Good for Mitt

From: David Atkins:

Mitt Romney may be the most dishonest politician I've ever had the misfortune of watching. This is a man who seems to literally believe that there is no consequence at all for shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next.

Those who believe that Mitt "won" the first debate hands down seem to believe that Romney is justified in his complete cynicism about the process and the electorate. Those who believe, as David Axelrod and I do, that Romney mortgaged long-term political pain for a 24-hour news cycle win, have just a little more faith in this creaky old electoral system.

American democracy is broken. But it's not that broken.

Mitt was losing. So he decided to win. And everyone agrees that he won the debate. So far there have indeed been no consequences for him shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next. And why should there be, among the small pool of voters who have not yet made up their minds?

Meanwhile, why didn't Obama talk about Romney's 47% comments in the debate? From here: "'It just didn’t come up in the debate,' Messina said. 'It wasn’t a deliberate decision.'” I guess that no one in the Democratic Party has ever heard of bringing up talking points about one's opponent in a debate, to define them. They didn't think about it so hard that it wasn't even deliberate that they didn't think about it. After all, the basic attitude is this: We must be bipartisan -- above the fray -- and work together on a Grand Bargain to destroy Social Security. And those 47% are sort of shameful, aren't they? Why would anyone speak up about them when they don't have to?

American democracy is that broken.

That's not how it works

More about voting, or not voting, in the upcoming U.S. election. I know that I should just let this go, but it beats writing the last few posts about Occupy that I feel like I should finish.

Jim Henley suggests individual trade-offs here, of the form "If [loyalist progressive] wants [disgruntled anti-militarist] to vote for the Democrats, then [loyalist progressive] should trade that person something they want, like a letter to a politician." The basic problem with that is that signatures on petitions, letters to politicians, and so on are valueless. We've already determined that -- that's a major reason why movements like Occupy spring up. Petitions, letters, one-day protests and so on don't cause anyone to do anything. So trading a valueless political action for a valueless vote is like some kids pretending to play poker but they can't really keep track of whether one red chip is worth 5 black or vice versa.

Let's consider the disgruntled anti-militarists as a bloc, at least in potential. They're not negotiating with individual Democrats. They're negotiating with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has the power to give them at least some of what they want, in the form of actual changed policies. And the anti-militarists, at least in potential, would have the power to give the Democratic Party what it wants, in the form of won elections.

In fact, the disgruntled anti-militarists are not a bloc, and do not have the power to make a difference in elections, mostly because most people in America like war, assassination, and torture, or at least don't see why anyone but a nut would object very strongly. So we have a trading situation going through supposed middlemen (i.e. the individual voters or letter-writers) in which none of the middlemen have the power to carry out the deal. I don't think you need to have a libertarian background to see why this may not be a good idea. "Here, kid, I'll give you 5 black chips for your red one. Aren't you happy now?" You might equally well object that the red chip is valueless too, so if there is condescension or futility it's going both ways. But.

But the important part of not voting is to say that you're not playing the game. People want the reassurance of knowing that settled, middle-class people with young children, like me, are still dutifully going through the motions, and are not seriously saying that maybe it's time that we just stopped supporting the whole American political system. That's what you lose if you trade the red chips for the black chips. And that's why I don't expect there to be a lot of people taking this deal.

Signals

I wrote this poem a few months before Bush's re-election, I think. Strangely enough it still seems to be relevant now. It must be Timeless Art!

