Form vs. Content: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

Its fashionable (and interesting) to compare the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. One need not wander too far afield to figure out why: both of them are taking the form (or in the case of the Tea Party when still nascent, took the form) of a sixties style social protest. This form of comparison can, of course, be misleading: as David Zarefsky pointed out in the early 80's in an essay on rhetorical studies's penchant for studying social protest, simply aping the formal characteristics of a social movement (appearing in public, lobbing demands at the state) does not immediately qualify a human gathering as an actual, anti-institutional social movement. However, this point, confined as it was to an article almost 30 years old, seems in some ways to have been lost (if it was ever found) by those comparing the Tea Party and OWS. I too, may prove guilty of this sin. However, I merely plan on assessing how the Tea Party's relevance changes the ways in which OWS can be read by the mainstream media.

To do so requires a reminder about what was truly incredible about the Tea Party: it was a conservative political organization willing to appear in public as an "outsider" organization, that is, as a group claiming to be structurally disempowered politically, and using that status to authorize it demands against the government. Typically, publics theory (especially those who follow closely Michael Warner) understand a key element in discussing political space the identification of those bodies that are marked and visible. Those marked and visible persons, because of their material existence "in" space provide the symbolic resources to construct an unmarked, invisible "mass public" not coterminous with the "marked" public but nevertheless related to them by virtue of the difference they share. But the fact that the Tea Party generated coverage, and was discussed (even in the vein of "are they legitimate?) was key because it established, at a deeper (one might say ontological) level the "truth" of the Tea Party as a protest movement: by virtue of its identification as "not" the public, its existence was certified.

Of course, the underside of this was the Tea Party, by appearing in public, risked marginalizing itself as (to use in an actually relevant way for once) "always already" not the public: by trudging out the white, mostly male, middle aged bodies of the Tea Partiers, they established that they did not belong to the mass public they identified: the progressive, neo-socialist political movement led by Barack Obama. Nevertheless, whatever work the Tea Party did to unhinge a certain version of conservatism from its disembodied position as the structuring possibility of American politics, the Tea Party itself, by measures of either symbolic circulation or policy/electoral success, established itself as a relevant force in American politics.

It was something about the form of the Tea Party that attracted media attention. After all, American for Prosperity, The Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich: all of them were demanding lower taxes, smaller government. And its not as if these calls hadn't succeeded: between Clinton-era welfare reform and the Bush tax cuts, such policy positions were riding high. But the combination of electoral victory for Barack Obama and the ardent, energized, and angry Tea Party proved an alluring media target: how was conservatism configuring itself in the wake of the electoral chaos of 2008's repudiation of conservatism? Its actual appearance, that it appeared at all, was a really big deal, because it signaled a kind of refiguring of American political space.

Josh Gunn (whose blog should be mandatory reading) points out in a recent TP/OWS comparison post that there was a pretty substantial "lag time" in the way the media responded to OWS, owing to the difference in the movements form. Josh argues that the Tea Party was a mostly virtual movement, while OWS was fairly "spatial" in that the actual Occupancy of a physical space near a site of injustice matters. I don't disagree but I want to add a supplement: I also think that the history of social protest in America (Full disclosure: I recently read Nixonland and can't get away from it), especially the dominant narrative of the sixties as a battle between authority and hippies/protestors, helped to overdetermine how the form of social protest was itself a kind of content: one that harkened back to the old battles between cops and Yippies, trials of the Chicago 7, civil rights marches in the South, and so on. The Tea Party, however, as a conservative insurrection, produced the possibility that social protest could not be coded immediately as "liberal" on the basis of form alone. So while the right continues to circulate the old "bunch of smelly hippies" arguments, they are finding a lot less circulation in mainstream political discourse than did say, the WTO protests (also, to the Occupiers credit, violence from movement members has been very, very low). Occupy Wall Street may well persist because objections to the movement on a purely formal basis may be difficult to sustain. Instead, content based arguments about the movements demands (or lack thereof, to read the papers of the day) signify that the form of the protest might matter a lot less for deliberation purposes, and that space for meaningful disputes on the basis of policies is posible (though perhaps not likely.)

