Is the Mainstream Losing Interest in OWS?

Here's an excerpt from a poignant critique of OWS from the Washington Post's Michael Gerson. The whole article is worth a read.

At what point does a protest movement become an excuse for camping? At what point is utopianism discredited by the seedy, dangerous, derelict fun fair it creates? At what point do the excesses of a movement become so prevalent that they can reasonably be called its essence? At what point do Democratic politicians need to repudiate a form of idealism that makes use of Molotov cocktails?

The emergence of Occupy Wall Street raised Democratic hopes for the emergence of a leftist equivalent to the Tea Party movement. The comparison is now laughable. Set aside, for a moment, the reports of sexual assault in Zuccotti Park and the penchant for public urination. Tea Party activists may hate politicians, but they venerate American political institutions. Veneration does not always involve understanding. But the Tea Party’s goal is democratic influence.
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And we are beginning to see what direct action means. Occupy DC protesters recently assaulted a conservative gathering, then took over a public intersection to prevent the passage of luxury cars. Blocking the path of one driver and his 2-year-old son, an activist shouted, “Sorry, but you have no power right now.” That is the opposite of participatory democracy — the use of power to intimidate a fellow citizen on a public street. It is the method of British soccer thugs.
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Defenders of OWS dismiss this as the work of a few bad apples. But the transgressors would call themselves the vanguard. And they express, not betray, a significant ideological strain within the movement. Since the 1960s, some on the political left have sought liberal reform through the democratic process and nonviolent protest. Others have sought to hasten the crisis and collapse of fundamentally illegitimate social and economic systems. Both groups can be found within OWS, but the latter is ascendant.

As ANR has argued before and has been written elsewhere, Occupy Wall Street is fundamentally a flawed, if simply a "fake," protest movement. While there are certainly real grievances throughout America, OWS is not a viable movement that can address them. This isn't an argument about OWS's ideology (if it has one), which is certainly open to criticism on its face, but a structural criticism. It seems that the mainstream is starting to recognize this too.

American Exceptionalism, the Left, and Obama

What is American exceptionalism?  And, what is Obama's and the American left's view of it?  Shelby Steele has the answer in a well-crafted essay in the Wall Street Journal.

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

Steele's link between this "difficult rigor," essentially the American character, and our own exceptional standing as a global leader is aptly made and far too often not discussed or even considered by many.  Our own commitments to hard-work, sacrifice, innovativeness and ingenuity, individuality, and, amongst other attributes, the rule of law, have played an enormous role in developing the United States as a singularly powerful and desirable (in the terms of other people and nations wanting to be like us or join us) nation.  However, many in America, particularly on the left, do not agree with these values and especially our exceptionalism.  Steele outlines how America's imperfect history has become, for some, a cloak of repulsiveness over America's current successes and the values that helped us achieve them.

At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era.  

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So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

This self-loathing is bad enough as is.  It is never practically or emotionally commendable to look in the mirror and hate what you see - this is why psychologists make quite nice salaries helping individuals understand that their flaws or historical missteps do not obscure their true value.  But as so often occurs in individuals, Steele correctly argues that this systematic recasting of American values and exceptionalism as morally defunct has lead to the undermining of the very greatness of the American way.   

Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.

America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?

In Steele's analysis, this is not just a historical force of the left, but a very real problem of the current administration, who's leaders were raised in the heyday of this sort of political thinking.  Now, as leaders of the very institution they were raised to detest, they are torn between pursuing their responsibility of advancing America's position and being true to the elixir of principles they imbibed as youth.

Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom. 

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As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

All-in-all, this leaves America and the left in a very precarious position.  How do we trust a leadership that wants to "take the country down a notch" or wants to "lead from behind"?  How can the people be comfortable with representatives that were raised on an opposition ideology, who have fixated on what is wrong, not what is right with our system?  But most importantly how can those who ascribe to such beliefs reconcile the fact that their ideology is in many ways at odds with the responsibility of ruling?

Dying Gasps of American Liberalism?

Modern American liberalism is far from dead - there are still far too many willing to blindly accept its maxims whole cloth.  Nevertheless, a recent speech by Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison clearly displays the intellectual turmoil that is undermining the far left's worldview and reveals that even the stalwarts may be choking for air.

