"Occupy" Movement Must Move to the Center
This opinion essay was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (print) on December 13, 2011. It appears on the SFGate website at the same date.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has reached a tactical dead end. This much has been apparent for weeks. Remarkably, its fundamental message of seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth in America has not been lost, despite the extremism and eccentricity of the protests.
The message clearly resonates with a majority of Americans, as many polls have indicated. The problem is not that the movement needs a sharper focus or a more detailed list of demands. Social movements do not have to make policy, much less write legislation. They simply need to articulate the strength of feeling in the population for a change of course.
The more all-embracing its message, the better. But how can the latent sentiments that so many Americans feel today for a return to the principles of fairness and equality of opportunity be expressed in all their fullness?
An analogy might be found in the movement to end the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Protests against the war were started by small minorities of radicals among students, religious figures and draft-age youth. But in 1967 an umbrella organization calling itself the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (nicknamed the "Mobe") formed to sponsor huge marches against the war in New York, Washington D.C., and other cities.
Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in New York on April 15, 1967, to protest U.S. involvement in the war. Another 100,000 or more showed up at the Lincoln Memorial in October of the same year. In November, 1969, half a million people again demonstrated in the nation's capital to speed up the process of bringing the troops home.
Because these rallies were thoroughly peaceful protests, conventional in form and held on weekends, they attracted the widest range of participants, including thousands of middle- and working-class families.
Today's movement for economic fairness would equally benefit from a tactical turn toward the center. In fact, there is no good reason to continue to refer to it as an "occupation."
Americans do not want to live in tents; they want to live in their own houses with mortgages that are reflective of their homes' actual value and that can be paid off at reasonable terms. Americans do not want to form "affinity groups"; they want to be able to spend time with their families and friends without the anxieties of having to hold on to their jobs for dear life or being without work at all. Americans do not want to gather nightly to make political decisions by consensus; they want their traditional, representative form of democracy to work for them in an honest, straightforward manner.
There may not be 99 percent of the population ready to join a march on a Sunday to "tax the rich." But if even 30 percent showed up, that would create quite a stir.