In sum: the gambit of the Tea Party was that they could appear as outsiders, aping the protest strategies of progressivism to capitalize on the way the symbolic environment on American seemed to be marginalizing them after the 2008 election. However, by legitimizing "appearance in public" as a protest strategy in form alone, one of the most effective conservative arrows used to delegitimize liberal protest politics (the linking of social protest as a "form" to a history of the "loud minority" cataclysms of the 60's) was taken out of the argumentative quiver. To the extent that OWS makes successes in the future, it owes these in part to a conservative belief that social protest could be coopted in the name of conservatism.

"They Don't Have a Demand"

So I guess there's some obligatory waxing about "Occupy Wall Street" to be done. In general, I'm quite interested in how people attenuate themselves to the movement. There tend to be four or so different responses:

1. "These damn dirty hippies are seditiously ruining our country: just like their forbearers in the Sixties, we should make sure that they know that the vocal and smelly minority won't have a say in politics." This response tends to be conservative. I should also note that to the extent that violence and disobedience are overcoded as the responsibility of the crowd in the cortex of our imaginary, I am sympathetic to quasi-fascist arguments that the protestors should be held to a higher standard of behavior from within, simply to defend their optics. The counter argument, of course, is that even if nothing approaching "inappropriate" behavior is done the media frame will inevitably construct some such action out of misleading bits into a spectacle. Perhaps. This is no reason not to try.

2. "I have sympathies, but what is their PLAN??!" I find this argument the most difficult to stomach, in part because it is the argument where the moderate-pseudo progressive left meets a conservative complaint. Actually, thats the whole reason. Look, in the last 2 years we have seen a resounding wave of conservative populism, a political movement that appears as a function of grassroots beliefs mixed with a healthy does of rhetoric about the "American people" in a way that makes most progressive gaze lustfully at the American flag. Of course, when one pushes hard on the Tea Party for real plans, one comes up against a barrier: those that refuse to defend substantial cuts in Medicare and Social Security, when you get down to policy particulars, do not have a real PLAN to address the liberty-based concerns for which they advocate. This, as Obama has recently been fond of saying albeit a bit less appropriately, is math. However, the reason the Tea Party's arguments have sustained and now embedded themselves as relevant fragments within the deliberative framework of the GOP is because they work within an effective taken for granted frame: that government is bad, and its forces tend towards inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Conversely, the progressive/liberal democratic party has tended to concede space to this argument, generally arguing only for government when its a necessity but generally speaking about the need to free the "American people" to make the country great again. Now there are exceptions: you have your millionaire surtax, your Wall Street/Main Street binary, but the recent decision to NOT push harder EPA regulations underscores the Democratic mainstream's tendency to collapse in the middle MUCH faster than their conservative counterparts. I would like to assert (as many smarter and more eloquent theorists and writers have already) that this is because (until OWS) progressives were conceding the basic thesis of conservative arguments: that government is bad. There are exceptions to this, but it seems like "States of Exception" are more easily generated in the face of an existential threat to all Americans (terrorism, ahem) than in the face of a partial or part-ordered amount of discomfort for many Americans (but crucially, not the universal image of hardworking "Americans" whose suffering must never be read inductively as an indict of America itself.) The reason why "what's the plan" is so frustrating as a response to OWS is that before you have a plan, you have to understand the political terrain. The status quo understanding of the political terrain treats the market and the actors of market capitalism as unvarnished natural goods. OWS is beginning the work of challenging this presumption. So a plan? That might come. For now, you've got to not rewrite common sense, but just make it thinkable that its no longer common sense.

3. "They've been at this a while." They've been there for a few weeks, whereas the unabashed declarations of love from Hayek and Mises are decades old. Lets holster the speed gun, kids.

