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American Autumn: Progressive Populism Rises Up

Occupy Wall Street and related occupation efforts are quintessentially a movement to reclaim democracy. “We are the 99%!” expresses the growing understanding that the one percent have concentrated enormous wealth and power in their own hands and now wield hugely disproportionate influence in economic and political life.

Call it plutocracy, corporatocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, whatever—this is clearly not what democracy looks like. As that reality gets harder to ignore, as more people suffer under an increasingly ruthless rule by the rich, Americans are getting mad and fighting back.

After an Arab Spring and a European Summer, American Autumn has arrived. (And other peoples movements around the world say, “Welcome to the club! What took you so long?”)

It was as if popular discontent in America was a large pool of highly flammable liquid; on September 17, a relatively small band of demonstrators in New York City served as the spark that ignited it. As the conflagration continues and grows, everyone—advocates, enemies, and those still undecided—try to make sense of it all and figure out how best to respond.

How did we get here?

This movement has been a long time coming. For the past three decades or more, America has been steadily concentrating wealth at the top. We had 12 years of Reagan-Bush deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. Then we had an eight-year, corporate-friendly Clinton regime of more deregulation, plus “free trade” agreements favoring those at the top. Then eight years of Bush-the-Dumber—a post-9/11, shock-doctrine orgy of plutocratic policy on steroids.

For those at the top of the pyramid, the good times did indeed roll. (See chart.)

Until it all came crashing down in the fall of 2008. That’s when the whole deregulated, risk-taking, greed-enabling gambling game that is our current financial system failed on a colossal scale. The big-time gamblers suddenly needed help from the public whose lives they had been gambling with. And the public, panicked by the specter of global economic collapse, mostly went along. Maybe they didn’t like it, but most accepted it.

However, hope was on the horizon. Barack Obama, a new guy with new ideas, was elected president amid a wave of progressive enthusiasm that swept in a large majority of Democrats into Congress. Surely, they would bring change we could believe in.

And then they didn’t.

As any attempt at progress on any front was stymied, watered down, and compromised beyond recognition, people gradually began to see the new economic/political reality. The system itself was—how to put this delicately—fucked up beyond all reason. It seemed to matter little who was actually in office. The real control was elsewhere.

What had happened was that, as wealth concentrated at the top, so did political power. Those with the most money discovered that one of their best financial investments comes from investing in politics. Whether that investment shows up as campaign donations, hiring lobbyists, creating think tanks, funding sophisticated PR campaigns, or just outright buying major media channels (looking at you, Rupert Murdoch), these investments offer handsome dividends. They allow a small minority of people to control a political system that pretends to be a democracy.

A sense was growing that something was deeply wrong, even when details weren’t clearly understood. Many people became outraged. They formed a movement. They called it the Tea Party—a revolutionary reference for a movement with revolutionary ambitions. They felt like they were losing control of their country to some agenda that was not their own, and they wanted to fight back against that agenda.

Unfortunately, this Tea Party mistook their enemies for their allies. They saw a broken government and named Big Government as the problem, not recognizing the real problem: Big Government had become merely a sock puppet for Big Money. This Tea Party grew with funding from billionaires and support from Fox News—a 24/7 propaganda machine for Big Money interests. This “populist” uprising adopted an anti-government agenda curiously in alignment with that of the plutocrats. They were clearly confused.

On the progressive side, people were also confused. And dispirited. The hope and enthusiasm progressives had felt in November 2008 had given way to cynicism and despair. Some tried to comfort themselves with a philosophy that “half a loaf is better than none,” celebrating each and every crumb as a victory. But most found little consolation in crumbs as the country seemed to be falling apart.

To add insult to injury, in early 2010, the Supreme Court—apparently concerned that rich people didn’t have enough influence in government—opened the floodgates to unlimited, anonymous donations to influence elections. The ironically named Citizens United decision was a giant kick to the groin of actual citizens who still hoped to have a voice in what remained of American democracy.

In this volatile context, the political winds shifted again in the 2010 elections. The angry, fired-up people who knew they wanted change (backed with strategically placed big money) kicked the crap out of the uninspired, despondent people who thought they’d voted for change just two years earlier. The Republican Party—who’d been disgraced and voted out of power in that previous sea change—made a stunning comeback, regaining control the the “people’s house” of Congress as well as a majority of state houses around the country.

They brought with them their new and improved agenda from their new Tea Party masters. They wasted no time exercising their new-found power and quickly removed all doubt—the “populism” of the Tea Party was nothing but plutocracy in drag.