Signals

When we were waiting in the line
It passed hand to hand to hand
“Ten”, the note read
We looked at, up, eye to eye
And waited
For the branded bottles of water
Among the flies
The mold, the crooked sign
Unmoving

"It's time to go" he said at the bar
"Time to join up"
His recruiter would get a bonus
His face gleamed
Shiny
And the TV static
Formed a nine, circled,
Testing

He had a job
Coordination
The dismal flicker of eight
On the CRT
The flights sent to Uzbekistan
Dropping people one-way
Only digits came back
"Eight" he Emailed
Broadcast

"Seven" puffs the sky writing
Over the assembled cameras
The backdrop
The camouflaged ranks
The mike

They were well dressed
Celebration signs waved decorously
Conversationally
"We want the Rapture"
"666 is the second coming"
Crosses
And forward-looking smiles
And a wind-blown sign tumbling
With one more six

"Five" whispered the voice on the phone line
It was recorded
Aren't they all?
In a special file
Played over and over
Scanned for hidden messages
"Five" it said "five"
They let it alone
There was so much else

"Four" he laughed crazy
To the people at the nation's mall
"More years" he laughed
"You all want more"
And they nodded,
More

The radio said three angrily
In between the uncanny voices
The old-time talk
They had been talking from the beginning
About three-fifths,
Three fifths
And how that was always
Written, always should be

When all the LEDs
On all the alarm clocks
Blinked two endlessly
The people
Who were to have awoken that day
Looked, groggy,
Decided to get up, go on,
Wanting it over with
Wanting it the same

On the final day of that country
The voice said One, everyone heard it
"One" and they took out matches
"One" and burned the books that told them they were good
"One" and stumbled, footsore, into the wilderness

Occupy (V)

The post-encampment phase

This is the most difficult part of this series for me to write, because this phase was both the chronologically longest part of Occupy and, at least for me, pretty annoying. Encampments started mid-September 2011 and were essentially over by the end of December. If you arbitrarily choose the one year anniversary September 2012 demonstrations as the end of Occupy in its current form, then it's spent a good deal more of its existence without encampments than with them.

I'll use the Occupy group that I was involved with as an example once again, because I know more about it than any other. We did quite well for a small-town group. In our post-encampment phase we had weekly demonstrations in front of our local Bank of America branch in the town center. At the end of February, we had a visit by activists from OWS who did trainings, and we hired a movie theatre and showed short Occupy documentaries to 600 people, who then marched around the town to call attention to a number of places where big-money interests impinged on our communal life. In mid-March, we called a public meeting to discuss city finances with the mayor and town council which hundreds of non-Occupy people attended. We got local press for all of these activities and contributed to national press. Some of our more active people helped to oppose foreclosures at a nearby major city, and we opposed a proposed three-strikes law at the state level.

None of this made any discernible difference in actual political outcomes. Not that any experienced activist expects this kind of thing to make a difference in the short term. But that's who the majority of people were in Occupy at this point: experienced activists. And they'd done this kind of activism before Occupy and would individually continue doing it after Occupy, as part of existing groups that had lasted for much longer than it appeared that Occupy was going to. The major Occupy encampments served some hugely important functions besides those I've already mentioned: they provided the critical mass of people who made us into part of a global movement, and they supported the people who thought strategically about what was going on and could provide some sense of direction and response to events to the movement as a whole. Without them, it wasn't clear what we were gaining by doing this kind of thing as Occupy rather than as the kind of groups we'd had before.

And we were certainly losing something by being part of Occupy. I've been in a whole lot of movements, non-hierarchical co-ops, nonprofits etc., and when a Occupy General Assembly became dysfunctional, it became more dysfunctional than any other kind of arrangement I've seen. "Infighting" is a very common word that I've seen in any description of a late-stage Occupy GA. I'll write more about the organizational problems of this kind of structure in the next post.

Still, the Occupy General Assembly can inspire new people, even as the older ones leave. A sort of steady state might have been achieved. But here is where larger-scale considerations start to become important. How do middle-class protest movements end?

Occupy's debt to the Spanish Indignados and the Arab Spring protestors is well known. Perhaps less well known is that there have been middle class assembly movements in a wide range of industrialized countries. The Israeli #J14 protests, for instance. Or the Argentine Neighborhood Assembly Movement. Both of the articles that I've linked to are, I think, worth reading. I'll leave aside the question of ideology and the coexistence of moderate and radical politics for now, and sum up the two main long-term threats to these kinds of movements as co-optation and conciliation.

