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.

85. Suspense in the Sixties, Suspense Now

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (10)

I see that Hendrik Hertzberg in the latest New Yorker (10-17-11) is in the same state of suspense over the Wall Street occupiers that I was in over the Viet Nam war protesters. Will they focus on a worthy goal or will they blow their chance?

From my experience I can give him this exciting answer: some will and some won't. And the good that's done will depend on who the television cameras focus on. In 1968 it was Jerry Rubin and the Yippies — in Hertzberg's terms, "the flaky fringe." Now, who knows, but whoever it is a repetition will mean irrelevance, diffusion of force, disillusion. Hertzberg clearly fears that but, he says, it's "not too late to hope."

I want to tell him, and anybody else now in his state, that there are grounds for hope. You could see them right there in the sixties scene. If in today's university population we have any significant number of young people like those I saw going to work for Eugene McCarthy Hertzberg has nothing to worry about. Some American young people are going to be there ready to focus and, hopefully, make the others focus.

Remember that turnaround in 1968? The war was going on and on, Johnson was going to get re-elected, it would all continue, and then McCarthy stood up, declared against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, New England's universities emptied their best students into the state to work for him, the votes poured in, and Johnson, shocked, dropped from the race. Power. Exerted by young people. Inside the system.

Humphrey steps in, takes over the Johnson machinery. McCarthy will run against him in the Indiana primary. Indiana, right next to Ohio. In our streets, as in most streets, we're hearing "Power to the People," black power, flower power, student power. Some students, though, are hearing, "power in the ballot box," and don't care if it's coming from what other students are calling "party hacks." They check in with McCarthy headquarters in Indiana and get organized.

In haste. Oh my God the haste. Who saw this coming? Who has any money? Small contributions come in. Veterans for Peace contributes fifty dollars. Not nearly enough for a bus but some students have cars. A prof has a station wagon. Here we go, OU for McCarthy.

Headquarters assigned our contingent two towns, Shelbyville and Franklin, historically tough for Democrats and poison for liberals. Canvassing would take place on separate weekends. Canvassers would be put up in private homes and church basements. They would feed themselves.

It may be hard now to appreciate what these establishment-joiners were giving up: status with the rebels, the hip, the icebreakers who were setting student style; the badges that showed their allegiance, the dress, the smoke, the long hair; even, here and there, the beard. "Lose it," said the boss in Indianapolis. Lose anything that might lose a vote for peace on the porches of Indiana.

The boss in Indianapolis, the one who set up the McCarthy operation throughout the state, was a nineteen-year-old sophomore. She had dropped out of Macalester College in Minnesota in the middle of the quarter. The fellow who was waiting for us in the one lit storefront in Shelbyville (it was one a.m., our people had late classes) had dropped out of Yale Law School. His briefing of arriving groups would take him well into the morning.

OK, so there's sacrifice, there's adulthood, there's the contrast with the juveniles around them, there's emersion from that juvenility. And there's the ground for hope that the young Americans in the Occupy Wall Street movement will focus on something worthy (Hertzberg lists seven possibilities) and not blow their big opportunity.

I hope they understand how big that opportunity is. At this moment the two-party system really is at a stand — worse, in its way, than in 1968. The Republicans won't squeeze the wealthy and the Democrats can't, not really. They need the big money as badly as the Republicans do. Why do you think Obama is so slow to crack down on them? To get re-elected he's got to pay for all that expensive television time. Same with the Democrats in Congress. So, without a campaign-finance law, the country's got nobody. Except, now, you. You've got a lot of eyes on you, OWS.