Nicholas Kristof of the New York
Times was dazzled when he visited Occupy Wall
Street in early October. “The protest reminded me a bit of Tahrir
Square in Cairo,” Kristof exulted. “There is the same cohort of
alienated young people, and the same savvy use of Twitter and other
social media to recruit more participants.”
The quinquagenarian Kristof is quite the fogy if he finds it
amazing that 20-something Americans are able to figure out how to
use Twitter. But that wasn’t the least impressive element of Occupy
Wall Street as Kristof described it. “Where the movement falters is
in its demands,” he wrote:
It doesn’t really have any. The participants pursue causes that
are sometimes quixotic—like the protester who calls for removing
Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill because of his brutality to
American Indians.
I had seen it before—in April 2000, when I reported from
Washington on the Mobilization for Global Justice, a protest
against the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank. As I wrote in the Wall
Street Journal:
It must be frustrating to be a young left-wing demonstrator in
2000, longing for the glory days of the Vietnam era. Back then,
protesters had a clear and simple message: End the war. By
contrast, nothing of consequence unites today’s demonstrators. Do
the Mumia Abu-Jamal guys lose sleep over Nicaraguan turtles? Do the
hearts of the free-Tibet crowd bleed for the victims of Buddhist
persecution in Burma? Has a member of the D.C. Statehood Green
Party ever shed a tear for the plight of the Kurds?
In the weeks after Kristof wrote, however, Occupy Wall Street
did become a major media event in a way the antiglobalization
protests of the 1990s—or, for that matter, the antiwar
demonstrations of the 2000s—never did. That says less about the
state of the nation than the mood of the media. Many of Kristof’s
colleagues, it turned out, were as eager as he to embrace this
supposedly new populist left-wing movement.
The Washington
Post’s Richard Cohen had identified the reason
back in August. “I suffer from Tea Party envy,” he wrote:
There is little about the actual party I like and there are some
members I abhor, but I am jealous of its sense of purpose, its
determination and its bracing conviction that it is absolutely
right. In its own way, it waves a crimson battle flag while
President Obama’s is a sickly taupe—the limp banner of an
ideological muddle.
Throughout the summer, as I’ve noted in this space (see “After
Osama,” TAS,
October), liberal commentators were growing frustrated and enraged
at Obama, who kept losing political battles to congressional
Republicans. The disgruntled liberals wrongly attributed Obama’s
failures to preference for compromise over conflict. In reality,
the president’s approach all along had been imperious and bullying.
It was ineffective this year because Republicans—having won an
electoral mandate in the Tea Party-driven election of 2010—refused
to be bullied. Tea Party envy arose from the absence of a
corresponding popular mandate on the left.
Even the Post’s E. J. Dionne,
nicknamed “Baghdad Bob” for his usual fatuous liberal triumphalism,
started pining for a left-wing Tea Party:
Obama’s victory…partly demobilized the left. With Democrats in
control of the White House and both houses of Congress, stepped-up
organizing didn’t seem quite so urgent.
The administration was complicit in this, viewing the left’s
primary role as supporting whatever the president believed needed
to be done. Dissent was discouraged as counterproductive.
Oxymoronically, Dionne wrote that he wanted dissenters who would
“rally support” for Obama, and who would simultaneously move him
“in more progressive directions” and provide a contrast that makes
it harder “for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger.”
As for Kristof, after noting the purposelessness of Occupy Wall
Street, he hilariously enumerated a wonkish list of policy
proposals it should adopt. He wasn’t the only liberal media figure
to see in Occupy Wall Street a body politic in search of a brain. A
few days later, Ezra Klein of the Post quoted organizer Rich
Yeselson as saying that the Occupiers lacked “an articulate
exposition,” which meant that “the brainy liberal left
infrastructure’s time has come.…[Former Enron adviser Paul]
Krugman’s Army may be on its way.”
That must have stung Kristof, whose better-known colleague
Krugman quickly grabbed the mantle of leadership:
When I said that it was the job of policy intellectuals to fill
in the details for the Occupy Wall Street protesters, I didn’t mean
“don’t worry your pretty little heads about it, we’ll work it out.”
I meant job literally as in responsibility: people like Joe
Stiglitz and me have an obligation to work on this, helping to
translate what justifiably angry citizens are saying into more
fleshed-out proposals.
When the Tea Party started, left-wing commentators had accused
it of being racist, violent, and extreme. It turned out that
Krugman’s Army was vulnerable to these accusations too. At protests
that centered on scapegoating “the rich,” “bankers” and “the 1%,”
it wasn’t hard to find overt expressions of anti-Semitism. A
political scientist wrote approvingly on the Times website that the
Occupiers were engaged in “political disobedience,” meaning that
they reject the very legitimacy of the U.S. government. London’s
Daily Mail even
snapped a photo of a protester defecating on a New York City police
car. Krugman, who once made up lies about “eliminationist rhetoric”
on the right, found himself commanding an army whose soldiers were
engaged in actual elimination.
IT WOULD BE unfair to make too much of these unattractive
qualities. I spent a couple of hours at Occupy Wall Street one
Saturday night in mid-October, and most of the people I encountered
were endearingly earnest. Many were college students or recent
graduates, and it occurred to me that four years earlier they
probably would have been plumping for Barack Obama and his vaporous
promises of “hope and change.”
Nobody at the protest seemed excited about the prospect of a
second Obama term, and it’s easy to see why. As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, an
actual left-wing dissenter, noted, Obama has raised more campaign
contributions from people in the financial industry than any
political candidate in history. “Would it not be a bit odd,”
Greenwald asked, “for a protest movement to ‘Occupy Wall Street’
while simultaneously devoting itself to keeping Wall Street’s most
lavishly funded politician in power?”
The Obama campaign reportedly expects just that. “Obama and his
team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a
central tenet of their reelection strategy,” the Washington Post reported. The
paper noted that “Obama has tried this line of attack before,
railing in 2009 against ‘fat-cat bankers’ who he accused of taking
excessive bonuses in the wake of the financial meltdown.” It might
have added that he has spent much of his presidency demonizing
“corporate jet owners,” “millionaires and billionaires,” and so
forth, to little avail.
But you can see why the Obama campaign might think that the
president’s class-warfare message was finally catching on. Across
the nation, there was arising a spontaneous populist movement, a
left-wing version of the Tea Party. Or at least that’s what it said
in the papers.
