Why Occupy Wall Street
is Not the Tea Party of the Left
The United States’
Long History of Protest
Sidney Tarrow
October 10, 2011
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The most accurate
portrayal of Occupy Wall Street I’ve ever seen
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"There's a
difference between an emotional outcry and a movement,"
former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young said recently of the Occupy Wall Street
demonstrations. "This is an emotional outcry," he went on.
"The difference is organization and
articulation." Young knows something about social movements: as a
young pastor in the South, he joined the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and was jailed for participating in demonstrations in Alabama and
Florida. But his suggestion that what is happening today in lower Manhattan
lacks real momentum rings false -- the civil rights movement is not a precedent
one can use to understand Occupy Wall Street. Neither is this movement a Tea
Party of the left, as some
observers have suggested. Occupy Wall Street is a movement of a completely new type.
Both the civil rights
movement and the Tea Party were
created to serve specific constituencies -- in the first case, African
Americans suffering under the burden of Jim Crow in the South; in the second,
older, white middle-class Americans who saw themselves as victims of an
overweening federal government. "This is about the people who work hard to
bring home the bacon and want to keep it," one Tea Party group declared. In contrast, Occupy Wall Street puts
forward few policy proposals and has a shifting configuration of
supporters as it spreads across the country. (Do- no specific constituencies)
The closest its activists have come to issuing a clear statement of aims was in
the "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City," posted on
September 30th. (DO- articulation) "As one people, united," the
declaration proclaimed, "we acknowledge the reality: that the future of
the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must
protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the
individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors."
That is hardly a policy platform. But policy platforms are not the
point of this new kind of movement.
Charles Tilly, the
late Columbia sociologist, divided movements into three types, based on the policies they demand, the constituencies they claim to represent,
and the identities they are trying
to construct. Both the civil rights movement and the Tea Party combined the
first and second goals. Occupy Wall Street is what we might call a "we
are here" movement. Asking its activists what they want, as some
pundits have demanded, is beside the point. Participants are neither
disillusioned Obama supporters, nor a "mob," as House Majority Leader
Eric Cantor cynically described them. By their presence, they are saying only, "Recognize
us!"
If Occupy Wall Street
resembles any movement in recent American history, it would actually be the
new women's movement of the 1970s. When that struggle emerged in the wake
of the civil rights movement, it shocked conservatives and befuddled liberals.
The first saw the activists as a bunch of bra-burning anarchists; the second
considered them unladylike, or, well-meaning liberals gone off the reservation.
Although the leaders of the new women's movement had policies they wanted on
the agenda, their foremost demand was for recognition of, and credit
for, the gendered reality of everyday life. Likewise, when the
Occupy Wall Street activists attack Wall Street, it is not capitalism as such
they are targeting, but a system of economic relations that has lost its way and failed to serve
the public.
Periodically, thousands of Americans from
no single social class or region, and with no explicit goal, come together in
what has come to be known as a "constituent moment."
Periodically,
thousands of Americans from no single social class or region, and with no
explicit goal, come together in what the Cornell political theorist
Jason Frank has called a "constituent
moment." Likewise, the Yale constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman names three such moments in American
history. The most recent was during the Great Depression,
when hardship and outrage came together in a wave of strikes and
demonstrations, some of them far more mob-like than Occupy Wall Street. They
had no specific policy agenda, but they demanded recognition and radical change
in the relations between government, the people, and corporations.
The parallels between
the 1930s and today are striking. The economy has plunged to historic levels of
unemployment and hardship. The economic crisis again is global, forces of
obscurantism and reaction are afoot (think of the anti-immigrant legislation
recently passed in Arizona and Alabama), and policymakers are demanding savage
spending reductions. The Supreme Court, which, in the 1930s, was unaware that
the judicial doctrines of the nineteenth century were hopelessly inadequate for
the economic problems of the early twentieth, today has returned to a doctrine
of originalism, which seeks to go even further back -- now to the 18th century.
But the energy
gathering behind Occupy Wall Street may very well not bring on another New
Deal. Perhaps no "constituent moment" will result from it. During the
Depression, unemployment topped 25 percent; today it is 9.1 percent. Then, the
United States had a president, Franklin Roosevelt, who said of the plutocrats
who opposed his policies and hated him personally: "I welcome their
hatred!" Like the Wall Street protesters today, he spoke of
"government by organized money" and of the "forces of
selfishness and lust for power." The response was electric, and Roosevelt
was re-elected by a greater majority than in the previous election. The
difference this time is that the White House and the Democratic Party offer
no leadership to the inchoate anger that Occupy Wall Street reflects. In
his press conference last week, after acknowledging that he understands the
anger of the protesters, President Barack Obama was quick to assure the
financial sector of his continuing support.
"We are
here" movements often flare up rapidly and fade away just as quickly, or
disintegrate into rivulets of particular claims and interests. Others, like the
new women's movement, eventually coalesce into a few organized sectors, each
with its own set of policy demands and political identities. It is too soon to
tell which of these will be the fate of Occupy Wall Street. But one thing is
certain: we are hearing a wake-up
call to a complacent corporate sector and its Washington enablers,
signaling that there is a new force demanding change at the grassroots of
American society
Sidney G. Tarrow
Sidney Tarrow (PhD,
Berkeley, 1965) is the Emeritus Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government at
Cornell University. Tarrow has his BA from Syracuse, his MA from Columbia, and
his PhD from Berkeley.
