Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
I've enjoyed following the Occupy Wall Street movement. I've also wondered why it hasn't grown in popularity. Rod Dreher points to one possible explanation, an essay by Kenneth Anderson that argues we're not witnessing a populist movement so much as a revolt among elites, people who thought they were guaranteed elite status and accurately sense downward mobility ... and are getting rather freaked out:
The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.
Another excerpt:
The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class. It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.
Internecine warfare between two tiers of elites would explain quite a bit here. Read the whole thing.
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Dec '10
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
It makes me wonder if the American Dream has become its own sort of bubble. Just as people bought houses well beyond their means, the OWS crowd dreamed of lives well beyond what the market of humanity could sustain. Not everyone gets to be a rocket scientist (or a wealthy environmentalist do-gooder), but the economy still needs ditch diggers and ditch digger foremen. Have we overloaded the upper tiers of our society to the point that the bubble will burst and send many people back down a notch?
Aug '11
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
Thanks, Molly. That's actually an astute observation, and one which strikes me as making the most sense out of all the interpretations so far. Will pass it along.
Nov '10
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
Very interesting, but in some respects it comes down to a repeat of the 1960's; the decades before saw a vast increase in college students pursuing degrees in areas such as "sociology," urged on to do so by the policies of FDR and the New Deal democrats who followed him. They became disenchanted with their prospects, and became hippy protesters. Kent State put an end to their riots, and the real economic decline of the 1970's forced everyone to retool.
The same thing is happening now, in a more compressed time frame, perhaps because it has been festering longer. We now have multiple generations of people with utterly useless college degrees on no prospect for upper mobility. Whether they can be accurately described as different "classes," I'm not sure. I certainly don't like the Marxist tendency to look at everything and anything through the lens of social classes. Still, there definitely is an identifiable group of people who are limited in number, and whose grievance is the downward socioeconomic turn that their lives are taking.
Aug '10
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
Dean Vernon Wormer famously said "Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son".
For this lot, neither is poor, fey and stinky.
The poor and foredoomed part they get, that's why they are enraged. That getting stinky seems to them a plausible way forward is telling.
I cannot muster much interest in this lot, they are like a spoiled children sprawled and wailing in the candy aisle, and like a tantrum, this whole story is just an embarrassing distraction.
The masses of underclass kids in major American cities who will eventually come to the same conclusions, they worry me.
They won't throw a silly tantrum for handouts.
Anderson's analysis seems dead on, and very insightful.
Edited on Nov 1, 2011 at 2:22pmOct '10
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
Thomas Sowell made a similar point in the recent episode of Uncommon Knowledge. He said that you don't see any real poor people who have the luxury of taking off that much time to squat on Wall Street and protest. It also reminds me of the conflict between the NFL players and management. I find it hard to feel any sympathy for 'workers' who are making millions of dollars a year.
Feb '11
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
That's a fascinating article and no doubt explains why some people are showing up at these puerile little rallies of their own volition.
I think they are the dumbest of the dumb. Not only were they dumb enough to go miles into debt to get a worthless degree, but they were also dumb enough to expect sympathy from everyone else.
I know people who have left college with those sort of degrees. They either made it work or went back to school to learn something useful. And they paid their student loans, too.
These people at the rallies seem to have done none of that. Instead they're demanding that people with better sense rescue them from their bad choices and pay for the lifestyle they think they deserve.
As it happens I'm not interested in picking that tab, and it looks like not many other people are either.
Aug '10
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
Megan's The Rage of the Almost-Elite deserves a careful read too:
(T)hey expected something different. They didn't see it coming. Yes, yes, maybe they were naive about the possibilities of a fulfilling and secure life in the field of non-profit environmental management. Probably they should not have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into acquiring a BFA.
But these mistakes didn't usually used to be crippling. They were a drag, as you paid off those huge student loans with your tiny little income. (snip) Unfortunately their choices became utterly, horrifyingly disastrous just at the moment when we had a terrible financial crisis that spiked our unemployment rate up to 10%.
We can argue about exactly who is at fault and to what extent, and how much longer our public sector spending would have been sustainable without the financial crisis. But whether or not you think their reaction is empirically correct, it certainly isn't surprising. To them it looks like a bunch of greedy, stupid bankers stole the jobs that they were entitled to. And why the hell do a bunch of thieves get to drive around in BMWs while I take the bus?
Jun '10
Re: Why Occupy Wall Street Hasn't Grown
The people manning the barricades at OWS are just rhetorical cannon fodder. It's very telling that the upper elites are still controlling these imbeciles enough to have them do their business (yes, in both senses) in front of Wall Street offices and not at the locale of their true enemies: the faculties in the universities or the White House or the Dems in Congress.
Sidenote: David Horowitz, in Radical Son, has a very pathetic and candid description of his own father and how he (his father) felt so jealous of his son after he became a famous author of the New Left. After all, he reasoned, David was only able to do so well and know so much because his father and mother were the ones who were on the right side of history, joined the Party and who did the prep work (meetings in the evenings four or more times a week) at the local Communist Party cell.