It really doesn't matter whether people approve of OWS
Last edited Wed Feb 1, 2012, 08:24 PM - Edit history (5)
OWS isn't running for office. OWS isn't applying for a job. And nobody looks to OWS to know what to think.
It is a disorganized protest movement. The real message of OWS is the existence of OWS—a bunch of people who are not Republicans are upset enough to march around and camp out in inclement weather and genrally raise a ruckus.
In practical cultural/political terms that's the message — the existence of discontent. (The establishment seeks to deny the exitence of discontent so OWS is quite inconvenient.)
Mass psychology is not a huge individual psychology where an entity with coherant attitudes reasons through things. Most of the nation did not chose between Vietnam protesters and the Vietnam war. The protesters raised awareness of Vietnam and the longer you looked at the Vietnam war the worse it got. Vietnam-era protests didn't make protestors popular, they made the Vietnam war unpopular.
The public does not have organized mass-thoughts like, "I used to support the war in Vietnam then a lot of college students showed me I was wrong."
People have basic feelings like, "Controversy increases my anxiety. Protestors make a fuss. I do not like protestors. The vietnam war is controversial. I do not like hearing about the Vietnam war. I wish it went away."
And the most die-hard haters of Vietnam-era protestors found themselves hating continuously without conciously realizing that their attitude was crumbling -- at first the protestors were bad because they supported communist take-over of the world. Later they were bad because they were rubbing America's nose in the fact we were losing this pointless war that we entered with the best of intentions. And if you hated protestors infinity+1 there's only one way to get them off TV... end the war. By the end the RWers wanted out of Vietnam because it was making the hippies look good!
Modern Americans recoil from civil strife. We will ignore it whenever possible, and when we can no longer ignore it we follow a dual course of action.
1) Face-saving: Everyone makes it very plain that eveything they ever thought remains right and always will remain right and that all the troublemakers are alien. (We saw this with the Iraq war. Those originally against the war were not vindicated personally. Some became even more hated for being right! And the worst pro-war stooges retain the same high journalistic positions as before. But the war itself became immensely unpopular.)
2) Capitulation/Co-option: After jailing the protestors and Harrumphing a bunch some concessions are made. Not to the protestors (hippies!) but to mollify the underlying mass-attitudes that protest movements imply by their existence.
(Some say that FDR saved capitalism by co-opting socialism sufficiently to prevent radicalization. If so, bring it on. From today's perspective I'd be happy to be co-opted FDR style.)
In the short and fixed time-frames of electoral politics, protest movements are problematic. As cutural change agents, however, they tend to work.
Here are the potential attitudes ranked by how useful they are:
-Most useful- I love those OWS people.
-Less Useful- I hate those OWS people.
-Useless- What is OWS?
This piece is not suggesting or defending any specific unlikable OWS activity, real or hypothetical. The point is that at the end of the day it is irrelevant what people think of OWS provided they think less well of the establishment. Because that is the real point.
= new reply since forum marked as read
no one even knows what it wants. You wish!
edit to add: and and...they burned a flag.
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