OWS RIP

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Walter Russell Mead

5/16/12

 

Remember when Occupy Wall Street was sweeping the nation? The media branded it the left’s answer to the Tea Party, the start of a grand national mobilization; depending on who you ask, half of America once supported the OWS protestors, double the amount who back the Tea Party. The Huffington Post even launched a separate page devoted entirely to coverage of OWS.

 

How the mighty have fallen. The New York Times may still be trying to perform on the decomposing OWS corpse, attributing continuing policy influence sans evidence of any kind to a movement that has all but completely disappeared, but compared to the Tea Party, except for the media hype, OWS was a political flop. (Via Meadia is not a card carrying tea-partier, by the way; any tea sipped in the stately Mead manor is poured into delicate China cups by our well trained housekeeping staff, and tasted with pinkies appropriately extended in the proper, traditional way.)

 

(Snip)

 

A generation of intellectuals and students raised on Howard Zinn expected great things from this combination. If times don’t improve — and especially if the GOP wins in November and a Romney administration governs from the right so that right-wing rather than left-wing policies get the blame for economic failure — we may yet see a serious movement of left-populism contending for national power. But on the whole, it is harder than it looks to push the United States to the economic left.

 

(Snip)

 

 

Not sure that Walter is correct that OWS is going away. But then I have always seen it as a child of the New Left, they haven't gone away (mores the pity), so the Occupy movement won't either. As for their influence, ask me after the 2016 election.

 

[clearvision]

"OWS", Occupy Whatever Syndrome, will pop back up from time to time I'm sure.

[Valin]

WRM: OWS, RIP

Ed Driscoll

5/16/12

 

Veteran public speaker Cavett Robert was fond of telling newcomers, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.”

 

The Tea Party was born spontaneously in early 2009 but, with the exception of CNBC’s Rick Santelli, received little public support from the MSM (almost entirely the opposite, and that’s understating the case, as we all know). Unfortunately, Occupy Wall Street had far more ink than it knew what to do with in its early days last fall, thanks to an overwhelming superfluity of promoters in the legacy media who, along with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrat politicians, were desperate to have a Tea Party-style movement of their own. Well, besides, as Glenn Reynolds noted last year, “the Coffee Party, the Brownbaggers, The Other 95%, A New Way Forward, the One Nation Movement— am I leaving any out? I can’t remember.”

 

 

(Snip)

 

But again, the mindset of OWS is precisely that of the college professors who have taught them (some of whom would join their former students last fall in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere); it’s the Tea Party that dared go against the grain of the establishment and what they were told in early 2009 about the Brave New World our young Colossus-like president was singlehandedly about to usher in. Perhaps because so many “liberals” consider themselves free of ideology (this topic is thoroughly explored in Jonah’s Tyranny of Cliches book), so few realize that they are now, as it was invariably capitalized in the ’60s, The Establishment, having long ago occupied (heh) the high ground of Hollywood, academia, the news media, politics (at least in many states), and at least until Obama brought the pitchforks (to borrow from his own Alinsky-ite vernacular), a wide swatch of Wall Street itself.

 

 

 

(Snip)