That is why the protests look, one the face of it, just like every other episodic post-'60s gathering. That suspicion is amplified by the claim - which has become something of a media mantra - that the protest has no specific point, that it is just an even vaguer iteration of the anti-globalization movement. But that's not entirely fair: what is at issue is the combination of lack of opportunity and high levels of unemployment on the one side, and growing inequality thanks to a financial elite that has prospered while the country has staggered. There is a great deal of anger out there, and Wall Street is the right and proper target. The real problem for OWS isn't that the movement has no message or goals, it is that it does not have an adequate ideological language in which to express them.
The current wisdom is that the OWS movement represents the steady polarization of American politics, an equal and opposite reaction to the Tea Party. But while the Tea Party has successfully installed itself into the manure-ridden stables of Congressional horse-trading, the left continues to believe that the street protest is the only effective mechanism of political engagement.
For the French, it's very familiar. France is one of the most centralized states in the world, governed by remote bureaucratic agencies that are usually able to entirely ignore local opinion. This has given the French left a distinct attitude toward the state, in which power is always seen as lying in the hands of les autres, a group that steadfastly resists change until accumulated discontent boils over into the streets. These periodic protests amount to a ritualized, almost theatric-al re-enactment of the original Revolution.
That is because the current French republic is, in many respects, structurally similar to the ancien regime - captured by a coalition of rent-seeking elites that resists any demand for fundamental reform. While the initial problem was solved only through the extreme violence of the Revolution, today French politics persists as little more than a crude dialogue between the elites and the streets, a dramedy where everyone knows their part by heart.
Over in the United States, ever since the sixties, the language of the counterculture has completely replaced socialism as the dominant mode of thinking for the left. That is why virtually every American left-wing action since the '60s has been something of a staged re-enactment of the protests that flared into violence in 1968. End the war, smash the state, subvert capitalism - it's just rinse, repeat as far the left is concerned.
Yet there is starting to emerge, perhaps, a different way of thinking. This is clearest in the slogan the OWS movement has adopted, "we are the 99 per cent," underscoring the basic insight that the great many are being exploited by the very few. This message - that there is a collectivity out there that has a common interest - is something new for an American left that has been conditioned to despise the masses, and what the Occupy Wall Street movement needs more than anything is a different ideological framework. The old language of socialism - that the entitlements of the few are the entitlements of all - is an obvious choice, but that kite won't fly. Red-baiting remains far too effective a rhetorical strategy in a country that deep down believes that McCarthy was right.
But there is another vocabulary at hand: that of the French Revolution. If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has been exposed as a recipe for plutocracy, what about liberty, equality, fraternity? Fraternity - or more expansively, solidarity - is nothing more than the conviction that we are all in this together. Or if not all of us, at least the 99 per cent of the population that is coming to the growing realization that America is a rigged game. The challenge then is whether the movement can motivate this new language of mass social solidarity to mirror the Tea Party and properly institutionalize itself as the most committed, energetic and ideologically focused wing of the Democratic party.
Instead, the movement appears to be falling back, once again, on the old counterculture tropes of resisting conformity through small-scale acts of pointless rebellion: Do drugs, dress weird, have sex, shout slogans. As Occupy Wall Street morphs and metastasizes over the coming weeks, the only question is whether the protesters are, this time, really in it together, or if it is all once again just a gathering of the tribes, fighting for their right to party.
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