The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

The election results of 2013 lacked any clear connection to the events of 2011. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, lost seven seats but remained the most popular. Netanyahu himself kept the prime minister’s office. He may have been somewhat weakened by the protests, but, unlike Mubarak and Zapatero, he was not overthrown. The Labor Party gained a few seats, but remained stuck in third place.

Daphni Leef continued to thunder against swinish capitalists and the government that supported them. No longer an ordinary person, she had become a celebrity of sorts. The protests she started had worked out well for her, even if they failed to achieve their goal of social justice and left few marks on the Israeli electorate.

The protests also demonstrated that the powerful current of negation beneath the inscrutable surface of the public required little provocation to break into largescale political action. The Egyptian public had endured 30 years of Hosni Mubarak. The indignados at Puerta del Sol had suffered a loss of future prospects because of the severity of the economic crisis. In Israel, the public’s existential challenge to the established order came because Leef had found it unendurable to lengthen her commute.

OCCUPY WALL STREET AND THE BAFFLING POLITICS OF NEGATION

The events of 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, and Israel were true mobilizations of the networked public, which fused fractious communities of interest into a single political movement. In each case the numbers were enormous, the organizers were political amateurs, and the protests they began almost immediately acquired a life of their own. Large segments of the general public gave their blessing to the protesters.

Many of these benchmarks were not met by the various “Occupy” groups which sprang up across the United States in September 2011. The numbers were miniscule—they never remotely approached the 300,000-plus who took to the streets in Israel, a country with one thirty-ninth of the US population. With such limited participation came the possibility that the episode reflected the will of semi-professional activists and grievance-mongers, rather than a tide of opinion sweeping along a substantial portion of the public. And in many Occupy factions, including the original in New York, this possibility came close to the reality on the ground. As for the American public, it wavered in its opinion of the episode: pluralities tended to support the cause but disapproved of the method.

Despite these differences, I have not hesitated to include the Occupiers as part of the 2011 phase change. Let me offer up three reasons why.

One: I found strong demographic and behavioral affinities between Occupy Wall Street participants and the public that took to the streets in Egypt, Spain, and Israel. They were the same people, in different countries: young, middle class, university educated—and, in the case of OWS, predominantly white. Sectarian ideals propelled them to politics. All repudiated, in principle, the need for leaders, programs, and top-down organizations.

The organizers in New York and many other Occupy sites were, disproportionately, anarchists. To a somewhat lesser extent, that had been the case in Spain as well. Anarchists introduced the mechanisms and principles of decision followed by the Occupiers—the “general assemblies” and the demand for consensus or “direct democracy,” for example. These were not ordinary people. They were experienced, if not hardened, veterans of street battles, who rejected capitalism and all its works and despised liberal democracy. ²⁶

But, again, if anarchist groups had the knack to organize hundreds of protests across the United States, they would have done so before 2011. Most of the participants shared that lack of positive political definition that characterized the protests of 2011—by one count, 60 percent of the OWS people had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and felt disappointed with the results. ²⁷ Like the tent dwellers of Tel Aviv, they wanted more. It’s worth noting that anarchism is by far the most sectarian movement on the left, with an ideological predilection for individualism and self-expression. The difference between a young anarchist and a young disillusioned liberal was not likely to be noticed by either.

Two: To a remarkable extent, the Occupiers lived virtually. They organized on the web so they could occupy a physical space, and they occupied a physical space so they could talk about it online. More completely than the other protesters of 2011, they were creatures of the Fifth Wave, able to extend their reach digitally beyond their small numbers. The We Are the 99 Percent campaign on Tumblr, in which ordinary people told their stories of victimization on a single sheet of paper, had a tremendous impact on liberal commentators and the news media in general. Every Occupy site had an elaborate Facebook page. Every violent act by a cop trying to dislodge a young Occupier was caught on mobile phone video and posted online. City governments, embodying the slowmoving Center, were driven into awkward rituals of attack and retreat, as public opinion swung between irritation over the disruption caused by the protests and anger over the level of force necessary to disband them.

All this bore a striking similarity to the other encounters I have covered in this chapter.

Three: Like their brethren in Spain and Israel, the OWS protesters were energized primarily by the force of their repudiations. They made no demands, but they felt free to accuse. The objects of their loathing—a predatory economic system, a corrupted government, a society ruled by money—united them in a way that common goals did not. They spread the notion that the top 1 percent of Americans tyrannized the bottom 99—and that they, a handful of white, middleclass youngsters, represented the vast American public, the people, in revolt. OWS injected these once-marginal attitudes into the mainstream, where they became fodder for liberal politicians. The romance of condemnation, in my judgment, has become the most conspicuous feature of President Obama’s mode of governance. The demonization of millionaires was a rhetorical pillar of the president’s successful 2012 campaign.

