Occupy… my mind
[originally published on my personal blog November 24, 2011]
For the last couple months I’ve been watching the Occupy movement — first with detached bemusement, then interest, then gradual respect, then support, and now what feels like a sense of solidarity. I’ve had a number of conversations with friends and strangers about the types of issues that have spawned the Occupy protests, juxtaposed in my head with a series of other thoughts seeking a coherent narrative. Concern about America’s direction. A conviction that, everything else aside, the system is fucked. Something is rotten…
The UC Davis pepper spraying is powerfully symbolic. And the subsequent silent protest as the chancellor walks to her car is, if anything, even more evocative — even chilling.
There’s something happening here. Something big. I don’t think anyone quite understands the full scope of what is at stake — not just in America, but around the world — as citizens express their discontent. But it feels foundational.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I devoted an entire year over the course of writing my senior thesis at Amherst to interrogating the fascinating question of American political apathy in the face of a system that increasingly seemed incapable of delivering on the implicit promise justifying its existence: the pursuit of the American Dream. Or, as Outkast rapper Andre 3000 aptly put it in his chart-topper “Hey Ya”: “Why are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here?”
As I tried to sort through my thoughts before beginning this blog, I went back and re-read my 2004 thesis. My thesis focused on the concept of alienation as a lens through which to understand contemporary American society. I took as a premise the basic facts and trends of American society as I saw them at the time in economic, social, and political terms (the analysis focused on the problems affecting us: lord knows there are plenty of pockets of good, too). To briefly re-state (and if anything, the situation has only deteriorated since then):
1. Economically: rising income inequality, stagnant real income among the middle class, increasingly unsustainable levels of personal (and public) debt, an increasing share of GDP concentrated in a financial sector with questionable tangible benefit for society at large, etc.
2. Socially: increasingly pervasive sense of lack of connection among Americans, a dearth of meaningful/rewarding human relationships, a sense that social norms are somehow eroding or are under attack, a sense that despite the constant struggle Americans are somehow barely staying afloat.
3. Politically: power is seen as increasingly concentrated in the hands of a plutocratic elite, institutions are seen as unresponsive or disconnected from the needs of average citizens, politicians are seen as unable or unwilling to effectively address fundamental issues, people increasingly perceive themselves as ineffectual/unable to participate meaningfully in democratic politics.
So I locked myself in the basement of the Robert Frost Memorial Library at Amherst through the long winter of 2003–2004 and searched for answers in the tomes of de Tocqueville, Emerson, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Heidegger, Rousseau, and others. I wanted moral/historical/philosophical context. Then I read through the history, literature, and social commentary of 20th century America, before finally reaching the present. And while I took the academic’s prerogative and shirked any real responsibility by confining my inquiry to the descriptive rather than the normative (as always, that’s someone else’s job), I summarized the intent of my thesis as follows:
To illustrate my aims, recall Joachim Israel’s definition of alienation: “the discrepancy between social goals and a lack of the means to reach them.” Implicit in this definition are two normative implications for action. First, America must reevaluate its social goals. We must ask ourselves: should wealth be the highest value? Second, we must work to provide adequate tools for the attainment of what we as a society decide are the fundamental rights of each citizen. If indeed “all men are created equal” and we are in fact dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we must work to equip all citizens with the necessary means to engage meaningfully in that pursuit.
I tried to explain why no serious political movement had sprung up to challenge the dominant narrative, and concluded that people still, at some level, bought into the professed ends of the system even as they increasingly rejected its means. I summarized the apparent paradox:
To the extent that Americans perceive the government as unresponsive to their needs — and substantial evidence suggests this is the case — political life, too, loses significance. The only realm left available to Americans, then, is economic life. Unsurprisingly, the power elite extol the virtues of consumption as a means to identity, for, without social and political identity, purchases become the only realm of life where Americans can exert some measure of control. The success of the dominant institutions in instilling this mindset attests to Americans willingness to accept its premises. Americans will continue to accept the general dearth of civic life so long as commercial life provides a satisfactory escape from an otherwise oppressive social system.
Or, as William Connolly wrote in explaining the curious lack of political mobilization:
“Complaints about the strains created by instrumental work, production for private profit, labor mobility, income stratification, accentuation of private over collective consumption, state subsidies for economic growth, the rapid obsolescence of old skills and old workers, environmental destruction, the dangerous dependence on crucial resources located in foreign countries, and the limits to intellectual development posed by technical education — these complaints will be muted and self-mocking in tone. For it would be irrational to favor the end and oppose the means. Better to be ironic about the occasional inconsistency between one’s appreciation of the good life pursued and lack of appreciation for the pursuit itself.”
