How the left has blown it

Paul T. writes:

Regarding your post, “Even the Washington Post has turned against Occupy Wall Street”:

Exactly right—the fooferah is coming to be, not over bankers, bailouts and so on, as originally, but over the occupiers’ own forcible takeover of public space. Which is to say that the movement has grossly overplayed its hand while (if I may mix metaphors) taking its eye off the ball, and is correspondingly losing public sympathy. As a great country song has it, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em’”; and the OWS crowd doesn’t. Even here in liberal Toronto, where a recent poll showed 58 percent of locals holding a favorable opinion of our own ‘Occupiers’, patience is wearing very thin. What some people took as a return of the Aquarian Age is coming to look like … Hoodstock!

LA replies:

And Obama, the Democratic Party, and the liberal media are left holding the bag. Unfortunately, by November 2012, the voters will have forgotten the Obamacrats’ role in promoting these would-be revolutionists.

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Kristor writes:

You write:

And Obama, the Democratic Party, and the liberal media are left holding the bag. Unfortunately, by November 2012, the voters will have forgotten the Obamacrats’ role in promoting these would-be revolutionists.

I’m not so sure the newly invigorated loony left will allow us to forget. My bet is that they tack to a different form of protest—flash protests, or something like that. They got all excited and began to feel important when all the media were reporting on them. They won’t want to allow all the “momentum” they feel they’ve generated to dissipate. They’ll want to crank up the volume even more.

Also, so long as the financial crisis continues in Europe, the press will keep demonizing bankers, so they will have lots to be irate about. And, the longer that Democrat policies defer the economic recovery, the more concrete grievances the Occupiers will be able to blame on the bankers.

James R. writes:

You wrote: “by November 2012, the voters will have forgotten the Obamacrats’ role in promoting these would-be revolutionists”

I keep one ear in the grapevine, and none of this was a surprise. I knew six months or so before it even started what the plans were. And I can assure you that the Occupy movement will come back around May 2012.

I think this was alluded to by one of the secondary organizers (Adbusters) in one of the stories you linked to: the plan was always to wrap this fall’s protests up around now, the various mayors including Bloomberg, whether by accident or design, helped them do this in a way that advances the narrative. The “spontaneous, grass-roots” organized plan has always been for renewed protests next Spring, which will be made to look spontaneous and new but really be a round-up of the same suspects, and thus, despite themselves, degenerate into the same spectacle. (The later is not part of the plan, but is inevitable because they are what they are).

The voters will—or can—be reminded, but only if people like ourselves do a better job than we have so far in not letting liberals shape the narrative again. You’d be surprised how many people have not been turned off by this, and because the mayors handed them a narrative gift in how the protests were “closed down,” as time goes by they will be able to reshape the perceptions of people who right now have a been turned off by the antics while these antics are still fresh in their minds: the protestors will be reframed (again) as victims rather than victimizers. Ken Hechtman could probably better explain how this will be achieved than I can, if he’s so inclined.

Matthew H. writes:

James R. expects the OWS crowd back next Spring and he may be right. However, my bet is that if they come back they will come back scrubbed up and looking more respectable. Think of the “Clean for Gene” campaign in 1968 (these people love nothing so much as rehashing the 1960s) in which students and hippies shaved and got haircuts in order to make a good impression on Middle America in support of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential run. I foresee stories about how the movement has “matured” and attained a new sophistication. (Perhaps they will even cease defecating on the sidewalk.) Look for earnest, idealistic young people who only seek to “speak truth to power.” All this zaniness is fine in the run up to the Republican primaries. But the Democrat’s nightmare of ‘68, when their children created a violent freakshow in Chicago driving every normal person to Nixon, has surely not been forgotten. In their hearts the OWS’ers are still Obama’s people and some adult will have to take them in hand.

LA replies:

Maybe, as part of their cleaned-up act, they’ll call themselves the Log Cabin Democrats.

A commenter at Lucianne.com writes:

Reply 10—Posted by: viperdog, 11/16/2011 7:42:32 AM

Yea, but the stupids involved in it don’t realize the party is over and are still desperately trying to eke out another few minutes of infamy. They never had a message, which was proved by the many attempts to get the asses to explain what they were all about, and they couldn’t. Apparently all these losers really are, is a bunch of lazy parasites that want their worthless lives paid for by someone elses hard work, because they feel put upon by a society that rewards that hard work. They are jealous of other peoples success and being too dumb to understand how the system works, they go into a rather large pout! Of course under a bunch of Jerks in the Obama regime, to include Obama himself, their large pout is rewarded with fawning news coverage.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 16, 2011 10:37 AM | Send