Among my concerns in writing this book has been the fate of democracy in the indecisive conflict between the public and authority. From this perspective, OWS’s numbers may have been small, but the message was consequential. It helped tip American politics at the highest level toward pure negation and distrust, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. For this reason alone the Occupy protests belong with the bigger revolts in my investigation of phase change.

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That said, the number of odd occurrences surrounding OWS seemed to defy the laws of probability—although, when all was said and done, that’s what I would guess was at work. From early 2011, a number of attempts had been made to disrupt Wall Street for the obvious symbolic reasons. These attracted sparse attendance and zero media attention. The first notable protest against the headquarters of American capitalism was launched by an online Canadian anticonsumerist magazine, Adbusters, which in June registered the #occupywallstreet hashtag, and, on its blog, posted the following proposal: “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.” ²⁸

The few hundred demonstrators who showed up on that date were chased off public spaces by the police, until they found refuge in Zuccotti Park, where, in a strange muddle of ideals, they were protected by the sanctity of private property. When the media ignored the initial occupation, the organizers forgot their anticonsumerism and turned to a commercial public relations firm, Workhorse Publicity, for help with spreading the word of their revolution. The company did so well that it actually won a professional award for its efforts. ²⁹

Beyond such quirks, the story of the OWS movement can be told in few words. From September 17 until November 15, the Zuccotti Park encampment waxed and waned with the flow of events. Larger crowds came invariably after attempts by police to arrest or disperse protesters. Mobile phone video of a New York cop pepper-spraying a group of young women, for example, went viral and aroused much indignation. Following the arrest of 400 Occupiers for disrupting traffic on Brooklyn Bridge, some 15,000 protesters marched on October 5 from Foley Square to the park. Shortly after, occupations began to spread across the US—to over 600 sites, according to one source. Numbers for each site remained small, but media attention of the movement grew large, and, particularly in New York, was not unsympathetic. Labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, offered their support, though union members mostly stayed away. As in Tel Aviv, this was not a working class revolt. Nor did OWS manage to attract African American or Hispanic activists in any numbers.

Every Occupy site embraced nonviolence, but some were more nonviolent than others. In Oakland, protesters fought pitched battles against police, with each side accusing the other of brutality. Occupy Oakland’s “General Strike and Anti-Capitalist March” on November 2 managed to close the Port of Oakland— probably the only significant economic impact of the protests.

Sanitation was always a problem, and was frequently cited by the authorities as a pretext for clearing out the encampments. Crime became a concern with the passage of time, as the homeless and other distinctly non-middle-class elements drifted into the sites. On November 15, giving unsanitary conditions as a reason, New York police swept the protesters out of Zuccotti Park. Within days, city governments had done the same in every Occupy site around the country. Sporadic protests and attempts to re-occupy continued for months, but the numbers involved dwindled into insignificance, and public opinion, insofar as it cared about the movement, had turned negative. Mostly, though, the public and the media had stopped paying attention.

The rigidly sectarian mindset of OWS proved more seductive to American political life than the actual protests. In calling for the first occupation, Adbusters had presented a single demand: a presidential commission “tasked with ending the influence of money” over politics. This was immediately forgotten. As in Israel, media commentators and intellectuals rushed in with suggested schemes for the protesters to embrace. They were ignored. The Occupiers refused to make demands as a matter of principle. They felt it was beneath them to petition an illegitimate government. Here is a statement from the discussions in the “demands committee” of the Zuccotti Park general assembly:

The movement doesn’t need to make demands, because the movement is an assertive process. This movement has the power to affect change. It does not need to ask for it. The OWS does not make demands. We will simply assert our own power to achieve what we desire. The more of us gather to the cause, the more power we have. Make no demands for others to solve these problems. Assert yourself. ³⁰

We have heard this sentiment before, the hope—the expectation—that hierarchy would be decontaminated by making it subservient to the sect. “From now on, the young people will shape the government’s vision,” Itzik Shmuli had said. The government was not to be overthrown. The government was to become an instrument of sectarian virtue. Zuccotti Park would command Washington and achieve what it desired. As a general proposition, this was disconnected from the realities of American politics. But on any given issue, not so much: OWS could mobilize public opinion, substantially enough, it may have been, to inflict a fatal wound on the target of its repudiation.

What the Occupiers desired to achieve was what all the rebels and street insurgents of 2011 desired: to negate a host of historical conditions, institutions, and relations whose persistence had driven them to revolt. They wanted history to abolish history, hierarchy to eliminate hierarchy, government to bring down the temple of authority.

The list of things OWS stood against was long and deep. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York,” adopted on September 29 and one of the few formal statements of the movement, consisted of a crazy quilt of complaints against authority, ending with a bland call to “create a process to address the problems we face.”

