, as if it had just been released as an official manifesto of the Occupy movement. (Conrad Black has proposed one, but this will do nicely.)
The inequity here is not insurmountable: a structural imbalance caused by ludicrous tax ideas, and by the nation-crippling antics of a small cadre of predatory bankers. These Americans -- all 76 percent of them -- are not wild utopians; their complaint can be remedied by an appeal to good old-fashioned legal and financial rigor. Sanity, however, will not install itself. This will require immense pressure from the ordinary citizen.
Occupy Wall Street makes perfect tactical sense here: when you have relatively little money, the only democratic way to go up against this kind of entrenched economic power is to make noise. Preferably coherent noise, without a drum track. My initial response to OWS was irritation -- youth is, let's face it, irritating (I was one) -- but I am increasingly thrilled with the less youthful face of the movement, which looks something like responsible Americans demanding a new New Deal.
Some of the young, in fact, are not so youthful, and their presence is eclipsing the feckless. Soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are centuries older, spiritually, than the baby neo-hippies and the adolescent Black Bloc, but they are embracing the Occupy movement in growing numbers. Hardly utopians, they have expectations nevertheless of the nation they fought for. They have reason to be disappointed. If I were a young Marine, conservative, patriotic, homeless and suicidal, I would be on the next bus to Zuccotti Park. Despite the drummers.
Follow Douglas Anthony Cooper on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dysmedia
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This is the Charlie Sheen of protest movements..
Only in the sense that it's *winning*. Well, it also has tiger blood.
Snarky
This is why politically left-of-center people can't seem to change anything nowadays, they have no patience and they go off half-cocked, alienate potential allies, and end up right back where they started.
Almost no one said boo about income inequality until people started losing homes and jobs. Only then did bank and fund manager bonuses became a flashpoint. Ergo the main problem is not income inequality, it is the condition of life for the other 99%.
The minute OWS gets leaders and a programme and a list of policy positions it becomes just another player. As long as it remains amorphous and vague, people from all walks of life and all political viewpoints can see it somehow speaking for them...the returning vet AND the barefoot kid in the drum circle.
There are millions of people who feel NO institution; nither political party, not the media, no body speaks for them. They need this.
Jeez, do you know how hard it is to get conservatives like Cooper to agree we're right about ANYTHING? Don't alienate one of the few across-the-board allies we have.
Although it's interesting to note that when I did have some truck with conservatism -- a long time ago -- my preferred theorist denigrated Burke as a modern: true conservatives do not regard history as a triumph, whereas Burke was comfortable with the idea of progress.
And what about the international branches of the movement? Occupy Sydney? Occupy London? Occupy China...well no, granted, that one's being trampled by Chinese internet censorship.
The truth is the middle between these failed extremes and its called for a lack of a better word socialism or New Deal Demand Capitalism./mixed economies. take your pick... thats what works for us pragmatics.. not an idealoge's black and white!
WE are a socialistic country, our Constitution is such a document!
Give me the details of a libertarian or an anti socialist, you can quickly expose all as Hypocrits..
Its as simple as Churches not paying taxes, which means others pay /subsidize them and their flocks or Bachmans farm subsidies or red states getting back 50% more in Fed money than they pay in TAXES or saying government does not create jobs until you go to close a military base in their district or point out China and AEROBUS and etc.
Regards.
You're making the Republicans' mistake, and then just reversing the value judgment. You think any alternative to the current system is socialism. It's just that you then proceed to praise the idea rather than attack it.
According to the dictionary, socialism is when the state takes control of the means of production. Socialism would be if the government owned our electric company, or owned our steel-making factories, or owned our farms, etc. THAT really DIDN'T work when most countries tried it, with the exception of the Scandinavian countries.
Socialism wasn't in the Constitution, and if you say it was you'll give conservatives a weapon to think our opinion is deluded.
Focus more on the "promote the general welfare" clause. The socialism argument is not going to work, even if you "reverse the value judgment to make it good instead of bad."
Socialists merely enslave those inclined to capitalism. Communists kill them and take there stuff.
So does OWS.
(And your rationalization of "inequality" as an "abiding fact of our condition", and therefore it's "feckless" to make annoying loud noises about the crippling fact that this country has been undeniably taken over by the wealthy and powerful corporations who are clearly determined to pillage it to it's death, reveals the impotence of vapid intellectualism in the face of actuality.)
My fellow liberals are pursuing perfection and sinking themselves because they won't make compromises even when it's to their advantage.
Bringing the left and center on board is trivial. If we can prove to conservatives that they too are already on board, then we'll have accomplished something.
What we have now is a gamed system which actually seeks to widen, broaden, and deepen that unfairness for the Benefit of a tiny minority of the population. That is NOT a natural state. That is an engineered condition that can be CHANGED.
People have the right, always but especially in a democracy, to Change that which doesn't work and even that which they do not like.
Because you saved me time typing something similar.
I have a baseline approach to the world ... in the game of life ultimately everybody loses. Since earth is basically a hospice for the creatures who briefly occupy it I see no reason why we can't attempt to bring a certain level of comfort to all who are passing through. An 85 year old sitting on a pile of gold is a tragic absurdity. We don't need revolution, we don't even need capitalism or socialism, all we need is commonsense and the banishment of the fantasies of immortality that make human beings so cruel to each other and the world in which they live.
I'm not sure if my viewpoint is Utopian or not, but I think it is logical since no one beats death despite wealth, stature, or achievement (as Steve Jobs illustrates) to create an environment, on the wet rock in the middle of nowhere we call home, where human beings can live without feeling inflicting pain on others is a winning strategy ... for that is all aggregating absurd amounts of wealth is about anyway.
Read the article more carefully, he ultimately agrees with the OWS movement now that elderly people and veterans have joined.
Cooper's one of the few conservatives left who's willing to talk to us. Don't chase him away with demands for perfection, that will ultimately sink any chance of accomplishing anything and we'll be back where we started.
Did you earn your capital gains on pharmaceutical or internet based stocks? You can thank the USA for funding the research for that by paying your taxes. How about the rest of the Wall Street companies? Is there any company that made it on it's own? No government money or technology involved? No. Ok, everybody, pay your taxes, call it a cost of doing business, and thank America for your opportunity.
The rest can be mostly accounted for by the outsourcing of 30 million jobs, or 60,000 factories closing under Bush or declining wages such that the avg wage in Texas is LT than the 1965 min wage adjusted for inflation...
You want more people to pay taxes, then dont lower wages and have 20 million out of work or under employed.
Precisely. Wall Street bankers didn't earn their billions (they stole 'em), so they don't own them.
Snarky
Why this pervasive attitude dream-killing lately? When did we ever stop reality stop us from having big, bold ideas in the past? As Mr. Pratchett, using Death as a persona, said "Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sift it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as though there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some rightness in the universe by which it might be judged. You need to believe in impossible things; how else can they become?"
Abstracts like love, equality, loyalty, justice, mercy, generosity—these things only exist insofar as we believe them to exist and strive to make them a reality. When you've already given up on fixing the system, of course it's going to stay broken.
their patriotism and Christianity. Ironically most of the pundits and politicians who proclaim this loudest have never served in our armed forces and the rest of the the voices seem to have forgotten the shall not covet point made earlier. Those that yell loudest for freedom only seem to perceive it in a narrow ultraconservatistic, abortion and immigrant free spectrum.
The answer is that the word "conservatÂive" once described some of what I think. And some of what Sully thinks. The term, however, is utterly tainted. I refuse to be described by any word that is widely used to describe Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh. (Unless we keep it nice and general, like: "biped." That probably describes all three of us. You can call me a biped if you like.)
(And thank you.)