Another Reason to Organize, Occupadores!

Over at DKos Mark Sumner is rounding up the pundits and has this to say about Sam Tanenhaus's op-ed about Tea Party weakness:

What's making for weak Tea? In this case, the formula seems to contain plenty of uprising, but few core beliefs. The only demand placed on Tea Party candidates is that they be rabidly mad at Democrats, for any number of mostly make-believe reasons. That may be enough to win an election cycle, but as it turns out, it's not enough to sustain a movement. This party's over.  (emphasis added).

Seriously?

Look . . . I'm a Sumner fan and I don't like the Tea Party . . . but how is this also not an indictment of the Occupy movement as well?  Don't get me wrong, I think that the Tea Party is as doomed as a political movement as Sumner thinks it is but . . .  well, doesn't the same thing apply to Occupy?

This is the reason I and so many other people have been saying that Occupy needs to rally around/behind at least one or two political causes:  because without having something to fight for, any movement eventually just becomes noise.

All Thane’s Day and the Occupy Movement

Some time ago I wrote a post about the Occupy movement’s insistence on maintaining a non-hierarchical, horizontal organization even if keeping that kind of organization might not always be in its best interest.  I pointed out that for thousands of years humans naturally have been organizing ourselves into hierarchies for good reason:  a hierarchical structure brings with it a number of distinct advantages that consensus driven organizations just do not possess.

This afternoon, just to have something to look at while I ate my lunch, I randomly opened Jared Diamond’s fantastic book Guns, Germs and Steel and came across something Diamond wrote about social organization that seems to travel along the same line as my earlier critique.  I’m going to get to Diamond in a moment, but first I’d like to tell you about All Thane’s Day.

Everybody in America Thinks They’re Middle Class

Over at Washington Monthly, Steve Benen expresses confusion about Mitt Romney’s claim yesterday morning on MSNBC that “Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.”  Benen asks

I’m just not sure what Romney means when he defines “middle class.” As he sees it, even if someone falls into poverty, he or she is still middle class? In what universe does that make sense?

Actually, I think I understand perfectly what Romney is saying here, and it is the reason many Americans are still resistant to the straightforward complaints being made by the Occupy movement:  in America everybody considers themselves to be “the middle class.”

The truth is, Americans don’t really think about class in a truly economic way, but in a social status, lifestyle kind of way.  This is why, even though the median household income in the US is only around $50,000, professionals making several hundreds of thousands of dollars or more each year still consider themselves middle class – they’re not rich like the people they see on the TeeVee, who can charter private jets and take expensive vacations.

It is also the reason why the people who are increasingly falling behind economically probably enjoy hearing that – regardless of their actual economic standing – Romney still recognizes that they are “middle class at heart.”  For these people, if they used to have a house and a nice paying job but were then laid off and lost the home in foreclosure . . . well, they still don’t consider themselves really poor.  Not at heart.  ‘Cause then they’d be losers.

Like I said, it is one of the reasons I think a lot of people hate to recognize the growing wealth disparity that exists in this county – because if they did then they would also have to recognize that they’re on the losing end of that growing gap.

Scalia and Me

I have had three (kind of) run-ins with Justice Antonin Scalia, none of which he knows about or would remember.

The third of these was decades ago, when I was on the Beltway traveling to see friends.  A large BMW passed me and I noticed that the license plate read “SCALIA.”  That’s gotta be Tony, I thought and I sped up to catch it.  Whoever was driving the thing must’ve seen me coming, because suddenly the Beemer sped up to about 90.  And now it was a race, which only made me even more determined to catch him.  I gunned my car and gave chase.  We kept playing follow-me/catch-up until eventually the Beemer got caught in traffic and I could pull alongside it to peer within.

The driver shot me a look and in my recollection he seemed a bit scared.  Which is how I know it wasn’t Antonin Scalia – even federal district court judges carry emergency “panic buttons” (I would learn that later; I didn’t know that when I was still young enough to start chasing Beemers that might be carrying Supreme Court justices) with which to summon federal marshals, but this guy was panicked by a kid in an old Chevy convertible chasing after him.

Still . . . the driver actually looked at lot like Tony, just a younger version.  He turned and stared at me and I thought it must be his son, but I don’t even know if Scalia has a son.  Maybe the streets of DC are just filled with a lot of short, heavy-set Italians named Scalia.

The 99%: We’re Not Even Livestock

So Rush Limbaugh is pulling another stupid human trick, this time assaulting the very idea that schools might want to feed poor children.  What I find revealing is his stated rationale for challenging the notion that it might be a good idea to give poor children food:  “If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer?”  It’s as though he were describing baby black bears in Yosemite National Park who might not learn to forage properly if tourists keep giving away their pic-a-nic baskets.

The thing is . . . I have become more and more convinced that this attitude isn’t too far off from how the political and economic elite really do see the rest of us.  I used to think they view the millions of Americans who are the 99% as akin to crops or livestock, something to be harvested or culled for money when the need arose.  But I no longer believe that analogy holds.  After all, ranchers actually do have to spend money and tend to their cattle, farmers actually do have to water and care for their crops.  But the 1% and the public servants who toil on their behalf no longer bother to ensure we have minimal care.

Instead, I think it is more accurate to say that the 1% now conceive of the hundreds of millions of Americans who together make up the largest economy in the world as a kind of natural wildlife that should be left free to forage on its own, but which they are at perfect liberty to trap, skin, slaughter and eat as they please, their exploitation restrained only by the dimmest of understandings that enough of us must be allowed to survive so that our next generation can be trapped, skinned, slaughtered and eaten in turn.

