Occupation and realignment: How a real leftist movement could create a new center in our politics

[pampango]

Will the worldwide “occupy” demonstrations make 2011 the new 1968?

The liberal left must hope not. The global wave of left-wing radicalism that peaked in 1968 was followed by a generation of right-wing reaction in the United States and Europe. The rise of counterculture frightened the “silent majority” in the U.S. and Europe into supporting politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, running campaigns based largely on patriotism and traditional values and “law and order,” used their power to undermine the labor market regulations and social insurance programs that had protected the socially conservative working classes who voted for them.

It is all too easy to write a script for a post-Reaganite, neo-Nixonian conservatism that emphasizes law and order. If protesters in Wall Street and other downtowns go from waving placards to smashing windows, it would be easy for the right to win over the suburban majority by accusing the center-left of coddling law-breaking downtown protesters as well as law-breaking illegal immigrants. At the moment much of the public is favorably disposed toward the occupation protests, but attitudes may change if countercultural shantytowns grow up in urban parks and confrontations with police and local governments become common.

But there are other possibilities. Democratic strategists across the country are no doubt pondering how the somewhat unfocused demonstrators can be turned into a “Tea Party of the left” that can be deployed as reliable Democratic voters in future elections. Other members of the progressive establishment may try to co-opt this essentially anti-political movement into the elaborate structure of single-issue progressive patronage networks.

Maybe occupiers can be persuaded to join minorities, women, LGBTs and environmentalists as officially sanctioned progressive interest groups. Maybe in 10 years there will be foundation-funded Occupation programs, each with their own well-paid administrators, followed 20 years from now by endowed chairs in Occupation Studies, occupied by chubby, middle-aged veterans of Zuccotti Park.

There is a third, more promising possibility. Instead of provoking a conservative backlash, or being co-opted by the existing progressive identity-politics machine, the Occupy Wall Street movement could indirectly benefit the American center-left by re-creating an American radical left.

If left-radicalism is defined as anti-capitalism and pacifism, American progressives and liberals in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson have never been radicals. The goal of progressive-liberals has been to save American capitalism by reforming it, not to replace it. And the progressive-liberal presidents led the U.S. into the world wars and the Cold War, over the objections of the pacifist left and the isolationist right.

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/18/occupation_and_realignment/singleton/

There is a lot here to disagree with (particularly his analysis of how the actions of the left led to the resurgence of the right), but it's an interesting look at possible scenarios of how the OWS will play out.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. I got lost at " Democratic strategists ..."

[AnneD]

3. LOL LOL LOL....

Back to your room, no supper for you :spank:

I voted for FDR and got Herbert Hoover and boy does it suck.

[msongs]

2. democratic strategists - butt kissing republicans the past 3 years isn't working out is it? nt