In a speech at the Campus Progress National Conference (see video below at 16:30), Ellison accuses conservatives of "want[ing] mom to get back in the kitchen, and take her shoes off, and get pregnant....  [Conservatives] are offended by a strong, powerful women [sic]."  Ellison's desire to harp on such tired and outmoded rhetoric speaks volumes about the left's waning star.

The unavoidable fact is that today's conservatism undeniably does not ascribe to such sexist notions.  The left, however, needs to drum-up conflicts between women and men (just like between races) because its intellectual foundations are firmly rooted in such assumptions.  Modern American liberalism views the world through a lens of conflict between the powerful (who are morally culpable in their mind) and the oppressed. 

But as progress has demonstrated, the old-fashioned view of the world as a battle between underdog and "overdog" has been proven false.  Because of this, nothing is more threatening to the far left than a successful conservative women (or minority), who simply by existing not only disproves the powerful-oppressed dichotomy but soundly rejects leftist ideology.

As Ellison demonstrates, this leads the most ideologically-blinded liberal through severe cognitive contortions in order to maintain their long-held but misguided beliefs.  Ellison concludes his argument by stating, "And here is the sad part, some of them are women themselves - Michele Bachmann being an example."  There is nothing more laughable than arguing that strong, empowered, confident and successful, conservative women have achieved so much (and daresay are running for president) in order to put themselves "back in the kitchen".

Such statements should be easily dismissed except for the fact that they shed so much light on the state of the far left.  The movement, which had its shining moment some four decades ago, struggles to maintain relevance by consistently reinventing bogeymen.  After defeating a number of entrenched enemies (sexism and racism) in the 1960s, they are compelled to deny their own successes in order to justify their continued existence.  Such thinking is backwards and detrimental and the likes of Ellison should be embarrassed; not so much for the lunacy of this argument but for the fact that it nakedly displays the bankruptcy of their ideology.

Reverse Racism, Sotomayor, and Some Firemen

The term “reverse racist” is about a meaningless term as one can get. What’s the difference between a racist and a reverse racist? The artificial distinction seems to imply that someone who is prejudiced against minorities is a racist, while someone who is prejudiced against whites is a reverse racist. But why is a distinction necessary? Racism is racism, pure and simple. If one is discriminatory based on race, it is racism. That’s it.

It seems that the use of “reverse racist” is mired in a philosophy that systematically separates races and automatically defers to the Democrats’ talking points and language. Racism is often an accusation hurled at the right from the left. Whites have historically been pegged as racist (often because they were). However, it is seemingly un-PC to call a minority racist. It touches on some sort of sensitivity to use the language of victimhood for the supposed [historical] perpetrator. So instead, the right soft-toes around the Democrats’ feelings and coins a new term- “reverse racism”.

This is at best inane and worst outright harmful. Racism, to whomever it is directed at, should be labeled as such. By having two terms, the argument is still one of white vs. black- not one between discrimination and non-discrimination. It is foolish for America’s conservatives to give the Democrats free rein to structure the debate around skin color and claim that only one or two groups in America are truly victims. Rather, Republicans need to brand racism propagated against whites not as reverse racism, but simply as racism. It is the same beast.

This is essential to shifting the focus of the equality and discrimination debate in America from one of skin-color to one of tolerance. In this day and age, skin-color should not matter. The so-called Civil Rights movement should no longer be one of emancipation for blacks and other minorities, but one of eradication of race based thinking, regardless of the racial category of the victim. The emancipation movement for blacks has already succeeded. It is high time we recognize this. The Left is very reluctant to do so, as there are a milieu of special interests and politicians (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton) whose existence is based on racial tensions. The Republicans only fuel this mode of thinking by acquiescing to Democrat standards of language use.

This issue has been widely prevalent in regards to Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court. While I would not go so far as to call her a racist, Judge Sotomayor’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano is clearly racist and discriminatory (See my prior discussion here http://anewrepublican.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-race-is-your-fireman.html). She approved of a system that blatantly and unfairly signaled out (and failed to reward) individuals based on skin color. Republicans have been doing a great disservice by terming it reverse racism. It implies that Sotomayor’s decision does not have the same gravity as it would have if the races of the firemen involved were inverted. In fact, the Ricci decision is as heinous as if New Haven refused to promote any black firefighters simply because of their skin color.