We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process . . .

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity . . .

They have perpetuated gender inequality and discrimination . . .

They have poisoned the food supply . . .

They have continuously sought to end the rights of workers . . .

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education . . .

They have consistently outsourced labor . . .

[ . . . ] They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

[ . . . ] They have perpetuated colonialism . . .

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas. ³¹

The disproportion between such systematic injustices and the proposed actions —the “process” I cited above, a cursory exhortation to “assert your power”— reflects a form of logic which should be familiar to us by now. Revolution, in 2011, meant denunciation. Actual change was left for someone else.

Manuel Castells, a sympathetic observer, perused the online records of the Occupy sites’ general assemblies, and compiled a roster of changes the participants expected to work on the world. It made exhausting reading.

. . . controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing ofjobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the militaryindustrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the [I]nternet; assuring privacy on the [I]nternet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for cooptation in the political system . . . 32

The action words used for these improvements of the status quo connoted negation and elimination: “reform,” “control,” “reverse,” “limit,” “combat,” “fine,” “critique.” Added up, they conveyed a feeling of revulsion with the established order of American politics. The Occupiers didn’t deal in alternatives, but most of the standing political and social arrangements propping up their world they wished to sweep away.

It is instructive to consider the protesters from the perspective of the elites whose legitimacy they denied. A vast psychological distance distorted that perspective. Politicians at the top of steep hierarchies heard the shouts and slogans from the street as a confused babble. Because they were guardians of order, they felt compelled to offer some response to the disorder outside their doors. Their dilemma was that any response placed the government eyeball to eyeball with the insurgents, immensely raising the stature of the latter.

Those who wielded power peered at the rebellions of 2011 through the thick lenses of their institutional assumptions. If the rebels wanted to abolish history, the political elites were imprisoned by it, and behaved, in each case, according to the logic of their time and place. Government actions thus appeared strangely tactical, local, disconnected from ideology.

Mubarak had believed that if he denied the existence of the demonstrations, they would cease to exist. While pitched battles bloodied the streets of Cairo, stateowned Egyptian TV kept showing cheerful crowds in shopping malls. Unperceived by the aging dictator, however, the day of Homo informaticus had arrived: his regime no longer had the power to dictate reality. By the time Mubarak realized he had to respond directly to the protests, it was too late.

Zapatero, a socialist, felt the allure of revolt and repudiation but found himself the target of both. Ideologically, he came from an egalitarian tradition. In reality, he was president of Spain, with all the pomp and distance—and hostility from a rebellious public—his position entailed. Zapatero and his party never resolved this fundamental dilemma.

Netanyahu, the free marketeer, responded by swallowing his principles and addressing the more concrete complaints coming out of Rothschild Boulevard.

His government moved with unusual tactical speed, and may well have survived for this reason.

In the US, the Occupy movement never remotely threatened the Federal government. City governments, almost all of them run by liberal Democratic politicians, struggled to assume the proper posture toward local occupations. Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire and “one percenter” if ever there was one, relied on technicalities first to tolerate then to shut down Zuccotti Park. Bloomberg kept reporters away from the site while it was being cleared—again offering vague technical reasons for doing so.

On occasion, President Obama was asked by the media for his opinion of the Occupy groups. He invariably responded with sympathy for the protesters, whose grievances he identified with the economic problems that had won him the presidency in 2008. Here is a fairly typical statement from the president: “I think it [the Occupy movement] expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country . . . and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place.” ³³ To underline the message, the White House, on October 16, proclaimed that President Obama was “working for the interests of the 99 percent.” ³⁴

It may seem puzzling for a sitting president to embrace a movement which repudiated the legitimacy of government because it was run by corporations. The president’s motives may have included some element of political calculation. Many of the young protesters had been Obama campaign activists in 2008.

But I would venture that President Obama was as sincere in his sympathy for OWS as anyone in politics is allowed to be. I also think that the movement’s negations were precisely what appealed to the president. They were in harmony with his intuitive assessment of the world, his ideas about how to navigate events without surrendering his virtue. OWS didn’t influence the president. The arrow of causation moved the other way. President Obama anticipated many of the movement’s rhetorical features during his 2008 electoral campaign, which was one reason so many of the 2011 Occupiers participated in it.

President Obama’s place in the shadowy war of the worlds has been unique and significant, but it belongs to a larger topic—the fate of democratic government— which I will consider in a later chapter. Here I note only that OWS offered the president the opportunity to break out of an institutional perspective he had never found congenial. Like Zapatero, Obama likely viewed himself as both rebel and president, but unlike Zapatero he did not feel attached, in either capacity, to any particular structures.