But implicit in this rendering is a suggestion of how discontent may manifest itself into something larger. Americans fealty to the system depends on the system’s ability to “deliver the goods.” It depends on belief in an upwardly mobile system — it depends on belief in the American Dream. A steelworker interviewed in Studs Terkel’s classic Working makes the point powerfully: “If you can’t improve yourself, you improve your posterity. Otherwise life isn’t worth nothing.”
Which brings us back to Connolly. He develops an account to explain how the expression of discontent may emerge.
He argues that the dominant institutions of society lose their “normative significance” if any or all of three preconditions are met: (1) if the social ends pursued, once attained by a large minority, seem empty or somehow unsatisfying to those privileged enough to achieve them; (2) if members of the subjugated classes begin to believe that their sacrifice will be unending and that they and their progeny will never benefit from their toil; and (3) if attainment of the ends destroys valued aspects of the social fabric that were presumed to remain stable in the pursuit of these ends. Connolly argues that as people begin to fall into one or more of these categories, their allegiance to society’s goals diminishes proportionately with their faith in the validity of their pursuit. Discontent festers in the gap between the aspirations of a good life and the experienced reality.
So what the fuck am I actually talking about here? I’m talking about a widespread recognition that the Connolly moment has come. Put more simply, people are finally concluding: the system is fucked. I could go into the reasons why I think that it is, but at this point if you’re not intuitively persuaded you may be among the 8% who think Congress is actually doing a good job.
But how to translate that sense of discontent into effective political action? It is the central challenge of collective action: how to motivate a disaffected populace to band together and advocate for constructive reform? As I framed the challenge in 2004:
The discontent of the populace seems somehow unreal or illegitimate, because it does not communicate itself as a tangible set of grievances. Its anger is inchoate, and, in a society that relies on a concrete representation of an enemy as a motivating factor, the absence of such clarity robs the movement of political efficacy before its goals even reach the cultural mainstream.
Which brings us full circle back to the Occupy movement, which has suffered from that same “inchoate” critique (including, I might add, from me in my initial reactions to the movement). But before I get there, a word on the Tea Party. A part of me was excited to see the emergence of the Tea Party, for the same reason that a part of me was excited to note the rise of the Evangelical Right as I was writing my thesis. For the first time, the Tea Party marked a broad-based movement that linked Americans’ profound anxiety over perceived social, political, and economic decline, and did so by expressing faith in the potential of political action (through that most fundamental expression of democratic discontent: the ballot box) to change the situation. It was a full-throated cry of “Enough!”
I’m going to argue that a few events precipitated the emergence of this (and subsequently, the Occupy) movement. It all occurs against the backdrop I have previously described — a powder keg waiting for a spark.
The first spark was TARP. TARP was seen as the epitome of everything wrong with the direction society had gone: a bargain among elites that rewarded the wrongdoers, and did so on the backs of the taxpayers. In so doing, TARP symbolized the social (moral), economic, and political collapse of America (I’m being deliberately dramatic, but I will defend the argument). From a social/moral perspective, the financial collapse that necessitated the bailout illustrated the tremendous gulf between average Americans and the ruling elites. What had been legitimated as the just reward of a meritocratic system (financial profit and wealth accruing to a small minority) was exposed as a deliberate fraud, and exacerbated by forcing the victimized to pick up the tab a second time (in the collapse and then the bailout). Economically, the collapse exposed the fragile foundations of the modern economy: the financial industry built castles made of sand. And the bailout only reinforced our reliance on an economic system that seemed not only not beneficial to our interests but actually in conflict with them. Politically, the lack of transparency around TARP only served to reinforce the popular perception of politics as plutocracy, a narrative reinforced by the golden parachutes given to those responsible for the crisis.
TARP thus became a lightning rod for what until then had been an inchoate discontent: diffused anger found a target.
The second event — a spark of a different sort — was the election of Barack Obama. Obama meant different things to different people, simultaneously evoking profound hope among liberals that he could lead America out of the doldrums and eliciting profound fear among conservatives that he would continue to represent “elite rule” increasingly disconnected from their interests.
TARP sparked a broad-based revolt. Obama’s election temporarily defused the tension among liberals, but only exacerbated it among conservatives: and the Tea Party was born. But though I admire the activism and genuine sense of concern that animates the Tea Party, I think the Tea Party missed the diagnosis (and hence the prescription). A burgeoning public debt is only one part of the problem, and it’s a part grounded in a much deeper social-political-economic context. Cutting government spending (especially without addressing the need for more revenue) would not solve America’s problem, much less give any guidance on how to revitalize our economy in the long-term or address the social/political conditions that allowed the crisis to occur in the first place.
Which brings us to the third event, in the form of a literal spark: the dramatic self-immolation of a Tunisian man that spawned the Arab Spring (or a term I prefer, the Arab Awakening). Though the humble fruit vendor that gave symbolic voice to a repressed region had concrete grievances related to social, economic, and political issues, at its heart his act was a demand for dignity. It symbolized a rejection of the humiliation of a repressive state, of the petty indignities that one day prompted him to say, in the most profound possible terms: Enough.
