In the last few weeks it’s seemed as though one could learn more
about the Occupy Wall Street movement from the police blotter than
from anywhere else. As the arrests piled up, many protesters who
found themselves on the business end of a baton or a set of plastic
handcuffs ranted about the perils of living in a “police state,”
which is beautifully ironic. A group organized for the very purpose
of demanding that the government assume greater control over our
lives shook itself apart in violent spasms of rebellion against the
government’s effort to enforce the most basic rules of society.
The intellectual incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street
movement has been well documented. It has no clear objective, no
unifying principles, merely lists of grievances and passionate
expressions of disgust with the wealthy and powerful. The
unsustainable weight of its incoherence, though, was realized only
after local police officers stormed the parks to protect innocent
protesters, neighbors and passers-by.
If there was any big point to OWS, it was that the
powerless had to be protected from the powerful, and government was
the means of doing so. Wall Street, the signs and chants told us
two months ago, was a cleptocracy unchecked. Unless it was
restrained by the state, it would consume the country. And so the
protesters demanded massive intervention in the economy by
Washington. Among the acts the state would take: the forgiveness of
student loans, the redistribution of wealth, the negating of
contracts, and the general dismantling of capitalism.
While the protesters were demanding this unprecedented
reordering of the U.S. economy by the state, they were gathering
themselves together in little collectives, which they sought to
isolate as completely as possible from — the state.
The Occupy Wall Street encampments were, by design,
enclaves separated from the civil society in which they were
erected. The protesters sought to create their own communities in
which the pre-existing government was not allowed to extend its
reach. They made their own rules, if they had rules at all. The
police and over civil authorities were kept out or thwarted when
they tried to apply the laws of the surrounding society.
Of course, the predictable happened. Civil society
collapsed in the little tent cities. Peace and sanitation,
hallmarks of modern civilization, were no longer guaranteed, as
there was no one to provide them. When assaults, sexual or
otherwise, happened, they went unreported to outside authorities,
so profound was the movement’s mistrust of local governments. The
protesters so disliked authority in general that they often refused
to elect leaders, preferring instead to seek consensus literally:
insisting that every, single person agree on every
point.
Here you had a movement demanding that the state dismantle
and reorder the nation’s economic order by force, and yet so
frightened of authority that it could not even elect leaders or
allow police officers into its confines. That is incoherence so
profound as to defy explanation.
It was not just a reversal of conservative doctrine, which
holds that accountability is increased when power is concentrated
where it is closest to the people. Occupy Wall Street did want to
do the reverse — concentrate power in Washington, where it is
farthest from the people — but it was not motivated by any
philosophy. That was just the reflex. Where do liberals go to
redress their grievances? To Washington.
Occupy Wall Street wanted to weaken local governing
authority, but not for the sake of handing more power to D.C. The
protesters simply wanted to avoid being held to account for their
lawlessness.
In its haphazard attempt to achieve some
redistributionist-libertine Utopia in which no power exists
locally, but immense power is held far away, Occupy Wall Street
merely reinforced the wisdom of the Founders’ design. Seeing what
happened when this mob was given charge of a few city parks,
America is not only dead-set (as the polls show) against giving it
control of anything bigger, but is taking back its parks, too.
That’s a complete repudiation. And it took only two
months.
