What Gets Democracy Working?

I must admit, modern protests don’t inspire me. I applaud the great social crusades--Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington,Tahrir and Tienanmen Squares, and the campaign for women’s suffrage to name a few. It’s not that I don’t like protesters; rather, I don’t have much respect for radicals whose sound and fury drowns out opportunities for dialog and isolates them from the world they claim to want to reform.

Mattathias Schwartz’s excellent look at the back office and front line of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) describes the strategy that went into the first September 17th protest as well as the horizontal structures the movement employed to maintain some sense of order in an anarchical commune. The OWS protesters can be clever, but they come across as hopelessly bizarre.

Tea Partiers protest in DC, 2009

In this respect, OWS mirrors the potent but polarizing ascent of the Tea Party that emerged in 2009 and successfully carried the issue of anti-deficit, small-government conservatism through the 2010 mid-term elections and into the spending battles of 2011. Tea Partiers--who initially called themselves Tea Baggers--earned plenty of scorn, even as they organized, derailed the Republican establishment, and ushered an inexperienced, hard-line cadre of candidates into the House of Representatives who brought Washington to the brink of default and collapse.

The Occupy Movement can claim to have changed the national dialog to one of inequality as the public watched Republicans prioritize millionaires over deficit reduction. Their core concern rings true with most Americans. But Occupiers’ calls to arrest “banksters” and impose a 1% Robin Hood tax on financial transactions are just as unviable in the real world than the Tea Party’s gold-standard, end-the-Fed, back-to-the-Constitution platform.

Human microphone in Zuccotti Park, 2011

I recognize the tactical brilliance of the human microphone and the value of visual feedback from hand signals that cuts down on shouting, but the protesters and organizers that Schwartz profiles often resemble aliens who live in a parallel universe of revolutions and “surprise attacks against business as usual.” Do these radicals contribute any more than Tea Party leaders, like Michele Bachmann, who rail against “gangster government” and shadow box their fascist, socialist, foreign-born president?

When African Americans staged sit-ins at southern lunch counters, they wore their best clothes and let white reactionaries act like hoodlums. Modern protesters on the left and right wings, by contrast, unleash a lot of energy without much dignity. Such movements may generate heat and gin up media and money, but they’re unsuited to help resolve the very problems they decry.

Brevity makes for attractive slogans, but radicals all too often reject realities that interfere with their ideology; this makes their cries counterproductive to reaching effective solutions. The  Constitution doesn’t mention cell phones, women voters, or waterboarding, and so, necessarily, our democracy has evolved and expanded over centuries to meet new challenges. Reverting America to the playbook of 1787 is neither feasible nor desirable.

At the same time, Occupiers ignore the fact that although big banks played fast and loose while we got burned, we’ll have a hard time proving that they broke many laws in the process, as James B. Stewart reports in the New York Times. Having read Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, The Devils are All Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, and Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson, among others, I can’t escape the reality that TARP and a host of other efforts by public servants and private firms prevented a collapse of trust that would have frozen economic activity in terrifying and unimaginable ways.

The world is too complicated for radicals of any stripe to engage with. Instead, they stand in the cold, on the fringes, and rail against the intolerability of life as we know it. I disagree. I am a vegan who bikes to work, cooks at home, uses public libraries and minimizes consumption, but I am not PETA, I don’t slash SUV tires, boycott restaurants, or steal. I smile as much as possible, say sir and ma'am, and work my butt off to earn respect and trust that might one day create openings for change.

I am not a protester; rather, I am a diplomat. I strive to be beyond reproach, displaying that honor and values attach to my world vision. I want to relate my faith in people to others’ faith in God, to connect my love of cooking with others’ love of eating (I also love eating), and bind my abstinence from alcohol and narcotics with the wonderful clarity that everyone feels in the best and brightest moments of their lives.

Civil Rights Marchers, 1965

Occupy Wall Street and other modern radicals on both extremes just blow like so much cold winter wind when I want to win through warmth, like the sun. What separates these modern “primal screams” from the progressive voices of the past? I think it’s dignity. Ghandi fasted and marched to the sea to collect salt while British platoons fired into unarmed crowds. Small black girls walked into schools as white women spat at them. Tahrir’s residents only threw stones when Mubarak charged camel-riding goons into their midst.

I respect anger and frustration, but only when they are contained as a fuel rather than deployed as a weapon. I tend to side with those who act like they represent the better angels of our nature rather than the darker rudeness of our humanity. I’m not attempting to tar all occupiers with this brush, but I came away from all the coverage of Zuccotti Park and other recent protest movements without a sense of respect for the loudest voices that join our national discourse.

I respect power and institutions. Quite frankly, I am utterly dependent on them. Every day that I don’t have to physically fight, scavenge for food, or personally guard my possessions is an opportunity to learn something new that would be rendered irrelevant in The Lord of the Flies. I don’t have to hone my skills with a gun or cut a year’s supply of firewood because social, political, and economic institutions give me shelter in civilization.

The Citizens Campaign is a movement that I can wholeheartedly support. Without one occupation, they nonetheless have educated thousands of citizens in democratic techniques and the levers of political power. Citizens Campaign provides a free web-based toolkit and expert support to empower social change at state and local levels. Their achievements include the adoption of New Jersey’s Pay-to-Play Reform Law--the strongest in the Nation, the Political Party Democracy Act that created grassroots control of gubernatorial endorsements, and over 200 city and town-level citizen empowerment laws. These are the rebels who speak softly and carry the big stick of democracy into battle for the little guy.

I suppose that my disconnect with anti-institutional protesters ultimately comes down to their rejection of the very order in which I hope to succeed and institute reforms. They rail against the very hope that motivates my daily struggle for betterment. I want to believe in a world that listens to reasoned reform at the same time that it ignores fringe calls for the abolition of existence as we know it. We don’t need to build a model society in Zuccotti Park or revert to 18th century rule of law, we need to continue to improve the civilization that enables Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and everyone else that inhabits it, whether they like it or not.