And, indeed, it’s fairly easy to understand why they’d see us that way.

Better Get Organized: Lessons From Tahrir Square

Over at Digby’s David Atkins has another great piece up titled Lessons from Egypt:  Occupy the Democratic Party.  Essentially, Atkins (who, not coincidentally, is involved with the Democratic Party in California) points out that despite the fact the Egyptian revolution was largely set off by the liberal parties and youth activists who occupied Tahrir Square, the big winners in the recent Egyptian elections were Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis.  The reason for this, Atkins explains, is simple:  the Islamists were better organized.

There is a lesson here.  No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries and no matter how successful the revolution, at the end of the day organizational power will step in to win the day.  It always does.  That organizational power can be a force for good or for ill.  But especially in democratic societies, the ability to leverage organized support for specific ends will always trump anarchic mass sentiment.  (emphasis added)

Here, Atkins is touching on something that has long concerned me about the Occupy movement:  the insistence that a lack of formal organization is one of its fundamental tenets. 

Over the summer I read Hacker & Pierson’s Winner-Take-All-Politics, which chronicles the subversion of the US political system over the last 30 years until it now functions almost exclusively for the 1%; if there is one lesson I took away from that book it is that in modern politics nothing is more important to achieving one’s goals than is effective organization.  The 1% are highly organized and they know precisely where to apply the sharpest pressure to our body politic to get what they want; for the Occupy movement to imagine that a loose agglomeration of ordinary citizens – completely and willfully disorganized – can ever hope to match the political effectiveness of the 1% is simply naive. 

If they truly want to effect change, if they truly want to accomplish something concrete that might materially improve the lives of the 99% on whose behalf they march, then the Occupy movement eventually is going to have to organize itself in some way.  And, in order to be politically effective, they are going to have to organize themselves either within the Democratic Party or – and this would be much, much better – outside the Democratic Party but associated with it and pulling it strongly back to the Left.

I pay a lot of attention to the Occupadores and it causes me no small amount of heartburn when I hear some of them say things like “the entire system is corrupt,” and then suggest that they would rather not even vote than sully themselves by taking part in the corrupt political process that now exists.  I remember heaving a sigh of relief only about a month ago when I read that -- after much discussion in Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly -- OWS had voted not to make abstaining from next year's election its official political position.

But don’t get me wrong . . . I understand their frustration, really I do; like everybody else who voted for him, I did hope that once he was ensconced in the White House Barack Obama would at least try to do something other than “business as usual.” 

Nevertheless, we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.  I lived in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, and had Ralph Nader not insisted on running as the “Purity Party” nominee (or whatever the hell it was he called his ticket) we would have been spared 8 years of Dubya.  Hell!  We might even have been spared 9/11.  Don’t forget that it was the outgoing Clinton National Security team that warned the new administration to focus on Osama bin Laden; had Gore won the election that team might have remained in place and might even have prevented the greatest American tragedy since December 7, 1941.

Just imagine what the 21^st century would look like without 9/11.  No wars in Afghanistan, or in Iraq.  Our civil liberties still more or less intact.  An American soul not permanently stained by half its citizenry arguing that torture is okay “when we do it.”  Thousands of lives, immeasurable treasure not thrown away.  All of that possibly avoided but for a vanity campaign pandering to the self-righteous and proclaiming that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between Nobel Prize winning environmentalist Al Gore and . . . George W. Bush.

Yeah.

Steve M. had a great line yesterday in a post asking Does Obama Have His Nader Now?:  “if you respond to the awfulness of Democrats by ignoring the unspeakableness of Republicans, you’re going to repeat 2000.”  And if the people calling for a new American politics are determined to sit the game out until the rules get changed to their liking, we’re going to end up repeating the last thirty years.

We can do better.

Take the Luntz Story With a Grain of Salt

There was a lot of chatter yesterday regarding this story about the Republican Governors Association meeting in Florida this week.  Most of the chatter revolved around veteran GOP propaganda flack Frank Luntz offering the Republican governors advice on how to talk about economic issues. 

In the left blogosphere, almost everybody focused on the part of the story in which Luntz told the assembled Republican governors, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort.  I’m frightened to death.  They’re having a big impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”  A good many in Left Blogistan trumpeted this news, arguing that “Luntz admitting the impact of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent and telling closed-door meetings of Republicans that it frightens him is a huge victory for the movement.” 

And who knows, maybe Luntz really is scared, but this is the kind of thing that – when I hear it – I take with a grain of salt.  The bottom line is that Republicans pay Frank Luntz an obscene amount of money to tell them what phrases they should deploy in order to advance their own interests.  He was paid to show up at the RGA and speak to them about problems with which they need help finessing.  He identified a problem for them (one that has been in the news a lot, so it’s timely) and told them that he could help them – for a fee.

But what else would one expect him to say?  Well you guys, the Occupy movement is getting a lot of press lately but it’s not a big deal.  Still, if you want to give me a lot of money I can teach you how to dismiss the movement in front of the cameras.  Of course he’s not going to say that.  Frank Luntz is going to tell the Republican governors (i) that there is a very serious problem they need to confront, (ii) that he, Frank Luntz, can help them to confront it, and (iii) by the way, here’s my fee schedule.  And that’s exactly what he did.

Again . . . Luntz really could be genuinely “frightened to death” by the Occupy movement, but the fact that he made that statement in this setting, in front of this audience, means we just can’t know whether he really is scared or whether he is just trolling for a buck.