And that’s when things started to get really weird. In a horrifying kind of way.

In February of this year, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker quickly became the poster boy for the new Republican agenda as it would be implemented at the state level: bust up the unions and stick it to public workers in the name of austerity. Stripping the right of collective bargaining was the final straw, especially in a state like Wisconsin with a strong pro-labor history. Walker’s overreach provoked the first major, localized, populist uprising we’d seen in America in a very long time, including a round-the-clock occupation of the state house in Madison.

As the Republican state-level agenda revealed its ugly face, the Republican agenda at the federal level turned utterly surreal. Republicans used their new powers in Congress to show they would go to any lengths, including shutting down the federal government and causing the country to default on its debt obligations, in defense of one primary principle: that suffering people should be made to suffer even more in order to preserve and enlarge the privileges of their plutocratic masters.

Tea-Party Republicans declared, “Government is evil! Government is dysfunctional! Now that we’re in government, we’ll prove it!”

It’s a truism in American politics that both parties feed at the same trough of Big Money, but the Republican Party of 2011 has taken advocacy for plutocratic interests to a whole new level not seen in generations. It was as if the one percent had gotten together and said, “Hey, we’ve been on a 30-year winning streak, and those on the losing end of the bargain haven’t rebelled yet. They even bailed us out when we fucked up. Hah! Suckers! Now that we’ve destroyed most of the middle class and created mass suffering, let’s go in for the kill and grab everything that’s left.”

It was like a test to see how much more the American people could endure before seriously fighting back.

Now they’re finding out. And busily trying to figure out how to extinguish the firestorm they created.

We Are the 99%!

As Warren Buffet has noted (bless his class-traitorous heart), of course there is class war in America, and it’s his class (the top one percent) that has been kicking serious ass for a long time. As any student of class war knows, one side has the advantage in wealth while the other side has the advantage in numbers.

The genius of the rallying cry, “We are the 99%!,” is that it simultaneously names how bad wealth inequality has become while reminding us that our strength is in our numbers.

Focusing on the 99% encourages a big-tent, inclusive movement. It promotes solidarity, recognizing that even people of differing political ideologies, lifestyles, and belief systems are essentially on the same side of this battle, whether we know it or not.

Talking about percentages also points to an advantage this movement has over many previous progressive political movements. The civil rights movement, the movement against the Vietnam War, the movements for women’s liberation, gay rights, disability rights, and so on—all of them began as causes of a dedicated minority that needed to convince the majority of the population to join their side.

Not so this time. Public opinion polls have repeatedly shown that on many of the concerns of this movement, a majority of the population is already on our side. (Even a majority of Republicans think that ending tax breaks for the wealthy should be part of reducing the deficit—they should tell their representatives in Congress.)

That majoritarian sentiment is what has enabled the Occupy Wall Street movement to spread so quickly and become the talk (and occupation) of the nation. This is the movement so many people in so many places, in our nation and around the world, have been wanting and waiting for.

This is a movement many other existing movements can join, because it names the underlying source of so many of our problems. When Big Money rules, basic human values of peace, justice, sustainable living, and environmental protection suffer.

Against war? Call out the war profiteers and end their influence in government. Want real health care reform? Get rid of the influence of Big Pharma and the insurance industry. Want real action to address the climate crisis? First you’ll have to confront the influence of the those getting rich from fossil fuels. Want better food policy? Confront Big Agribusiness.

The list goes on—the song remains the same.

We’ve all heard criticism of this movement for being unfocused and not having a clear list of demands and policy proposals. These criticisms were predictably voiced by opponents of the movement, but also echoed by much liberal hand-wringing from sympathizers who have long hoped to win through superior policy wonkery.

Special note to all those “critical sympathizers”: It does little good to have all the right answers if you have no power to implement them. Instead of worrying about whether the people in the streets and parks will voice all the correct policy prescriptions, consider this movement the wind in our sails to move forward the solutions we already know.

That’s the real strength of this movement: Creating a space for a national and international conversation long overdue. It’s not necessarily the role of these occupations to supply all the answers, but just to help foster a political discourse that asks the right questions. If we have answers, now is the time to offer them.

Truth is, lots of people have been organizing in recent years to offer solutions to the injustices being highlighted now (see “Resources for a Populist Uprising”). And many solutions have already been proposed (see “Some Solutions”).

This is our time. Let’s make the most of it.

(Lansing Scott blogs at freelansing.wordpress.com.)

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