For what it’s worth, the “bitter white losers” part was meant more as a joke than anything my ex and I had where she referred to one group as OWL(old white losers) and the other as YWL(young white losers).
That being said, yes, the people who joined both groups generally speaking were both well-off white people bitter about the fact that world wasn’t turning out the way they wanted it to and that their lives weren’t living up to their expectations and lashed out at amorphous groups who they blamed for it.
The Tea Party people seem to just be older, choose different targets, and not be as afraid of black people or Muslims.
For the record I have vastly more sympathy for the OWS crowd.
Refusing to take Occupy seriously by calling them names and continually criticizing their demographics isn’t helpful or interesting. It’s true that 80% of participants were white, 90% were college-educated, and 50% had full-time employment. But then it’s also true that 20% were not white (and 15% identified as LGBT), and 50% were under- or unemployed. So not as white or well-off as you’re making them out to be. And that’s just for Wall Street – Occupy spanned the whole US, and over 80 countries.
As for your claims that they were not well-organized and did not have clear goals: the first depends on your definition of “well-organized” and the second was intentional. If millions of people marching on Washington fits the bill as “well-organized,” then the creation of an entire utopia-minded, leaderless mini-society based on participatory democracy that spans the globe should also fit the bill. And their goals (they had some! google it!) were intentionally open-ended to allow for a wide range of activism and viewpoints (though they did occasionally get specific).
ETA: (After glancing at the thread title again): apologies to the OP for getting a bit off-topic.
Our political system has been co-opted by plutocrats, so it doesn’t matter what the public wants, we get policy designed to benefit the wealthy and established class. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Protests are generally meaningless in today’s society IMO. What might help is nonviolent activism that brings commerce to a halt. Labor unions called it striking, but since they are mostly gone that is not something that happens anymore.
Then you run the risk of people not liking the strikers.
What does work? I have no idea.
Gay rights are catching on because they don’t harm the interests of the plutocrats. Try pushing for meaningful financial reform with nonviolent protest and see how far you get.
Then they were doomed from the start, as I’ve posted in other threads. You don’t create social change by camping out in parks and blocking traffic. You create social change with disciplined, organized campaigns with clear goals. You draft legislation. You lobby for support. You raise money to further the cause. Sometimes you search for worthy cases, with compelling facts, and you litigate them all the way to SCOTUS.
See, I think you got the point here (although I am not sure you realized it). The reason why the modern protesters can’t engage in “civil disobedience” against their various peeves is that the things they protest about are not nearly as onerous or oppressive as the things the past protesters were against. That’s why they are mostly ignored.
Occupying, blocking traffic, and other forms of civil disobedience can absolutely help social change, especially when combined with the other forms of activism you mentioned. A problem unique to Occupy, though, is that it has its roots in anarchism, so lobbying, litigation and legislation fall somewhat outside of its purview, as they belong to the very system against which it’s fighting. So it was restricted to non-authoritarian protest for a while, until becoming more politically mainstream at the end.
I agree with this. Prior to the protest, no one outside a the far left knew or cared about the steady increase in wealth concentration over the past several decades. By engaging in their protest the OWS brought this issue out in the open to be talked about in the media. This is the main goal of protest. It’s not to enact change right away, but to build public awareness so that in the future more mainstream legislative methods have a chance. The issue of wealth inequality was a huge issue in the 2012 election. I’m not sure it would have been without the OWS protests.
The problem with OWS is that they had no end game. They should have closed shop after about a month once they got their message across, but once they started protesting there was no clear way to determine when to stop. As the protest dragged on, their original discussion point became old news and the protesters seemed to be protesting for the sake of protesting, making them look like whiny brats and diluting the original effectiveness of their message.
It is also because the things they protest against are just as real but far less tangible, as it were, than the things past protestors were against. E.g., the Civil Rights movement had goals that could clearly be met, in great part, simply by abolishing certain laws (Jim Crow laws) and enacting certain others (the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act). But, if you’re protesting the fact that the top 1% of American society has a greater income-share of the whole than at any time since before the Depression . . . identifying that sort of problem does not so readily suggest any solution. Even the basic question of, “So, how did that happen?” has no obvious and noncontroversial answer.
Can we safely say they have enough money? I think so. Can we say they have more than enough money without offending anyone’s delicate sensibilities? Sure hope so. Would you prefer that they took a more aggressive approach, so as not to appear “whiny”?
Protesting some kind of personal oppression, whether yours or someone else’s, is one thing. Protesting that someone has, in your opinion, too much of something is quite another. One is somewhat noble. The other is an envious whine.
You know how, in order to be able to sue someone, you have to show that you or your interests were damaged? It’s kinda like that.
Except for the fact that this is nowhere near a court of law. Which is kind of a big difference.
Is money power? Most of us would say yes. And few of us much care that they can buy more loud, shiny crap than us. Can they buy more political power? If two citizens stand to speak, and one of them can afford a state of the art sound system and the other can only afford to speak as loud as he can, are they equal as regards “free speech”?
You can inherit money, do you therefore inherit power? Does that pose any problems for the ideal of political equality among citizens? Or do you hold the property rights trump civil rights? If we establish a form of political power that can be inherited, why not establish a peerage outright?
And if you take my point, that money is power, and such power reflect an unequal civil relation between citizens, oughtn’t we do something about that? I think so, the OWS thinks so, how about you?
It is the court of public opinion and the principle is similar. If you’re protesting something about someone else and you cannot show damage to you and yours from it, you will not be taken seriously and your protest will (and should) look like a whine.
We really weren’t expecting you to take us seriously, Terr. And even if we went to the effort, you still wouldn’t. If you had actually gone, you might know that the proceedings tend to more or less cheerful. “Mic checks” are a bit silly? That finger fluttering thing, a bit silly? Yes. But if you’re willing to laugh at yourself, others laughing at you doesn’t sting so much. Or really, at all.
Theres a rather nice old lady here in my trailer park, ninety something, drives off to work as a Wal-Mart greeter, because her pension turned to shit. OK with you if I call her one of “mine”? If not, do let me know, and I promise to give that all the consideration it deserves.