Does George Lakoff Always Get It Right? What About Occupy Wall Street Turning Electoral?

George Lakoff writes that the next step for OccupyWallStreet is out of the parks and into action-- electoral action. Far be it for me to challenge a guru like Lakoff-- and I'm working with candidates and potential candidates who are part of the Occupy Movement and virtually every single Blue America candidate has pledged fealty to the 99% Movement... But... OccupyWallStreet hardly speaks with one voice beyond a basic message of discomfort at the teaming up of Wall Street, K Street and the ruling elite to screw the rest of us. Electoral politics, though... I don't know. There are forces inside the movement who are hostile to the very idea and some who feel-- the way Stalin did-- that the Democrats and the Republican are equally to blame for the woes of the world.

The Occupy movement has raised awareness of a great many of America's real issues and has organized supporters across the country. Next comes electoral power. Wall Street exerts its force through the money that buys elections and elected officials. But ultimately, the outcome of elections depends on people willing to take to the streets-- registering voters, knocking on doors, distributing information, speaking in local venues. The way to change the nation is to occupy elections.

Whatever Occupiers may think of the Democrats, they can gain power within the Democratic Party and hence in election contests all over America. All they have to do is join Democratic Clubs, stick to their values, speak out very loudly, and work in campaigns for candidates at every level who agree with their values. If Occupiers can run tent camps, organize food kitchens and clean-up brigades, run general assemblies, and use social media, they can take over and run a significant part of the Democratic Party.

To what end? All the hundreds of the occupiers' legitimate complaints and important policy suggestions follow from a simple general moral principle: American democracy is about citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that care.

The idea is simple but a lot follows from it: a government that protects and empowers everyone equally, a government of the Public-- public roads and buildings, school and universities, research and innovation, public health and health care, safety nets, access to justice in the courts, enforcement of worker rights, and practical necessities like sewers, power grids, clean air and water, public safety including safe food, drugs, and other products, public parks and recreational facilities, public oversight of the economy-- fiscal and trade policy, banking, the stock market-- and especially the preservation of nature in the interest of all.

The Public has been what has made Americans free-- and has underwritten American wealth. No one makes it on his or her own. Private success depends on a robust Public.

The rationale for the Occupy movement is that all of this has been under successful attack by the right wing, which has an opposing principle, that democracy is about citizens only taking care of themselves, about personal and not social responsibility. According to right-wing morality, the successful are by definition the moral; the one percent are taken to be the most moral. The country and the world should be ruled by such a "moral" hierarchy. Except for national security, the Public should disappear through lack of funding. The nation and the world should be ruled for private profit alone-- and by force.

That idea is what is destroying American democracy, and America with it. That idea is what is behind everything the Occupy Movement opposes-- and everything that is going wrong with America today.

Not only is America divided between two opposing principles, but a great many individuals are of those two minds at once: progressive on some matters, conservative on others-- with all sorts of variations. They are called variously independents, moderates, or the center. They are mostly the population that elections depend on. They have not one fundamental principle, but are split between two.

What makes one of these ascendant in the individual brain is the language one hears most. That is why the domination of public discourse is so important. It is why advertising in the media is important, why talk radio and tv and social media matter. Elections are what focus attention on public discourse. That is why the next step for the Occupy Movement should be to occupy elections.

The way to begin any discussion should be: Do you care about your fellow citizens? If so, do you take responsibility to act on that care?

The next question is: Do you realize how much every American, no matter how rich or poor, depends upon The Public?

Only when those questions are answered can detailed policy questions make sense.

Those are the questions that should be dominating our public discourse. They are the implicit questions asked by the Occupy movement. It is time to make them explicit, and to do so where it counts: in occupying elections.

Persuasive... but. I've talked to Occupiers whose political sophistication isn't quite as acute as others in the Movement. Will they stick around for that trip. And there are others, both idealists and hucksters-- pulling in their own, very divergent directions, including a contingent that has every intention of attempting to turn OccupyWallStreet into a weapon to destroy the Democratic Party. I asked some of the Democratic candidates who have been most consistently outspoken in their praise for the 99% Movement and who have interacted with the Occupiers. Norman Solomon hit the nail right on the head. After reading Lakoff's essay he said, "Let's distinguish between 'can be', 'should be' and 'will be.'

"I've been at Occupy protests in eight different cities in my district. I've seen a wide range of political microclimates, within and between those protests.

