A Skeptical Survivalist

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Egyptians did it for democracy. So did people in Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Now, activist groups are hoping Americans will launch their own uprising — in the form of thousands of protesters descending on Wall Street this weekend.

Occupy Wall Street is a “leaderless resistance movement” spearheaded by activist magazine Adbusters. Organizers want people to swarm into lower Manhattan on September 17 and set up camp for two months, then “incessantly repeat one simple demand.”

Adbusters posted a call to action on its blog July 13 — originally asking for 90,000 people to join the protest — and word spread quickly around the Internet. A total of 74 cities around the world are participating in “solidarity actions,” and the event’s official site will stream live shots of those events.

The New York Police Department says it is prepared to deal with any situations that arise.

“The NYPD is aware of various protests and we have planned accordingly,” Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told CNN.

In a September test run of the occupation, nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct, and later released without being charged.

“It takes a lot to rise up and reform the global economic system,” Lasn says. “And maybe this time we fail. But if we do, we’re just setting the tone for the next revolution.”

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It’s time for the left to get off its duff and turn the tables on the radical right. And our history reveals that there’s an excellent method for accomplishing precisely that: a great march of the unemployed on Washington.

Recent polls reveal that Americans are decisively more concerned about the crisis of unemployment than the issue of our national debt. But as many commentators have observed in recent weeks, the results of the midterm elections, with Republicans gaining control of the House, and the associated rise of the tea party have pushed an agenda of austerity in government spending ahead of using government resources to fight unemployment.

Once there, these unemployed people would deliver a simple demand: The government must act immediately to give them back employment. They could invoke quite a number of interesting historical precedents: the platform of the pre-Civil War Whig Party, whose leaders, including Henry Clay and young Abraham Lincoln, urged governmental “internal improvements” — public works such as canal- and road-building projects — to give work to the jobless during a ruinous depression that followed a financial panic in 1837.

They would naturally invoke the great precedent of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, an agency that under the leadership of Harry Hopkins created jobs for the jobless almost overnight, thus providing some desperate and innocent people with a way to save their families and homes.

To be sure, the left has tried to address economics: It has protested repeatedly on the issues of out-sourcing, deregulation of the financial sector, and so on. But in the midst of the worst economic contraction since the 1930s, it has somehow allowed the extremists of the right to run roughshod over them.

That needs to change. Even many sincere and committed centrists admit that there are times when a disproportionate influence in one direction will require some vigorous counter-pressure if a wholesome balance is to reign.

A march of the unemployed might be the way to do it. And there’s historical precedent for this idea, too — not only in the still-remembered marches on the nation’s capital that occurred in the 1960s, but also in the largely forgotten marches of the unemployed that occurred both in 1894 and (more consequentially) 1932.

The preparations would have to start soon if such an exercise in grass-roots activism is to stand a real chance of affecting our political balance of power next year. Is the left prepared to rise to the occasion?

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The most casual participant in the political process knows exactly what they will get when they vote for and elect Tea Party types and the more extreme right Republicans in general. No, he never came out and said “Hey, I’m gonna ream you public employees so hard you won’t walk right for years!” on the campaign trail.

He might even have said a lot of sweet sounding things to the contrary. Only a voter lying to himself or completely ignorant of politics, however, would actually believe it. It’s time to stop being angry with Scott Walker, which makes no more sense than being angry at a dog for barking and chasing cars.

Instead, our anger is more fairly directed at the swing voters who decide American elections – the kind of mushy, ill-informed “independent” who would vote for him and then be shocked to learn how extreme his brand of governance is.

People like Walker will continue to get elected so long as there are voters who are willfully ignorant of what candidates really stand for or so easily duped that a few sound bites can overwhelm all available evidence that the Governor-to-be supports an agenda of the kind of corporate cronyism and pathological hatred of government that defines people of his ideological stripes.

When you vote for people like Scott Walker and Ron Johnson, this is what you get. How unfortunate it is that the rest of us have to be chained to so many people who have not yet figured that out. As long as the electorate is composed substantially of people who won’t understand that the glowing stove is hot until they put their hand on it, we will continue to suffer Scott Walkers at unpleasantly regular intervals.