His act galvanized a quiescent Arab Street into action. Not political action, for there were no institutions for organized political expression. Human action, in the form of human protest. Tellingly, the demands of the Arab Awakening go beyond cosmetic reforms: they are not interested, by and large, in improving the system. They want to change the system. They want, as we all do, to live in a system that respects their human dignity and allows potential for them to pursue a meaningful life.
Let me digress for a moment to a chilling warning from de Tocqueville, writing over 200 years ago:
“The prospect really does frighten me that they [democratic peoples] may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right. I fear that the mind may keep folding itself up in a narrower compass forever without producing new ideas, that men will wear themselves out in trivial, lonely, futile activity, and that for all its constant agitation humanity will make no advance.”
If that isn’t a damning indictment on how we’ve spent the last couple decades (are you listening, Baby Boomers?), I don’t know what is. But I would argue that now, finally, potentially… we are seeing that “sudden energetic effort.” TARP provided the catalyst. Obama’s election provided a partial accelerant and a partial suppressant… and the Arab Awakening removed the suppressant and added fuel to the fire. And the Occupy movement emerged.
The Occupy movement is fascinating, because despite the rhetoric of the conservative media it truly is a non-partisan phenomenon. The messaging of “we are the 99%” is more than a slogan: it’s an aspirational rejection of the society we have become and an invitation to return to our core principles. The same message that the Tea Party is articulating but, in my mind, better attuned both to the nature of the problem and hence the appropriate solution.
And like the protestors across the Arab World, it does not appear likely to go away anytime soon. Like the dictators and autocrats of the Arab World, the American ruling elite — politicians and corporate leaders alike — has been slow to realize the change underfoot. And like the Arab leaders, they have thus far proven totally inadequate to the task of channeling popular rage into a constructive agenda. Both parties continue to jockey for partisan advantage — the Republicans rejecting Occupy as a liberal/hippy fringe and the Democrats trying to co-opt it to support their own political agenda. Both miss the point. This is not about the deficit, taxes, war, jobs, politics, the economy. It’s about all of those things and something more: an unshakeable feeling that America has, somehow, gone wrong.
Which returns me to where I started, with the powerful video of the UC Davis police officer callously — casually, almost indifferently — pepper-spraying peacefully protesting students. The imagery is stark: students as vermin to be eradicated. The visual is fundamentally dehumanizing. It is humiliating. It is a compelling symbol of the chasm separating rulers from ruled in America, a gap between citizenry and authority that simultaneously reinforces the legitimate claims of the people while exposing the essential brutality of the power structure. It echoes — albeit on a vastly different scale — the repression we see unfolding in the Arab world. It is a divide underscored in the outraged cries of the Davis students watching impotently — humiliatingly — as their classmates are maced. It is a simple question, one that goes far beyond the narrow world of the UC Davis Campus Police and strikes at the very heart of the American system today: “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?”
And the students accompanying cry carries a powerful undercurrent of moral judgment, one that I believe has the potential to link the Tea Party anxiety to the broader Occupy movement. “Shame on you!” Such a simple statement, so absolutely obvious and fundamental. It is the same message that we wish our leaders would have said to the Wall Street titans responsible for the financial collapse. Let us not obfuscate about what was legal, or what was permitted (or enabled) under the system of lax or nonexistent regulations. Let’s be clear to Robert Rubin, to Lloyd Blankfein, to Dick Fuld (is it only coincidence that the most catastrophic hubris seems always confined to men?), now Jon Corzine, and let’s say: shame on you.
But we need to go farther. For part of the movement is a social movement: it is about restoring morality and decency into economic activity. It is a movement that is already underway in a number of sectors, perhaps nowhere more prominently than in the “sustainable foods” movement now personified in Michelle Obama. But it’s the same thread that gave rise to corporate social responsibility, the “green” industry, and the burgeoning mini-industry of social entrepreneurship. And the movement of course asks that we restructure and re-imagine the very basis of our economy… and in so doing challenges the political system that has proven thus far unable to address the systemic failures. This is not about placing two UC Davis police officers on administrative leave, any more than we could hope to address Abu Gharaib by punishing Lynndie England.
The headline of November 23rd’s USA TODAY summarized the state of society in two emphatic words, in the context of the supercommittee’s inability to broker a compromise that would address America’s dire fiscal situation: SUPER FAIL.