If repression fails, then existing power centers in a society naturally try to absorb the energy of the new one. In the Argentine case, their assemblies became sites of competition by various left-wing parties. America, of course, has no functioning left-wing parties, and the Democrats never made any serious effort to co-opt Occupiers into becoming electoral activists. The only organizations that made a serious effort to turn Occupy towards its purposes were the unions, who ran a sort of national campaign to have Occupy assist in union community outreach. We saw the effects of this in our small area -- our major protest somehow ended up stopping at areas that were of interest to unions but hadn't been of interest to anyone in our group before then, and well-prepared young people who were theoretically "Occupy" but who no one had ever seen at a GA showed up and helped to run a major event and spoke out on union issues. This was helpful, and since we had no real difference of opinion with the unions, people noticed it and then shrugged.

Conciliation was a much greater problem. "Conciliation" may be the wrong word, since very few people in power took deliberate action to conciliate Occupy -- repression had worked. Still, a basic characteristic of middle-class economic protest movements is that as the economy gets better, people go back to normal life, because normal life for them is after all pretty good. Duncan Black periodically posts what he calls the Scariest Chart Ever, a graphic which shows the percent job losses in post WW II recessions in the U.S. If you look at that chart, it is indeed scary in terms of the depth and length of the employment loss. It is less scary in that the employment has been steadily trending upwards for a long time now. If it took the depth of the recession to create Occupy, then that slowly trending upwards line meant that we weren't getting replacements for the people who left. The educated young people who'd been out of a job were getting jobs and leaving, and the experienced activists who were left weren't seeing a great benefit in doing what they did as Occupy.

That might have been what eventually did Occupy in even if the encampments had remained. That is the narrative that a lot of people both inside and outside of Occupy would prefer -- a sort of gradually-drifting-off end suitable for whatever interpretation the teller wants to hold. But it will forever remain a hypothetical, because by the time it arguably started to happen, Occupy's main strengths had already been taken away.

Occupy (IV)

Homelessness

Before I get to the post-encampment stage as such, a bit about homelessness and how it affected Occupy.

The first thing that happens when you put up free housing in a city center and provide free food is that homeless people settle there. The homeless people that I saw in Occupy were generally not disruptive, but with rare exceptions they were functionally apolitical. People who become homeless in the U.S. primarily because of poverty are engaged in a desperate scramble to negotiate what supportive resources for them exist and to find work. If there is temporary housing or shelter space available, they are in it, not out on the streets. The long-term homeless who sleep on the streets and for whom an Occupy camp is a step up are primarily homeless because they have serious mental health or substance abuse problems. They can barely get through society as it is, much less mobilize their energies effectively to make changes in it.

And Occupy, being a middle-class movement, dealt with homelessness pretty badly. Occupiers everywhere were proud that they didn't kick homeless people out. They could hardly do so in any case, given that all-inclusiveness was a major ideological component of Occupy. But the homeless weren't in general really full participants and everyone knew it, although there was something of a taboo against admitting it. I talked to a number of people who came back to the town that I lived in after Zuccotti Park was cleared, and a lot of them were more or less openly relieved that it was gone, because they were tired of keeping the camp going for people who had no real interest in Occupy's ideas. The right-wing media were always on the lookout for anything resembling an atrocity story coming out of an Occupy camp, so the non-homeless people there had to be unpaid security and social workers and shelter maintenance with no training or interest in doing what was essentially charitable rather than political work. One of the best weapons that the top 1% had was in making us take responsibility for the bottom 1% that they had abandoned.

