Occupy Wall Street

The bloom is fading

Nov 7th 2011, 22:08 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

The Economist

LAST week, Steve Kornacki of Salon tried to reconcile two seemingly contradictory polls tracking public support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A Quinnipiac University poll shows a public swiftly souring on OWS: "By a 39 - 30 percent margin, American voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Occupy Wall Street movement, with 30 percent who don't know enough about it for an opinion." OWS remains for now less unliked than the tea-party movement, though one should keep in mind that it took the tea partiers a good while to achieve this sort of unpopularity.

Meanwhile, according to a CNN poll, "Thirty-six percent say they agree with the overall positions of Occupy Wall Street, while 19% say they disagree." As Mr Kornacki rightly suggests, one may well agree with the general stance of OWS—that Wall Street is rife with corruption, that inequality and the influence of the wealthy need to be reined in—while disapproving of tent cities reeking of trash and the supercilious entitlement of liberal arts majors aggrieved by the realisation that student loans aren't gifts. Mr Kornacki comments:

The risk for OWS is that clashes with authorities and more reports of disturbing activities at protest sites will continue to turn swing voters against the protests and that this will distract from the broader message behind the movement and overwhelm the very real progress that OWS has achieved in altering the political debate. It’s also possible, of course, that voters will be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, continuing to express support for the OWS message even while voicing alarm at the protests themselves.

I think Mr Kornacki here is letting hope get the better of him. Walking and chewing gum seems simple, but it's never wise to overestimate the American voter's capacity for nuance. The increasingly confrontational tactics of various OWS offshoots risks not only "distracting" voters from the message behind the movement, but risks tainting the message itself and generating a backlash. Peaceful OWS protestors can disavow the violence and vandalism in Oakland all they like, but I'm afraid most Americans have so little patience for public disorder that their willingness to distinguish between the peaceful heart of OWS and its combative fringes will wear very thin very quickly. That's why I'd bet my lunch money that public support for OWS erodes over the next few weeks.

There's something particularly troubling about the Daily Caller footage below from this weekend's protests in Washington, DC, organised by the local Occupy branch, of an American for Prosperity (AFP) event at the Washington Convention Centre. AFP is a conservative advocacy outfit that has helped to organise and finance the tea-party movement. David Koch is chairman of AFP's board, as well as a major donor, which I imagine explains why Occupy DC chose to target the organisation's "Defending the American Dream Summit".

I think this is the way the AFP event appears from the prevailing perspective of the OWS left: The hated Koch brothers are paragons of the nefarious 1%. The many think tanks and advocacy organisations they support are front groups designed primarily to advance corporate interests behind a thin veil of libertarian and conservative ideology. The citizen-supporters of these groups, such as those attending the "Tribute to Ronald Reagan" dinner at the AFP summit, are at best unwitting tools of the oligarchs. At worst, they are knowing collaborators.

And here's the way it looks to the rest of us: A bunch of committed, mostly well-to-do conservatives went to a totally anodyne event organised by a conservative advocacy group in celebration of a popular conservative president, and they got harassed in a pretty frightening way by OWS-affiliated ideologues who seem to think they have the right to intimidate people whose politics they happen to disagree with.

Say what you will about the tea-party movement, but I don't recall tea-party types storming the doors at progressive events and knocking down old ladies. I think it's safe to say that very few Americans approve of this sort of behaviour. Americans disagree sharply about a whole array of issues, but we expect to work out our disagreements in a civilised fashion, with a minimum of social disturbance. To assemble peaceably is a basic American right and a venerable tradition. To get together and aggressively antagonise other people peaceably assembled because you've decided they're the enemy is not.

As long as the Occupy movement remains without acknowledged leaders who can credibly distance it from the worst behaviour of its least reasonable affiliates, the movement will increasingly come to be defined by its most egregious episodes. And if the sort of bad behaviour we've seen in Oakland and Washington doesn't soon come to an end, OWS could easily end up more albatross than asset to the left.

Update: This CBS News segment (via Justin Elliot at Salon) on divisions within Occupy Oakland over the truculent tactics of "black bloc" protestors nicely illustrates the Occupy movement's general public relations problem. The nice fellow at the end there is so expansively tolerant and non-judgmental he's unwilling to condemn the agitators who are destroying the chances that his social movement will have any lasting effect. You see the problem? Also, who watches CBS News? Older people. Older people who don't cotton to this sort of shenanigans and vote in droves.