No shit. Well, if we can’t trust those in power to do something about it… where does that leave us? And here again Connolly is helpful. He discusses three different approaches to collective action which he terms the “liberal,” “utopian,” and “structural” moments. I won’t go into the details here, but will summarize to say that I believe we have now arrived at the moment with the most promise: the structural moment. Again from my thesis, channeling Connolly:
The structural moment recognizes the complexities and intricacies of the institutional structure, while maintaining a commitment and belief in the possibility of transforming the institutions that preserve the oppressive system. In contrast to the liberal moment, which collapsed upon facing the difficulty of imposing change from outside the system, and the utopian moment, which sought to reformulate and restructure the institutions from the platform of social consciousness, the structural moment uses public policy to institute change from the top down. It begins by imagining a shift in the ideology of the power elite to reflect the shifting priorities of the populace. Supposing that it generates the political support to push through initiatives, it imagines a dramatic restructuring of the institutions dominating society. Marx explains the process:
“Every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest.”
Ah, there’s the rub. And that returns us to the present moment. I suppose I should note here that Connolly doesn’t hold out much hope for the structural moment, though he offers it a better chance of achieving change than the liberal or utopian moments. I actually see us in a unique moment where the three moments are collapsed into one — Americans are (1) recognizing that the American Dream is increasingly slipping out of reach (2) recognizing the problem in the source of power and the institutions perpetuating the status quo and (3) are insisting that the entrenched elites join the popular movement in re-imagining society.
Of course… there’s a long way to go. We need look no further than the front page of USA Today for a stark reminder of the gulf between governors and governed.
One thought to throw out before I move from the societal to the individual: for awhile I’ve lamented the absence of great Statesmen in America. The kind of leaders and thinkers capable of rallying the population around the next challenge and articulating a vision for its resolution. The Founders. Lincoln. Roosevelt… both of them. The Kennedys — JFK, RFK, and Teddy. Moral leaders: MLK, Gandhi, Mandela. Obama held some of that promise, but I fear he arrived at the wrong moment: the forces arrayed against him were simply too vast and too determined to frustrate his agenda. But what’s cool about both the Tea Party and the Occupy movements, at least at face value: they are leaderless. But maybe that’s a subject for another blog.
So: a movement is afoot. Unclear where it will lead, who will ultimately follow, and whether it will succeed in getting the cloistered political class to pull their collective heads out of their collective asses (you’ll note that despite my professional home in the Executive I am not counting myself among the power elite). But in addition to rekindling my deep intellectual interest in a subject that has occupied my thoughts for quite some time, the confluence of all these factors has forced me to re-examine my own position in the world. We live in consequential times. The stakes are high. And while I don’t wish to deny a lot of good in this world, let’s not lie to ourselves: shit is fucked. Which returns us to the age-old question: how does one change the world?
Regular readers of my musings will know my thoughts on public service and proportionate responsibility. The basic premise goes something like this: given that so much is fucked in the world, everyone has an obligation to devote themselves to the task of improving the world. That obligation is proportionate/commensurate to the capacity of each individual: intellectual, financial, etc. So where do we as a society want to direct our best and brightest?
Obviously, we need everyone engaged everywhere. And people should follow their passions. But let’s take an immediate contemporary example: Elizabeth Warren. She’s been a steadfast voice of reason since before the financial crisis, a crisis that only served to underscore the accuracy of her forecast. She’s also — at least so it appears — deeply ethical. How to best take advantage of this woman’s considerable talents? She’s decided to run for the Senate out of Massachusetts… the seat once held by Ted Kennedy himself. But what can one Senator do amid the gridlock and intransigence that characterizes Congress today? Or, put differently:
Not exactly inspiring stuff. So let’s say we have a common agenda. Let’s take as a starting point what I think is the wildly uncontroversial platform espoused by Friedman and Mandelbaum in That Used to Be Us, with a focus on re-investing in American education and infrastructure, adjusting our immigration policy to make sure we’re attracting the best talent, revamping our energy policy to promote sustainable energy and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and reorienting our economic vision toward the realities of the 21st century through an improved business environment and a focus on innovation. I believe that if we as a country committed to those goals and tackled them with the creative ingenuity that we continue to possess in unparalleled abundance… we would ensure American growth, prosperity, and power for the decades to come. [Which would allow us to engage more effectively in the international community, and to project our ideals and vision as a force for good in the world — the focus of my professional life].
So for the sake of argument, say that’s the vision I want to implement. How do I go about it? Where can I as an individual have the greatest impact in making that vision a reality? Obviously I can’t do it alone: do I devote my energy to organizing? To developing and supporting a grass roots movement like Occupy? To fine-tuning the appropriate policy prescriptions so that we’re ready to implement when Congress pulls its collective thumb from its collective ass? What about to academia, to educate the next generation to do better than we’ve done? To the government, either as elected official or civil servant… or political appointee? Where, exactly?
All right, I’m losing steam. We’ve made the transfer in Salt Lake and are beginning the descent into Medford: home for the Thanksgiving holiday. This is my favorite part about flying: the uninterrupted space to think, to follow thoughts through to their conclusions. So let’s leave it there for now. I welcome comments, critiques, suggestions, and offers to change the world.
