LITTLE ROCK — The first thought that comes to mind regarding the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is that ignorance on parade is an ugly sight, especially for those of us who teach and are supposedly in the business of reducing it. The kids banging drums and defecating on cop cars in New York and other places might more profitably go back to their campuses to demonstrate over the overpriced “educations” that have left them so obviously bereft of knowledge and capacity for logical reasoning.
Still, for the political scientist, the movement also represents a fascinating window into the growing ideological incoherence of the left in general. While the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress appear to have embraced OWS on the assumption that looming electoral disaster can be avoided by diverting attention to Wall Street scapegoats, left unexplained are a number of rather obvious things, including how a president who has been in office for nearly three years can credibly blame everyone but himself for the economic recovery that never happened and how demanding free tuition and free just about everything else will go down over at Standard & Poor’s or among taxpayers.
It isn’t easy to tease coherence out of OWS, but a few things seem to come through amidst the din-they don’t much like capitalism (“death to capitalism”) or banks and corporations (presumably the symbols of capitalism), and they seem to have warm, fuzzy feelings for various strains of unspecified socialism.
Within this context, one would think that liberals, already touchy about the old “S” word, would shrink from expressing enthusiasm for a movement that sees capitalism as the primary enemy. In all other advanced democracies, the socialist label is readily, even ardently, embraced, but in America liberals claim not to have anything to do with it while pursuing an agenda largely indistinguishable from it.
OWS, such as it is, complicates all this by virtue of its lesser reticence regarding ideology. There isn’t much stealth or disingenuousness involved when carrying placards with the hammer and sickle, wearing T-shirts with the picture of the Communist butcher Che Guevara, and marching to chants of “eat the rich.” The killing fields of Cambodia, the Stalinist purges or impoverished North Koreans stripping bark off the trees because they have run out of food don’t seem to much impress such people, assuming that they have even heard of these and the many other dismal realities produced by the doctrines they preach (which they probably haven’t).
Still, one can’t embrace the know nothing left in the streets without also endorsing their program and adopting their hatreds, in this case, the “rich,” banks and capitalism more broadly. There are, of course, plenty of permutations of the socialist creed-Stalinism, Maoism, National Socialism, Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, social democracy, Fabianism, and lots of others more obscure-but one can’t denounce capitalism (or endorse movements that denounce it) without picking from among them, for the simple reason that socialism of some kind is the only other game in town. So if American liberalism and socialism are truly, as liberals persistently claim, distinct ideologies, why would so many of the leaders of the former now be applauding the emergence of such a vulgar expression of the latter?
Then again, perhaps all this incoherence comes in handy-Democrats can endorse the OWS movement without being forced to connect the dots and accept the unsavory ideological implications precisely because the left has, over time, become such an ideological muddle. Indeed, American liberalism has degenerated into such an amorphous thing that trying to understand it becomes the intellectual equivalent of pinning Jell-O to a wall. While it might be obvious that the OWS rank and file are ignorant of both the theoretical content and practical consequences of socialism/ Communism; it is no less obvious that their mostly liberal professors don’t have a clue about liberalism either.
The thought also occurs that an explanation for why our economic recovery has been so tepid might be found in the incongruity of an Obama administration that endorses a movement dedicated to “smashing capitalism” while claiming out of the other side of its mouth to be doing everything possible to jump-start the world’s leading capitalist economy. At the least, you can’t really blame the business community, those evil folks from which the jobs tend to come, for taking a timeout while the Democrats figure out which side of the barricades they belong on. Railing against Wall Street, banks and corporations makes for great television but a downright goofy program for economic recovery.
At a minimum, the one common theme that OWS and its Democratic cheerleaders seem to coalesce around is that they want more, as in more government, more regulation, more spending, more entitlements, and more of whatever there might be to have more of. So long as someone else pays for it.
Try hard and you might be able to keep the image of babies throwing tantrums in their cribs out of your mind.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 89 on 10/30/2011