4. You have cautious support on editorial pages of major daily newspapers. That it is even being covered is a big deal, although I have healthy skepticism's about Michael Warner's "mere attention" thesis: if something receives "mere attention" as an abject/external point to generate another kind of publicity, thats far different from fawning adulation. I do think that this everyday support is a powerful point to argue that the insistence of the crowd that they are just "regular Americans" is a pretty amazing thing. Once the state and not the market became the enemy of the American people, the Clinton-era welfare caves became a fait accompli. If "the people" can become read not as an effect of the government's displacement of their true and thorough virtuosity, but instead as evidence of a linkage between government and popular interest against the market (monsterized in this case at the heart of finance) then that might really do something.

On the Location of The People

In an address to the Congress on February 24th, 2009, Barack Obama delivered a stemwinding speech that progressives hailed as a phenomenal victory. The New York Times's Frank Rich argued that it was a "riveting" address, but one that also put Obama at a crossroads, confronting the nascent populist rage embodied in Rick Santelli's now famous rant against "bad behavior" on CNBC. Obama's speech was well received by the public; polls after the speech showed a meaningful pro-Obama bounce. Indeed, even conservative David Brooks praised it as "an excellent speech."

What interests me about the speech is just how conservative it is in content while stylistically is more liberal. It discusses the necessity of governmental intervention to the economy as a temporary intervention in an exceptional circumstance, only needed insofar as it brings us back to a condition of such economic stability the free competitionon an equal plane between economic agents can resume. Obama also locates the responsibility for the economic crisis not just on a greedy Wall Street, but also emphasizes that individual Americans have been behaving in economically irresponsible ways.

Obama also flatly defends American exceptionalism. Economic malaise threatens not human life or dignity but rather the danger is that America's status as "the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history" might be threatened. What will overcome this threat is the American spirit; government action is conditioned upon this fact. Government only acts until once again American excellence can again take over. Rather than examining the economic malaise as a symptom of a deeper problem (pursuing a perspective by incongruity or inquiring after the "metaphor of the metaphor"). The problem is not with the idea of America; it lies with how those called Americans have misbehaved within the structure itself. The economic collapse provides us with a "time of reckoning" in Obama's words, one where it is time to own up to our irresponsibility for borrowing irresponsibly, consuming too greedily, and refusing the future for gains in the near-term.

Obama thus particularizes the human behaviors of the last few decades that led to the economic issues as fundamentally resolvable through human choice. Recession could be avoided: if only we were better capitalists. No foreclosures but if banks don't let greed cloud their market judgment. It seems that the real issue is not a systemic one with the economic system, as Obama's opponents would have it, but instead adjustments within the system. The agents within the system must behave according to the rules of the system.

So fine, dear reader, you might flag this as a banal observation: Hey lookee! The president is supporting the vision of America that everyone assumes is predominant. All well and good. But we ought to be attentive to the situation, as well, and ponder: Obama's speech is responding to a tidal wave of anger (and as it would turn out, populist anger). How does Obama's speech figure the people?

The short answer is: he doesn't. Or at least, they are nothing more than an assumed mass, whose existence is already guaranteed. Their individual agency need only be liberated from our temporary morass. While government is figured as something that does work for the people, that work is only temporary, necessitated by extenuating circumstances. This is true with one major exception: for Obama, the people don't really know that they need his help. He positions the judgment that there is a crisis at the level of the popular but the solutions are positioned as emanating from the government. His tone is to say: "Look at all these things we (I) are (am) doing for you! Tax cuts! A recovery plan! Functioning loan markets!" However temporary, government is the condition of the possibility of a now-functioning American polity.

In this way, the often rambunctious and fiery Tea Party arguments, structured around a sort of populism that locates liberation in common sense and oppression in vague managerialism, gain ground. Because the judgment of the crisis is located in both the people and the government but the content of the solutions is decided by the government, any time-delay in the resolution of the crisis can be attributed to a failure in the government's solution-side judgment rather than in a misdiagnosis of the problem (a diagnosis shared by government and people). The supplement of the government can then be more easily discarded rhetorically, in favor of a sure-sighted support of what the people want--presumably, more freedom and individual liberation.