"While retaining and hopefully expanding visible protests, I think the diverse Occupy movement can devote a lot of its focus to electoral politics next year. I believe it should-- supporting genuine progressive candidates with a clear history of challenging Wall Street power and organizing for grassroots democracy. The extent to which this WILL happen is up for grabs; we must make the case and organize to get it done!" Alan Grayson, clear across the country, had a similar perspective. He think Lakoff's assessment is correct.

Occupy Wall Street is as much a political movement as it is an economic one. The protesters understand that Wall Street dominates and exploits the political system in order to expand its power. And that Wall Street’s Achilles’ heel is that it is still subject to the law, and the law is written only by people who are voted into office. So one clear way to attack Wall Street’s control is to elect people who will end Wall Street’s domination and exploitation of government.
 
We’re not talking about a bunch of basketball fans, or piano players. These are people who are consciously choosing to be involved in inherently political activity.

I hope he's right. I wonder how deep that vision penetrates into the ranks of the Occupiers. Darcy Burner, who just declared for an open House seat in the Seattle area and is duking it out with two conservative Democrats in a primary battle that will determine the next congressmember from the district, seemed as hopefully and as worried about the outcome as I am:

I think it's possible but not inevitable. There needs to be an engagement mechanism they feel is theirs. The existing party structures are too insular to fit the bill. 

Howard Dean got his Deaniacs to take over a significant portion of the Dem Party, but first he got them to engage through the Dean campaign, which they owned. What can the occupiers own to set forth from?

Franke Wilmer, a brilliant and perceptive university professor in Montana (as well as the progressive candidate for the state's one House seat), is where I find myself turning more and more frequently when I need some brain power to get beneath the surface. And she's unsure as well.

They remind me of me/us when we first saw the trend and consequences of hypermaterialism... and that political and capitalist institutions were in cahoots, tacitly if not explicitly.  

The underlying issue is the equation of money with speech and its constitutional protection as such. The Occupiers were, after all, mobilized largely through Ad Busters.

There are so many limits on the system as it is and I do not foresee the kind of change we need in order to rescue democracy from corporatocracy with mass consciousness raising or crisis. I would, of course, like to see the Occupiers vote AND continue the occupation.

Two things work against them and us. One is campaign financing and it is much bigger than the Citizens United case. It started with Buckley v Valeo and Citizens is just an extension of that. At least Citizens says that corporations cannot contribute unlimited amounts of money directly to campaigns. But as long as the underlying notion that money is constitutionally protected speech prevails, we will not have publicly financed campaigns and consequently, we will have money speaking loudly and candidates compromising in the face of it. WE NEED A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO OVERTURN THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION OF MONEY AS POLITICAL SPEECH.

The other thing working against us/them is that we could change things even without a constitutional amendment that denies money the status of first amendment-protected speech, but that will take a long time-- and candidates/congressional members serving the 99% and running grassroots campaigns... will be a minority for some time and only with patience and persistence can we ever hope to prevail.  

But then again, I draw inspiration from (a) those who beat the odds that consciousness can be changed and lived to change history [Gandhi] and (b) those who persisted and prevailed [MLK, Mandela]... and after all, they are my heroes.

Mark Naison was sniffing around the same basic questions this weekend at L.A. Progressive, where he tried to answer the question Will Occupy Fade Away? He comes up with different answers.

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared. Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing-- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants-- that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised-- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy-- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity
First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated, one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish.

The young people in this movement, part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt, discovered they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them.

But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance.

When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge-- that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top.

What the Occupy movement was created a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another. Do such free zones exist in our schools, universities and workplaces? If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did!

There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens.

...In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers in Birmingham in 1963.

If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like.”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative critics.

And that is a very good thing for the country.

I know from my own experience that a disappointing number of people have the ability-- or maybe the inclination-- to distinguish between good Democrats and the corrupt/conflicted kind who are as complicit with Wall Street in the undermining of democracy and the middle class-- they do, after all, go hand in hand-- as your garden variety Republican. Clearly, institutions like the DCCC and the DSCC are just as toxic to the 99% Movement as the Republican Party or the Koch Bros. wide-flung fascist movement to overthrow Democracy. So how do we get to people-- even very sophisticated ones like Naison-- and explain the difference between a Norman Solomon and Darcy Burner on the one hand and a Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the other? God knows, I've been trying since DWT got going in 2005.