It is time to take charge of the debate. Republicans have to move the focus from the partisan, racial agenda set by the Democratic Party to a new post-Civil Rights conversation. We have to appeal to the notions of equality and fairness. We have to seek to eradicate racism and raced-based thinking. We have to stop automatically terming any differences between blacks and whites as racism and focus on true discrimination- regardless of who it is targeted at. Defining the debate not as skin-color versus skin-color, but as discrimination versus non-discrimination will broaden the appeal of the Republican Party to minorities who previously bought the demonized racist image broadcast by the Democrats. Until we do that, the Republican Party will continue to suffer by playing the game under the Democrats’ rules

Free Speech? I Think Not

Despite allegedly being bastions of liberalism, American’s elite universities are deplorably illiberal. Take the recent incidents at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Former Congressman Tom Tancredo (http://teamamericapac.org/) was brought to UNC by an on-campus group to give a speech about illegal-immigration. Before he could even start a group of anti-dialogue leftists unfurled a banner across the podium. They chanted loudly and prevented Tancredo from speaking. (See Michelle Malkin’s blog for a video of the event http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/16/where-are-the-adults-at-university-of-north-carolina-chapel-hill/.) The speech was never given.

This is, unfortunately, just one of far too many examples of the left’s desires to quash free speech on America’s university campuses. This is a bit ironic if you accept the Democrats’ rhetoric that they are the supporters of free speech. The irony fades if you understand Democrats not as supporters of free speech, but abusers of the philosophical concept of free speech to establish their beliefs as the only acceptable dialogue. Democrats, and particularly Democrat organizations on these campuses, use the term ‘free speech’ as a ploy to signify the freedom for left-wing ideas. However, when dissenting views arise, the notion of free speech is cast aside. It becomes embarrassingly clear that free speech is not a true principle of the left, but a figure of speech.

This is terribly concerning. Our institutions of higher learning should be the exemplar of free speech. Politically active people on campus should, not by law, but by policy and ideology be committed to the open and free discussion of ideas and policies. There should be no more perfect place for the free movement of ideas than at these universities. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

These liberal groups, which have now become the majority on campuses, seek to do what their platforms supposedly rail against. They claim to be representative of minorities. They claim to speak for the oppressed. Maybe at one point they did, but unfortunately the term minority has lost its true meaning. ‘Minority’ is not supposed to solely refers to racial classes in America, but to any viewpoint, ideal, or characteristic that is not is not ‘mainstream’. Democrats have hijacked the term, and claimed unmitigated representation of minorities.

However, when a group or idea that was once a minority becomes accepted by the mainstream, its proponents no longer have a role in defending that minority. Now they become the oppressors as they seek to use the same ‘protect the minority’ language to further their partisan agendas. This is seemingly what has happened in the women’s and black’s rights movements. Two noble causes that fought for and justly gained equality some 50 years ago, now no longer have much of a purpose. Yet they push on with bankrupt and out of touch leaders such as Al Sharpton.

This is the same phenomenon that we see on college campuses today. These misguided youth are fed a steady diet of illiberalness from professors and national organizations. When professors post pictures comparing George Bush to a monkey, or laugh at students that express different beliefs, or prevent students from open discussion (all of which has happened to me) an altogether restrictive environment is established. Students are not taught to think liberally but to think Liberally. The difference is that true liberals are open to discourse and dialogue. They want to learn and hear each other out. However, Liberals are simply those that tow the Democratic Party line. The Democrats try to claim these two concepts are one and the same, but they are clearly not.

It is necessary for Democrats to be truly liberal, not just Liberal. This should be a matter of policy. I do want to emphasize that I am not so convinced this is a free speech issue. I think private institutions (on the issue of public universities such as UNC I think this is a bit more hazy) have a right to approve and disprove of who speaks on campus. Inappropriate and un-educational hatemongers, such as Ward Churchill, should rightfully be precluded from speaking and teaching. That being said, as a matter of policies these universities should keep true to their supposed mission and allow open and free dialogue. Disrupters of this, whether on the left or right, should be punished accordingly. Preventing someone from speaking is not an exercise in free speech. Differences should be settled and discussed by allowing both sides to have the podium- and both sides being able to hear the other.