Almost two months to the day since anti-Wall Street protesters occupied Zuccotti Park, Mike Bloomberg finally did what he’s clearly been aching to do all along: cleared them the heck out of there. Perhaps encouraged by similar actions in Oakland and Portland, the Mayor unleashed the N.Y.P.D.’s riot squad in the dead of night, first taking care to cordon off the area from prying news cameras.
As the sun came on yet another balmy mid-November day, two questions arose: Were the protesters gone for keeps? And where would the Occupy Wall Street movement go from here?
As of noon, the first question was shrouded in confusion. A few hours earlier, responding to a request from the National Lawyers Guild, Justice Lucy Billings, who sits on the State Supreme Court, had issued a temporary restraining order preventing the city from enforcing park rules, such as “no tents,” on the protesters, and ordering the city, the Mayor, the police department, and Brookfield Properties to show cause for their actions. Of course, the N.Y.P.D. had already enforced these rules, as evidenced by this A.P. footage, which shows sanitation workers filling garbage trucks with tents, tarps, and other detritus from the encampment.
Justice Billings set a hearing for later in the day, and Mayor Bloomberg, speaking at a press conference in which he attempted to justify his actions by saying the protesters had deprived other New Yorkers of the right to use the park and created a health hazard, said the city would fight her restraining order. A few dozen protesters were allowed back into the park, minus tents, only to be turfed out again pending the court hearing. Meanwhile, other protesters had marched uptown and occupied a lot at Canal and Sixth Avenue that is owned by Trinity Church.
The larger question, about the future of Occupy Wall Street, won’t be answered today or tomorrow. If the Mayor and the editorial page of the New York Post think the protests will simply fade away, they are deluded. In its short life, O.W.S. has gone from a local sideshow to a national movement, with offshoots in hundreds of towns and cities. Whatever happens next, it has already changed the terms of the political debate, putting rising inequality front and center, which is where it should have been for years.
Still, O.W.S. has to make some decisions about its future. At its heart, there has always been an incipient tension between aims (reducing inequality and reinvigorating an ossified political system) and means (occupying urban real estate). Now that its encampments in many cities have been broken up, and with winter coming on, the movement needs to confront this tension and, if not resolve it, at least come up with a way to negotiate it over the next few months.
Some opportunistic outsiders, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, are keen to seize upon O.W.S. as a vehicle to create a new progressive movement, with its own political candidates and party platform. In a widely circulated piece in Sunday’s Times, Sachs argued that the success of O.W.S. heralds a sea change in American politics. “A new generation of leaders is just getting started,” Sachs wrote. “The new progressive age has begun.” Sachs even suggested a snappy platform: “Tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.”
If only it were that easy to transform American politics. As anybody knows who has spent time in Zuccotti Park and sat through one of the “General Assemblies,” it is tough for the organizers of the protest to get anything done, let alone set up a new political party. With unanimous support required for new initiatives or significant expenditures, some recent assemblies have degenerated into shouting matches, and last week a dissident group set up its own alternative assembly.
Given the internal fissures that were developing, it could conceivably turn out that Bloomberg has done O.W.S. a favor. In some ways, the movement has already outgrown Zuccotti Park. It now has more than eighty working groups, looking at everything from community banking to town planning. It has significant media support. It has ties to trades unions, environmental activists, and the backing of celebrities and public intellectuals, such as Sachs and his colleague Joseph Stiglitz.
What is needed is some way to build upon these successes while maintaining the energy and enthusiasm that O.W.S. has unleashed. The recent history of the “Indignants” in Spain shows that a heterogeneous protest movement can survive the loss of its focal point. In June, after repeated clashes with the police, the Spanish protesters decided to leave their encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. The movement lives on: last month, hundreds of thousands of people marched in its support through Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities.
Can O.W.S. make a similar transition? I hope so.