On September 21st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more wealth than half of the country's population.
Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.
Ending police intimidation is our one demand.On September 21st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.
Ending corporate censorship is our one demand".
I perceive two main ways of looking at this phenomenon as part of the culture of U.S. politics.
The first critique and prescription are nicely summed up in the Sunday New York Times by Michael Kazin (whom I knew as a fellow communard and underground newspaper worker in the early seventies). He is looking for an organized left on the order of the economic reform legislation-oriented movement that brought about the policies we associate with the New Deal: limits on corporate power, social insurance, etc. He is looking for a resurgence of progressive social institutions, such as unions, to create the foundation. He doesn't prescribe how to do this, at least in this particular piece, but the mood is retrospective and nostalgic--of course: turning the clock back to a widespread passion for basic fairness and social justice? Where do I sign up for the time machine?
But there is also a perspective suggested by the Occupy Wall Street poem. It is less concrete and specific in terms of policies, but it warrants attention. It is the underlying truth that many Americans' sense of political reality is now terribly ungrounded, lacking a sense of agency, and overwhelmed with impotent frustration.
On the right, people are susceptible to the manipulations to of the Tea Party's funders and operators, who, in effect, say that black is white and are believed. Our political discourse isn't getting to values questions, at least in part because that space is being occupied by trumped-up controversies--Michelle Bachmann's many misstatements, for instance, which magnetically attract media attention, elevating her standing among those who mistrust those she counts as enemies. The left is different, because there isn't a driving big-money force (a counterpart to the right-wing zillionaire Koch brothers) pulling the strings. But when the scale is larger than local community organizing, among many, there is a reductive sense of possibility: let's work for a candidate, and if that is demoralizing, let's get arrested.
I can tick off the specific legislation I'd like to see adopted, to be sure: financial regulation, fair tax, adequate social funding, public campaign financing, corporate regulation, environmental protection, a new WPA, and so on. But (despite my great respect for Rebuild The Dream) I don't see terribly much hope that actual existing organizing efforts will bring about the adoption of such reforms.
Instead, I am worried about what may happen if we don't make a much deeper commitment to the culture of politics: teaching people how campaign money works; how advertising and other information manipulation works; how to understand their own mental processes so that they can correct for inbuilt biases and cultivate awareness, lessening susceptibility to exploiters and demagogues; how to educate themselves about issues and seek inside themselves to consider how they really think and feel about them, rather than settling for immediate reactivity. It's not that there aren't abundant information resources about all these subjects; it's that you have to decide to use them, and most people don't. How, then, can they learn?
I want to be clear about this: I'm not saying that those who disagree with my positions on this or that issue are inevitably gulled. Thoughtful people disagree all the time. What's foreground for one may be background detail for another. Take any hot-button moral issue: I am far more gripped by the thought of a women being forced to bear an unwanted child than by the thought of abortion; and I know there are people who have considered the issue deeply and arrived at exactly the opposite conclusion. Core moral values and priorities differ, and those lead to different positions.
What I mean is that the current culture of politics doesn't offer the basic citizenship education and fundamental self-exploration needed to achieve an informed, engaged, and self-aware electorate. I have quite a few ideas about how it can be done, most involving artists in eliciting, sharing, and extracting essential learning from people's own stories of civic and social meaning. I doubt there's any viable substitute for the labor-intensive work of assisting people, conversation by conversation, in learning the cognitive, emotional, and critical skills their formal educations have failed to provide. And without it, I doubt the culture of politics will become less desperate and surreal anytime soon.
My ray of hope? Life throws up opportunities to peer at the culture of politics through a thousand different lenses: the Wall Street occupation, the presidential campaign, the growing polarization of wealth Ginia Bellefante described above, and countless others every single day. In the absence of an overarching public initiative, citizenship education can be radically decentalized to every dinner table, classroom, and coffeeshop in the land. I've been deputized (by my own hand, to be sure); now I'm deputizing you into the Culture of Politics Corps. Good luck with your assignment!
I can't quite explain the grip that electric blues has on me at the moment, but somehow, this music is the soundtrack of my world. Maybe it's that the culture of politics makes me a little sad. Here's the amazing Luther Allison with the classic hymn of compassion, "It Hurts Me Too."
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