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Sunday, October 02, 2011

Will Occupy Wall Street Pass the Test?

I am happy to see headlines about Occupy Wall Street, but I am not happy to see silence on the American Jobs Act. These should be complementary stories, not competing ones.

It would be a terrible mistake for the left to abandon Obama at the very moment he finally does what they have been asking him to do for so long, to move from the cruel nonsense of austerity and focus instead on the moral catastrophe of joblessness and insecurity, to move from the pre-emptive capitulation of bipartisanship on terms dictated by unprecedentedly reckless, cruel, and obstructionist Republicans and focus instead on the real culprits.

I am obviously a fan of Occupy Wall Street, I have longed for such public demonstrations for years and am thrilled to see them, I hope they will grow and swell from here. But for me these demonstrations should function at least in part (there can be no question of their reduction to this function, they are and should be more than one thing) to re-invigorate activists and organizers to support the most progressive work of the Democratic Party, should function to bring new voices and energies into the Democratic Party, should provide a more radical left beside which Democrats can make progressive proposals that moderates will sign on to for fear of more revolutionary alternatives, and so on.

But if these demonstrations encourage blindness to differences that make a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans then they are functionally a tool for Movement Republican, if they distract attention and energy from the necessary pressure to keep the Democratic coalition together to try to pass the American Jobs Act (surely a result that would seem at least a modest accomplishment to most of the folks who sympathize with Occupy Wall Street) then they are enabling the explicit Republican program of obstructionism to make Obama a one-term president no matter how many millions of Americans suffer for this political goal. This would be an outcome catastrophic to the ends of the folks righteously demonstrating in the streets, and it is crucial that we all understand this.

Occupy Wall Street has to be more than an opportunity for the American left to re-stage a stale failed re-run of 1968. The Democratic Party and organized labor should emerge from this movement stronger, not weaker.

2012 should dawn with a government firmly controlled by Democrats (it will take a great but achievable effort to regain the House but an almost impossible effort to retain the Senate for Democrats) as well as an energized and righteous intellectual atmosphere suffused with demands and ideas to justify the proposal in a second Obama term of a tax on financial transactions over digital networks, a higher tax on income from capital gains as for income on labor, a raising of the cap on taxable income to preserve social security for future generations, and a Medicare buy-in program as a public option -- not to mention EFCA, the Dream Act, a path to legal citizenship for informal immigrants, serious gun control, much more money for renewable energy and mass transit infrastructure, more pro-choice appointments to the Supreme Court and the rest.

That is their test. Stronger Democrats not weaker ones, a better-positioned President not an abandoned one, a more energized left not a demoralized left in disarray jumping idiotically through right-wing hoops. Will the demonstrations pass this test?

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