The Occupation that I was involved in had a whole second attempt at an encampment. The liberal college town we were in, after saying we couldn't have tents at the public park, helped to broker an encampment on the grounds of a downtown church. Unlike what happened in New York, a local church let us set up on their grounds. But they had conditions, like "no active protesting or literature distribution" and "quiet at night" that made it a depository for tents, not really an active encampment as such. We were supposed to go back to the public park in the day for any political activities. The group agonized over whether to accept this through weeks of General Assemblies and finally did. But by then the group had grayed significantly, as the young people who'd been looking for jobs had found them and dropped out. Only a few people were left who actually could take sleeping in the tents in the winter, and after a couple of weeks the tents were only occupied by the homeless. And then there was a full outbreak of middle-class anxiety. Someone found needles in one of the tents, and there were rumors of people getting drunk and someone coming close to an overdose, and people suddenly had to confront the unremarkable fact that homeless people who have been kicked out of shelters are generally substance abusers. Rather than trying to get them treatment, people insisted that we were being irresponsible for setting up a place where they could do this unmonitored, so we closed the encampment and the homeless people presumably went back to the woods.

I don't think that dealing with homelessness was the critical problem for Occupy. The short-term problem was the police. But it certainly didn't help that a major component of people in Occupy thought that we should get rid of the encampments anyways, even before the police drove us out. The attitude after the evictions wasn't one of completely unrelieved outrage, for a lot of people it was "All right, it was time to do something else anyways. Let's go on to the next thing." People didn't have magical foresight, of course, and didn't know that there really was going to be no next thing. But it was certainly was a factor weakening the movement at a critical juncture.

Occupy (III)

The clash

Why can I confidently write that police repression was the main factor ending Occupy? Look at the chronology of events in the Occupy wiki page. On Sep 17 2011, the encampment at Zucotti Park starts. There's steady growth through the end of October, with global protests on Oct 15, thousands of Occupations by the end of October. October 25, Ogawa Park in Oakland is raided. Nov 2, protestors close down the Port of Oakland. November 14, Zucotti Park forcibly cleared, with other clearances following quickly. Through November and December almost all of the major occupations were ended by police action. That is not a narrative of decline. Between mid-September and mid-November there wasn't even time for decline. It's a growing movement that was ended. Occupy continued after the encampments were gone, but never again managed to do anything that gained major public attention.

The major spikes in media coverage coincided with acts of police violence, of course. Occupy might not have taken off as much as it did without the pictures of Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying protestors on Sep. 24. Then there was Scott Olsen on Oct. 25. On Nov. 18, John Pike pepper spraying students at UC Davis.

But these were cases in which police attacked identifiable individuals. What support for Occupy would have really meant would be public indignation at the police raids that closed the encampments. After all, the U.S. Constitution supposedly guarantees the right of people to gather in public and protest. I'm sure that any number of constitutional lawyers could tell you how this right is limited and does not cover cases in which people want to actually use it, but people who are not so well-trained still have a general idea that it exists. Occupy, outside of Oakland -- Oakland was a special case that I'm not going to be able to do justice to -- was quite careful to stay away from anything resembling violence. One might think that people would support the right to peacefully protest even if they didn't agree with Occupy. Ideally, the raids that closed the encampments might have been the acts of repression that pulled in public sympathy for the next stage of growth.

That didn't happen. I don't think that anyone really expected it to happen, although I'm sure that the people telling the police to move in were concerned about it or they would have sent them in sooner. In part, it's just how America is -- it's a country that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates describes, was built on internal oppression, and all of its vaunted freedoms have always been illusory for people who go against the elites. This has never been a country in which ideas like freedom to protest were really a concern of the people as a whole, or the political class as a whole, instead of being particularly left concerns. But in part, it didn't happen because "the 99%" really didn't support Occupy.

Who was an Occupier? The archetypal early occupier was a recently graduated college student without a job. It was pretty much impossible to stay involved in Occupy if you did have a 9-5 job; it took too much of a time commitment. This, again, was not a choice that Occupy organizers made -- Occupy appeared as the winner of a pseudo-evolutionary process, and if there were other initiatives that were suitable for people who had less time, they didn't take off. And the occupiers typically had resources of some kind to fall back on -- if you don't have a job and don't see any immediate prospect of one, it's a really risky move to decide that you're going to gamble your existence on the continuation of a protest camp that feeds and houses you. Most people in Occupy implicitly had somewhere else to go back to. (I'm going to consider the homeless part of Occupy later).

