Thank You Occupy!

I have spent years and years of my life trying to get some of the many thousands of students in my classrooms (and the comparatively fewer readers of my more marginal blogging effort) to question: what possible talents or virtues among the richest of the rich could justify the fantastic concentration of wealth into their hands in an America that is unthinkably rich and powerful due to the work and inheritance and commons shared by us all yet has flabbergastingly inequitable and dysfunctional systems for the provision of good healthcare, sound education, and the security of general welfare to all?

How I have struggled to get them to question: whether the rights to free expression and free assembly which we claim to define our glory and distinguish us from all others even really exist if all it takes is for a cop to tell us to move on or settle down to silence our expressions and scatter our assemblies? How I have strived to get them to ponder: how the proliferation and normalization of tasers and "non-lethal" crowd control technologies might not only have ameliorated the lethality of police intervention but far more importantly facilitated through that apparent amelioration a radical multiplication, amplification, and suffusion of police violence into our everyday public lives profoundly curtailing our experiences and expectations of liberty in a presumably free country?

Of course, there are many good people who have been raising these and other questions over the years (most with greater forcefulness and clarity than I manage in my pedantic way here and there), but, true though that is, there has always been a rather demoralizing marginalization of these vital questions and critiques always only to what have seemed, at least to me, the same small portion of activists and intellectuals, preaching ever more desperately to an insufficient choir while inequities in health outcomes, opportunities, privileges, security, access to law have grown ever more and more catastrophic all the while the norms and forms of an authoritarian police state devoted to the support of those inequities have grown ever more and more numerous and normal.

And yet suddenly, with the emergence and growth of the Occupy Movement, these topics have moved beyond the margins into everyday discourse, they are suddenly thematized in Establishment media accounts, their stakes are on the lips of multitudes of people talking to one another online and on the street, the polls and graphs and media whirligigs to which our millionaire representatives respond while pretending to respond to their non-millionaire constituents sometimes now actually reflect our real concerns.

It was always rather hilarious to hear people claim not to understand the demands of Occupy when the demands were so palpable and obvious, but annoyance with that sort of facile cluelessness has sometimes obscured what can only be regarded as the uncanny inerrancy with which Occupy has directed its attention, and hence everybody's attention, precisely to those sites and those contradictions and those demands that are most vital, most structural, and hitherto never attended to by more than a few in any kind of sustained way, from the obscenity of conspicuous wealth concentration, to the criminality of the fraudulent financialization of the global economy, to the plutocratic perversion of justice and law, to the misdirection of the police from the protection and service of all citizens to the guardians against everyday citizens like themselves of oligarchs who pretend to own them as mercenaries and to the surreal violence enabled and ensured by that misdirection, and on and on and on.

Especially to the extent that the Democratic party remembers its ethos as the party of people who work for a living and resonates with the distressed testaments and civic aspirations given voice by Occupy, and attracts more, and Better, Democrats into campaigns, and into government, to respond to the concerns of everyday people and reform our institutions to better enable and serve democratic equity-in-diversity then I find that the growing power and prestige of Occupy and the democratizing movements it goes on to inspire and from which it has drawn its momentum (like the Wisconsin protests of Walker's austerity budget and anti-union crusade) fills me with more hope and excitement than I have had in my life.

It is the work of critique to expose or pressure what are taken to be facts of the status quo into contradictions that open the status quo to contestation and progressive transformation. Occupy is foregrounding and so turning the Established facts of neoliberalism into contradictions demanding address across the terrain of long-accustomed plutocratic norms, protocols, institutions. I would like to think at least some of the groundwork for these sweeping interrogations was prepared by the work of a generation of critical theorists all too aware of the dangerous assumptions and aspirations of the followers of Hayek and Friedman (who were never more than a hop, jump, and goose-step away from the followers of Rush and O'Reilly), the crony capitalists, the union busters, the white-racists, the Dominionists, the domestic policy bullies and foreign policy hawks who throng the ranks of Movement Republicanism and the neocons and anarcho-capitalists of its reactionary avantgarde. But until now that project of critique, however righteous, has never seemed to be even remotely enough.

