Post-Occupied: A Follow Up

From last night, evidence that the devolution is nearly complete.

Note that the substantive argument is completely absent from this episode; it's now a struggle between protesters and police over turf and process. A descent into pure tribalism.

Part of this is a function of the coverage, of course. Media tends to want to see conflict as binary, and tends toward the scorecard view. Protesters on the 5-yard line; police mount a spirited defense to push them back.

But much of it's due, again, to the protesters' own approach. They seem to understand it in binary fashion. Have a look at OWS's own blog; note the implicit — and explicit — definitions of success. "What will you occupy in 2012?" reads one invitational poster. The question isn't "Whose lives will we improve in 2012?" It isn't "Who will we elect?" or "What legislation will we pass?" The poster doesn't ask, "How will we reform the tax code?" or "How will we fight inequality?" or even "How will we redistribute wealth?"

"Occupation," it seems, is both means and end.

As long as this continues, I'd guess OWS is destined for increasing petulance, followed by irrelevance.

What's more, and weirder: consider the potential for cooptation. Since it's not a whole lot more, now, than a collection of tactics bound to raw emotion (rather than a platform or course of action), it's possible "occupations" and the invocation of "occupation" as a method could proliferate into political and psychic territories unimagined by the original Wall Street protesters. If it happens, this could have two ill effects. The first would be to further dilute the political impact of OWS by clouding the already murky message. The second could be to provide yet another vehicle for the expression of reactionary rage. Why couldn't a splinter branch of the tea party — some group way out on the libertarian fringe — stage its own "occupation," observing the protocols and vocabulary but binding them to a diffusely right-wing vision rather than the current diffusely left-wing vision?

Which, I guess, raises the question — again — of the ethics of outcomes, and whether or not OWS would care.