Next month it will have been two years since the first Occupy Wall Street march. And I see that HBO’s “Newsroom” is using it as a subplot.
So can we evaluate this event on retrospect. What was it? Was it a movement? Did it have goals? What were they? Was any progress made to accomplish such goals? Does Occipy have any lasting relevance or significance or consequence?
I’ll note that in comparison, the Tea Party movement has actually become a political force and has managed to get people elected to Congress, where they have been having a tangible impact. (Whether it’s a good or bad impact is a separate question.)
My honest impression was that it started out as a great big nothing and somehow ended up even less than that. There is no lasting impact except maybe in a counterproductive way. We did learn that either 60’s style protesting just doesn’t work anymore or that people today just don’t know how to do it worth a damn. I almost feel embarrassed for anyone associated with the Occupy movement except they didn’t generally come off as sympathetic characters in general so I just shake me head instead.
The sad part was that they did have some valid points in there somewhere yet they failed to make those clear, had no concrete goals, and somehow generated sympathy for the financial institutions they were targeting just because their strategy and message were so ill-conceived. It was as large a fail as could reasonably be imagined.
They still have rallies, though they’re not as high-profile. Yesterday they participated in (don’t know if they actually organized) the 1984Day rally against government surveillance.
They did compared to the Tea Partiers.
It started out as a movement trying to figure out what its demands were, and I sense that nothing has progressed. Other than the fact that at the beginning, there were quite a few people who were really riled up and didn’t know what to do about it… and now the zeal is gone and they don’t know what to do about it.
If there ever is a book written on pointless political movements, this should be case study number one.
Yeah, that Tea Party Riot in Oakland was a disaster.
Oh, wait, that was Occupy. Only they could make the TP’ers look rational.
You mean they came off unsympathetic to the Tea Partiers.
Tea Party Riot? Wasn’t that a song by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in the mid-90s?
Well, sort of. They were both anti-bailout.
The important question is, did OWS succeed or fail in their real goal – getting hold of all that Nazi money?
Early on I think it was very successful in terms of publicizing the growing concentration of wealth in this country. Prior to OWS, the degree of inequality was unknown to all but a relative small number of people on the left who would blog about it among themselves. OWS brought mainstream media attention to the 1% and made it an important issue in the 2012 election. This goal was accomplished in the first few weeks so of the protest. If they had stopped here it would have been a unmitigated success.
After that the problem was how to get out of it. Without any real demands being made, there was no way to claim victory and quit. It wasn’t as if there was any way the wealth inequality gap could be closed overnight. So the protest continued due to inertia. Once their message had penetrated the media and became old news, the story stopped being about their message and started being about the protest itself. That is when things started going down hill.
So I think it succeeded in its goal as a protest movement, but will not be remembered for its successes, rather it will be remembered for its rudderless foundering at the end.
A good comparison could be made to the party of Ross Perot, which when it started was the most successful 3rd party in the last hundred years, but which now is widely regarded as a joke.
The bold ladies who camp with the OWSers
Are no puritanical wowsers
One can’t walk up Wall Street
Without hearing them tweet,
“Why, what’s that occupying your trousers?”
I doubt that the “concentration of wealth” argument was only known to a few people. Practically every election I can remember had the left wing of the Democrats complaining (loudly) about the perceived unfairness of it all.
rebels without a clue. It’s not like it’s hard to find a windmill to chase yet they managed to fail on every level.
They found a perfectly good windmill. They just weren’t very good at tilting.
It’s a mistake to call them “60’s-style” protesters. Protesters in the 1960’s were organized.
Their success in fighting wealth inequality and the power imbalance in American politics has been arguably negligible. However, nobody can deny the advances that have been made in drum circle syncopation.
Assuming that means late 60s, because there were huge Civil Rights protests in the early 60s that were organized and extremely effective. The anti-war protests of the mid and late 60s were maybe not so organized, but they did sort of galvanize the nation. LBJ chose not to run for re-election and who knows how much the protests had to do with that.
One thing OWS did accomplish was to inspire an international movement. Too soon to say what might come of it.
Also, the 60’s protestors had a few specific goals.A general goal to end the war, and a more specific goal (which touched many families personally)–to cancel the draft. Add to that specific things that individuals could do to bring about change–like (gasp!) sharing an apartment with someone of the opposite sex.
The OW protesters had nothing.