After a lifetime of reconciling myself to a status quo littered with contradictions taken for facts, obscenities too appalling to tolerate and yet for all the world too entrenched ever to change like our suicidal pollution and consumption of the environment on which we depend to survive, like the racist War on (some) Drugs and an ever-expanding Hellmouth of prisons, like our regressive tax system and the self-mutilating lowest-common-denominator appeal of anti-tax rhetoric, like the tragedy of capital punishment, like anti-social corporate personhood, like our commercial elections, like our for-profit private-insurance mediated healthcare system, like our scarcely regulated gun trafficking in streets and schools soaked in blood, like our dependence on a criminally exploited and humiliated informal and hence un-unionizable workforce, like our denigration and demoralization of teachers, universities, freethinkers, artists, critics, gadflies, harmless eccentrics, anything but pre-packaged imagination, anything but consumer-friendly rebellion, like the total suffusion of our public life with the deceptive and hyperbolic and crassly opportunistic norms and forms of marketing and promotion and advertizing… after a lifetime contemplating so much that was so wrong so ruinously and so obviously and yet seemed so impossibly remote from our collective attention and agency and address, suddenly Occupy has set its sights and settled its sites right there and taken us all with it, and there assembled, and thus expressive, they are making palpable and so possible so much of the change I have so wanted to see and yet despaired of forming in the world.

Pardon the clichéd genuflection to the "On this Thanksgiving Day what am I thankful for?" genre, but it seemed a fair moment to give some voice to the hope Occupy has given a worldly face for me.

Democrats Want to Fall in Love, Republicans Want to Fall in Line

I would have thought it goes without saying that for somebody of the Left like me (in the radical democracy, social democracy, democratic socialism neck of the ideological woods) there can only be a tactical alliance with any actually electable President. Education, agitation, organization yields political change, and while politics is not reducible to partisan politics, neither does it make much sense to disdain so preeminent an agency for political change as plays out through partisan politics.

I have said many times that Obama is the most progressive President we have had since FDR, and this is almost always taken as some sort of uncritical Obama-mania on my part rather than as a fairly straightforward indictment of the limits of the Presidency since WW2 for a person of the Left. While that indictment is perfectly true, it seems to me just as obvious that for a person of the Left, Obama is such an incomparably better candidate than any Republican will be and any Republican so devastatingly bad, that not to support Obama (either actively by voting for somebody worse or passively by not voting and thereby conceding the election to those who vote for somebody worse) is simply stupid or, in this day and age, simply reveals you to be evil. That's how bad Republicans are now: a generation or two of mostly scoundrels and ignoramuses and smug bigots crystallizing in the present in an unambiguous authoritarian identity movement.

I believe that it is a political commonplace to say of Democrats that they want to fall in love with their President, while Republicans like all anxious authoritarians are looking to fall in line. Neither attitude is commendable, and neither attitude conduces to reasonable political thinking.

So, just what is a consistent, and therefore probably what will pass in this day and age for radical, person of the Left to do? How to reconcile one's ideals with one's practice? Now, anarchism as a practical or ideological orientation on the right (the market fundamentalists and anti-government conservatives) carries water for plutocracy, and on the left amounts mostly to a form of performance art (not without its beauty and usefulness -- but the Left already won the Culture Wars so the usefulness is limited). Meanwhile, third parties function as spoilers for the foreseeable future -- since the institutional reforms that would render them otherwise (like implementing publicly financing campaigns, instant runoff voting, and reorganizing the way committee assignments are made in the House and Senate) are either as or more fundamental than the institutional reforms that can be made within the current system that would yield the policy outcomes the desire for which make third parties seem attractive in the first place. Few are willing to make the sacrifices demanded of literal revolutionary politics (which requires more than big talk, online or over coffee), and in any case too many forms of revolutionary insurrection have yielded in my view unintended consequences as vile as the ones that provoked them.

For a person of the Left -- and as such almost certainly a person to the Left of the politics of most candidates of the Democratic Party -- that leaves as the only sensible attitude and practical arena remaining always to work to support the election of More, and Better, Democrats across all layers of government, while continuing to engage in education, agitation, and organization in other modes of criticism, dialogue, activism, cultural intervention, and social support as a supplement to partisan politics pushing Democrats and the country and the planet more generally to the Left from the Left, but always in ways that disempower progressive partisan politics as little as possible.

This is no time to fall in love or pine to fall in love with elected officials, nor is this a time to limit one's struggle to the bounds of electoral politics. At a time when our institutions are so dysfunctional it makes as little sense to fall in line as it does to disdain altogether the struggle to regain control and reform those institutions back into functionality. So much paralyzing demoralization and pointless recrimination interfering with the heartbreaking heartening work of progressive change simply arises from the failure to recognize that one has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Elect More -- and Better -- Democrats. Engage in partisan politics -- and in social, cultural, political struggle beyond the immediate horizon of elections and reform legislation.

It is not either /or. It is not one to the detriment of the other. It is both/and. It is both, to the extent that they enable one another.