November 18, 2011 11:07 pm
The protests failed but capitalism is still in the dock
By Christopher Caldwell
The American public will have little pity for the members of the Occupy Wall Street movement evicted from their camps in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. It is a paradox of open societies: since order cannot be taken for granted, the public demands that government ostentatiously impose it.
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In 1968, youths who gathered at the Democratic convention were clubbed mercilessly on national television by Chicago police. Even though public opinion was shifting towards the demonstrators’ views, the public’s contempt for their protests led even the Democratic party candidate to sing the praises of the police.
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The Occupy protesters never quite realised whom they were protesting for. The slogan “We are the 99 per cent” showed a clear understanding of the problem of inequality, but a very fuzzy understanding of who the protesters themselves were. “Occupy” is an unsympathetic verb. We do not admire those who occupied France. This week the Washington Post interviewed a policeman who had spent decades policing various riots and demonstrations around the Capitol. He compared today’s Occupy movement to the farmers who descended on the capital to protest US agricultural policy in 1979. “Unlike what’s going on now,” he said, “with the farmers, they were all farmers”.
Nor could the protesters specify whom they were protesting against. In front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last week, I questioned what protesters there had against the euro. Nothing, they told me. Well, then, what did they have against the ECB? Nothing. It was “the banks”, they said.
And the movement was coy about stating its beliefs. An ideology is what permits a movement to germinate and endure. Without an ideology, what you have is not a movement but a lifestyle. Occupy Wall Street is an experiment in living differently on the margins of this civilisation, not a blueprint for a new one. As long as it has no ideology, tent cities are the entire message of Occupy Wall Street, and the movement will last only until the world’s mayors send it packing. This makes the campers dependent on holders of power. In Montreal, the city has rejected a petition to replace protesters’ tents with wooden structures.
Letting Occupy maintain its campsites would require treating non-verbal acts, such as tent-pitching, as constitutionally protected forms of expression. The public is hostile to that idea and the courts have been sceptical. In the 1984 case, Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, the US Supreme Court ruled that, while speech is a protected right, overnight camping is not.
The Occupy movement has done nothing to explain or solve the present crisis, but it has been an alarming symptom. Whether or not our crisis is a crisis of capitalism, it is related to capitalism. The most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies was recently laid out by the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review. He argues that full employment policies of the golden age of social democracy caused the voting public’s measures of the proper allocation of resources to diverge widely from market measures. Meeting both measures required more resources than governments could get their hands on. They filled the gap through various tricks: inflation, deficit financing, deregulated private credit and now the public commandeering of private resources for bail-out programmes.
Every effort to fix our current economic ills runs into the problems Prof Streeck lays out. Is a bail-out regime, or an austerity regime, compatible with democracy? The last prominent leader before Mario Monti, Italy’s new prime minister, to exercise power as an appointed senator was Augusto Pinochet. Is Keynesian stimulus compatible with democracy? The scandals in the US over the Obama administration’s subsidies to green-energy giants have been exacerbated by the question of whether there are products that a government can require its citizens to buy – an issue that the administration’s health plan has brought before the Supreme Court.
The Occupy activists are now leaving the stage because our problem involves more than the greed of 1 per cent of our citizens. It involves something systemic. The present crises – of inequality, growth, debt and currencies – demand a degree of economic predictability that liberal democracy is having trouble providing. Democracies should have thought of that.
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The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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In 1968, youths who gathered at the Democratic convention were clubbed mercilessly on national television by Chicago police. Even though public opinion was shifting towards the demonstrators’ views, the public’s contempt for their protests led even the Democratic party candidate to sing the praises of the police.
.
New York was not alone in trying to clear out its Occupy movement. The City of London started legal action to remove protesters from St Paul’s. Zurich cleared its main square. Nowhere are ordinary citizens rallying in solidarity with the kids. Yet, although Occupy has failed as a movement, it may prove important as a symptom.
The Occupy protesters never quite realised whom they were protesting for. The slogan “We are the 99 per cent” showed a clear understanding of the problem of inequality, but a very fuzzy understanding of who the protesters themselves were. “Occupy” is an unsympathetic verb. We do not admire those who occupied France. This week the Washington Post interviewed a policeman who had spent decades policing various riots and demonstrations around the Capitol. He compared today’s Occupy movement to the farmers who descended on the capital to protest US agricultural policy in 1979. “Unlike what’s going on now,” he said, “with the farmers, they were all farmers”.
Nor could the protesters specify whom they were protesting against. In front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last week, I questioned what protesters there had against the euro. Nothing, they told me. Well, then, what did they have against the ECB? Nothing. It was “the banks”, they said.
And the movement was coy about stating its beliefs. An ideology is what permits a movement to germinate and endure. Without an ideology, what you have is not a movement but a lifestyle. Occupy Wall Street is an experiment in living differently on the margins of this civilisation, not a blueprint for a new one. As long as it has no ideology, tent cities are the entire message of Occupy Wall Street, and the movement will last only until the world’s mayors send it packing. This makes the campers dependent on holders of power. In Montreal, the city has rejected a petition to replace protesters’ tents with wooden structures.
Letting Occupy maintain its campsites would require treating non-verbal acts, such as tent-pitching, as constitutionally protected forms of expression. The public is hostile to that idea and the courts have been sceptical. In the 1984 case, Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, the US Supreme Court ruled that, while speech is a protected right, overnight camping is not.
The Occupy movement has done nothing to explain or solve the present crisis, but it has been an alarming symptom. Whether or not our crisis is a crisis of capitalism, it is related to capitalism. The most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies was recently laid out by the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review. He argues that full employment policies of the golden age of social democracy caused the voting public’s measures of the proper allocation of resources to diverge widely from market measures. Meeting both measures required more resources than governments could get their hands on. They filled the gap through various tricks: inflation, deficit financing, deregulated private credit and now the public commandeering of private resources for bail-out programmes.
Every effort to fix our current economic ills runs into the problems Prof Streeck lays out. Is a bail-out regime, or an austerity regime, compatible with democracy? The last prominent leader before Mario Monti, Italy’s new prime minister, to exercise power as an appointed senator was Augusto Pinochet. Is Keynesian stimulus compatible with democracy? The scandals in the US over the Obama administration’s subsidies to green-energy giants have been exacerbated by the question of whether there are products that a government can require its citizens to buy – an issue that the administration’s health plan has brought before the Supreme Court.
The Occupy activists are now leaving the stage because our problem involves more than the greed of 1 per cent of our citizens. It involves something systemic. The present crises – of inequality, growth, debt and currencies – demand a degree of economic predictability that liberal democracy is having trouble providing. Democracies should have thought of that.
.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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