91. What's the Difference between a Yippie and a Wall Street Occupier?

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (11)

In 1968 there were a lot of confused, outlandish people demonstrating in the streets and they were stupid; in 2011 there are a lot of confused, outlandish people demonstrating in the streets and they are not stupid. What's the difference?

The 1968 demonstrators did not see that voters who might press their representatives to end the Viet Nam War would be slower to do so if it meant associating themselves with a lot of outlandish people. Voters could change things. Change yourself, become more landish, and you could change those voters. Those who didn't see that were stupid. And history confirms that judgment. The silent landish vote swept Nixon into office and kept Democrats out for decades.

That taught a lot of us not to side with outlandish people lightly. Give them a boost and the backlash could discredit good causes for years to come. In Athens we saw evidence of that backlash just last week, in a Messenger cartoon. One well-dressed fellow, passing Zucotti Park, says to another, "I'm having a moral dilemma: Do I want to live in a country that caters to the ultra-rich … or do I want to agree with a hippie?!"

Well, 1968 hippies were stupid for alienating those who had the power to change. The 2011 Wall Street Occupiers see (I suppose) that voters no longer have the power to change. The OWS equivalent to "Peace in Viet Nam" is "Regulation on Wall Street." And how will voters bring that about? Not by making a Republican President. He's almost sure to be against regulation. By making a Democrat President? Well, we've got one who had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate and who promised not to be influenced by lobbyists for special interests. Just the one to make the slam-bang speech against big money and lead the charge on the Hill. Just the one to get the country's biggest mistake in the pre-Great-Recession years corrected. Why isn't he doing that? Because to get re-elected he has to have big money, and to get that money he, through lobbyists called "bundlers" (NYT, 10-28-11), has to go to a lot of people who don't want regulation on Wall Street. We infer influence.

You don't have to give the Zucotti Park riff-raff credit for great powers of perception here. It's been obvious for months that Wall Street bankers, the very people responsible for the 2008 crisis, are successfully working on Senators and Congressmen, no doubt through that need to get re-elected, to hold up or weaken legislation on new rules.

So it looks like the difference is that in 1968 you were stupid if you didn't work through the system and in 2011 you were stupid if you did. The system wasn't working.

What's the smart play? It looks to me like a run at the campaign finance rules. Reduce the need for big money and you reduce the power of Wall Street. Is anybody smart enough to bring that off? Inside the presently jammed system? We won't find any such person in Zucotti Park. But that's not what we look to those occupiers for. It's enough that they keep before us, among all the goofy causes, this most important one.