By the idiosyncratic American definition in which an educated but poor person is "middle class", Occupy was middle class. It was not, culturally, working class. In addition, it always was a left-of-center movement -- there were never significant numbers of disaffected centrists or conservatives that I saw. Therefore, it was immediately opposed by the 1/3 or so of the American public that is engaged by tribal rightwing politics and hates anything on the left. Those people always actively support what they see as hippie-bashing. And, again outside Oakland, I never saw significant nonunionized working class support for it. There were plenty of centrists and moderate leftists who just didn't get Occupy and who were relieved not to be embarrassed by it any more. In addition, Occupy was primarily white. So when the time came for a swell of public support, it wasn't there. The people who supported Occupy were already supporters of Occupy, and the political class won their bet that repression would be effective.

ETA: Duncan Black:

It should go without saying (but it doesn't) that hostility to nonviolent public protests is hostility to democracy, hostility to the nobler parts of our history, hostility to our constitution and the right of free association, and basic contempt for the idea that the proles should have any meaningful way to express their grievances.

But only people on the left believe this.

Not voting

In a break from all-Occupy posting, I thought I'd address a recent discussion about whether people on the left should or shouldn't vote for Obama as the lesser evil, which started with Conor Friedersdorf writing in The Atlantic here, and continued with Henry Farrell, Jim Henley, Scott Lemieux, a link back to Daniel Davies, etc etc. And for an extra-special bonus,the comment thread on one of those posts has Walt going off on the vapidity of Le Guin's Omelas story.

Many good points were made in the course of this discussion. Yes, Obama's record of killing people is horrible. Yes, it's easy to reject Obama if you're a conservative who doesn't value social insurance anyways. Yes, it's a form of privilege to be able to not care about how much differentially worse Romney would be for people of color. But Henry Farrell's first post footnotes that it's abstracting away whether a single vote makes a difference in any case, and that's where the whole thing goes wrong.

Voting, outside those few and limited geographic areas in which your vote may actually matter, is primarily social signaling. No one doubts that just sleeping through election day because you don't care is being apathetic. But the people who don't vote and say that they're not voting are signaling something else, that they believe that the system has failed.

People all over the area where I live are talking about politics right now. I always have to drop in something like "I'm an anarchist, and I'm not voting because I think that people shouldn't support the American state." This makes me a jerk, especially when I say it to my daughter's third grade teacher who is teaching civics. But although it has almost no effect at all, it still has more actual effect than my going quietly to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Obama would have. Of course, I do some forms of political activism other than just talking to people as well, although they really have little more effect than this kind of thing does.

People on the left who don't vote and who say so are doing something. They are telling other people on the left that the system isn't working well enough. Not just the system of the corporations and the buffoonishly Randian right-wingers, who serve as easy targets for left-wing mockery. But the Democratic Party in America and whatever other supposedly left-of-center organizations still exist. The threat of exit may cause the people who run those things to eventually take notice.

And the question of what would happen if people on the left generally did as I did is nonsensical. If half of America believed what I do, the state would not exist in its current form. If just Democratic Party activists believed as I did, a candidate would have been chosen in the primary -- I don't know who, it would have been someone who is presently invisible -- who would not be blazing new trails in legal assassination. People don't believe as I do, and people in general don't believe as any of the people in this discussion do. The number of people who actually care about Obama's war and civil rights record is a tiny minority.

So we might as well act as a tiny minority, and not have discussions as if we were of any direct importance within electoral politics. Honesty is freeing. If I thought that my vote would actually affect the outcome, I would have to dutifully pull the lever for Obama, because yes Romney would be worse. But no one is going to be hurt whether we vote or don't vote, so any of us might as well loudly decline to if that's what they think is best.