In the wake of this week’s eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York and other urban campgrounds around the country, it’s tempting to dismiss the Occupy Wall Street movement as little more than a short-lived media phenomenon. The issues that spawned the movement — income inequality, money in politics and Wall Street’s influence — were being drowned out by debates over personal hygiene, noise and crime.
By Wednesday morning, when I dropped by the park, about 20 people, including some who looked disheveled and homeless, shared food and barely listened to a speaker with a graying ponytail who denounced New York as an “illegitimate police state.” Thursday’s “Day of Action” led to some more arrests, but it didn’t spawn the mass demonstrations some local politicians had predicted, let alone attract the throngs that the Tea Party mustered for a march on Washington in 2009.
But critics and supporters alike suggest that the influence of the movement could last decades, and that it might even evolve into a more potent force. “A lot of people brush off Occupy Wall Street as incoherent and inconsequential,” Michael Prell told me. “I disagree.”
Mr. Prell is a strategist for the Tea Party Patriots, a grass-roots organization that advocates Tea Party goals of fiscal responsibility, free markets and constitutionally limited government. He’s the author of “Underdogma,” a critique of left-wing anti-Americanism, which includes a chapter on the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s, which may be the closest historical parallel to the Occupy movement.
“They claim to stand up on behalf of the ‘little guy’ (the 99 percent), while raising a fist of protest against the big, rich, greedy and powerful 1 percent,” he said of the Occupy movement. “The parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement are too clear to ignore — right down to the babbling incoherence of the participants. The lesson from Berkeley in the 1960s and the protest movement they spawned is: it doesn’t matter that they don’t make sense. What matters is they are tapping into a gut-level instinct that is alive, or lying dormant, in almost every human being. And, when they unleash the power of standing up for the powerless against the powerful — David vs. Goliath — the repercussions can ripple throughout our society for decades.”
Mr. Prell hopes that doesn’t happen and is adamantly opposed to what he considers the movement’s big government agenda, but points out that “last generation’s protesters are today’s leaders.”
Sidney Tarrow, a visiting professor at the Cornell Law School, an expert in social movements and author of “Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics,” agreed that the movement could emerge as a more potent national force once the encampments were no longer an issue. This week’s evictions “could be the foundation for a national social movement,” he said. The 1964 Sproul Hall sit-in at Berkeley “created a communal basis for a future social movement. They hadn’t met until they were carried out by police. That’s a powerful solidarity-creating experience. We may well see networks of activists growing up because of this. People in the same encampments, and people in different encampments, are now in constant contact and can share experiences. They’ll build a community. That’s why occupation of space is important.”
Mr. Tarrow said he was sympathetic to the goals of the movement, “and I’m especially pleased there’s someone outside the Democratic Party establishment who’s saying these things. Someone had to seriously open a debate about the yawning gap of inequality in this country.” He added: “My advice to them is, ‘Move on.’ The encampments were running out of steam. They’ve achieved the best they could hope to achieve, which is to draw the country’s attention to extraordinary inequality. In my view, they should pack up their tents and march on Washington.”
Jeff Goodwin, a professor of sociology at New York University, who has both studied and at times joined the protesters, said he felt Mayor Bloomberg did the protesters “a big favor. The attempt to disrupt or suppress the movement will backfire. People involved think this is just the beginning. People are having a conversation about what’s wrong with the country. The police are not going to dissuade them from protesting or remaining active. It’s just going to anger people and radicalize them, and maybe draw new people into the conversation.”
While Occupy Wall Street has caught the attention of the White House and shifted the national debate over the economy, much as the Tea Party movement did from a conservative and libertarian perspective, it hasn’t yet had anywhere near the Tea Party’s impact, and it hasn’t elected any political candidates or raised significant funds. But it may have less conventional goals.
Cornel West, a Princeton professor who has emerged as a prominent voice of the movement, called me from Seattle, where he’d just joined Occupy Seattle protesters at Seattle Central Community College, and was en route to Oakland to participate in more protests there. “We’ve got to regroup and bounce back,” he said of this week’s evictions. “There’s already been a victory. Everyone is talking about corporate greed and income inequality, and that wouldn’t have been imaginable even a year ago.” He added, “To think that New York City spent all of that taxpayer money on policing the protesters and arresting people, while right there on Wall Street are all these financial criminals and no one has been charged. The oligarchs get away with everything. The hypocrisy is just too much to take. The shift towards truth and justice is what the movement is all about.”
Mr. West said he didn’t know where the movement was headed, but “you can’t evict an idea whose time has come.”
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