Not long after the Communist governments of Eastern Europe were overthrown, the Polish dissident, essayist, and newspaperman Adam Michnik told an interviewer that he wished he could be an opposition leftist, but he knew that the luxury was unavailable. There was no longer a government in Poland for him to oppose; the times demanded that he play the role of establishment centrist for a while; he took a seat in parliament. It occurred to me the other day that my political condition now oddly mirrors Michnik’s then: I’d probably be happiest as an establishment centrist, to the extent that I’m political at all. But the times seem to be demanding that I think of myself as an opposition leftist.
My Keynesian hunch about the current economic troubles is that when wealth is too much concentrated in the hands of people who don’t need to spend it, it stops circulating. I suspect that America spent its way out of the structurally similar Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties through a campaign of wealth redistribution that lasted decades—the government hired soldiers, gave college educations to veterans, granted pensions to senior citizens, and went to war on poverty—and that the transfer laid the groundwork for the longest period of uninterrupted prosperity in American history. Unfortunately, it’s become difficult to talk about hunches and suspicions like these outside the pages of, say, Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer. A politician who tries is likely to be attacked as a partisan of class warfare.
When I first stopped by the Occupy Wall Street encampment a few weeks ago, at the encouragement of a young friend, I thought, How lovely! It’s an expression of populist anger by people who haven’t bought into the idea that free markets solve everything. But then the voice of my disillusioned self—professionalized writer and longtime observer of politics—spoke up: Oh dear! They lack message discipline. And there’s a plethora of economic-policy expertise and organizational know-how that they’re failing to take advantage of. The conversations that I overheard in Zuccotti Park struck me as earnest and process-oriented—so earnest and process-oriented that I rolled my eyes. I listened while a veteran facilitator taught a circle of new recruits the fluttery hand gestures with which the protesters signaled approbation and disapprobation. While explaining the compacted version of Robert’s Rules of Order that prevailed at meetings, the facilitator said that there was often a lot of fuss at meetings about what the protesters’ demands should be. “Personally, I’m not so concerned with demands,” he noted, with a somewhat studied casualness, as if his willingness to suspend the question were an afterthought or a sign of a merely personal sophistication. These people are so young, I concluded. I wished them well, but I didn’t think their movement was likely to last. If they didn’t set forth a policy agenda, how could intellectually responsible liberals decide whether to support them or not?
But the movement continued despite my reservations. What’s more, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The endeavor made me feel hopeful. It was invigorating to know that a group of people had chosen not to accept expert political opinion and were daring to say things that had seemed unsayable in grown-up political circles just a few weeks before. I stopped by a second time and donated to the encampment’s library an advance reviewer’s copy of a new history of economic equality. A few days later, along with staffers from n+1, Harper’s, and the Nation who styled themselves the Writers’ Bloc, I carried a poster in a march organized by Occupy Wall Street in collaboration with several unions.
Many Americans were probably spurred to sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street movement on September 24th, when a New York police commander used pepper spray on a group of women waiting for possible arrest inside a pen of the police’s portable orange plastic fencing. In a similar way, writers may have been galvanized by early mockery of the movement in the New York Times and the New Republic. (The Times soon began giving serious and respectful coverage to the movement; the New Republic now seems split between scolding the movement and cautiously championing it.) The early press attacks were decisive in my own case, anyway. I had come close to dismissing the movement myself, and it was only when I read scornful appraisals by others that I realized that I didn’t actually want to see it dismissed. Having overcome that temptation, I proceeded to fantasize about “helping” the movement with advice that might make it more recognizable to me—and less like the strange, effective thing that it has turned out to be. Happily no one asked for, let alone took, my advice.
Whenever a writer considers endorsing a cause—whenever this writer considers it, at any rate—he worries: Do I know what I’m talking about? Am I distracting myself from my real work? Who cares what I think? Aren’t I just indulging a romantic sense of my own world-historical importance? Shouldn’t the cobbler stick to his last? Maybe. And maybe the movement will disappoint me by taking a nasty turn. I didn’t marry Occupy Wall Street; I just signed a petition supporting it. I think I did so as a kind of public recognition that my first impression of the movement has so far turned out to be more accurate and useful than my second thoughts. I signed in hopes of forestalling, or at least slowing, the impulse that other people might also feel to dismiss the movement out of hand.
Will Occupy Wall Street grow into a Tea Party-style political organization on the left? I suspect not, because its methods are too anarchist. Will it force the government to enact laws that regulate financial institutions more strictly or restrain the political power of corporations? Not while Republicans control the House of Representatives. But nothing concrete or lasting was achieved by the Bonus Army of American veterans who encamped in Washington, D.C., in 1932, or by the British workers who protested their unemployment and poverty by marching from the small town of Jarrow to London in 1936. All that those earlier protesters managed to do was add new voices to the political conversation. That alone wouldn’t be a small achievement.
