Occupy Wall Street Could be Disaster for Democrats

Blackrook · Oct 4, 2011

You know real change is upon us because the celebrity left has come together. Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons, Michael Moore, Roseanne Barr, Mark Ruffalo, Yoko Ono, and Alec Baldwin are speaking out. And when this many famous millionaires get preachy at the same time it can only mean one thing: theyve had it up to here with the rich.

Just as when hundreds of protestors claim police brutality their next logical step is to demand a larger and more powerful state, of course.

If youre having problems grasping the nuances of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you havent been paying attention to the present-day left. And good for you.

The self-demonizing millionaires and state-worshipping police haters barely scratch the surface of the ideological dyslexia at work. One Occupy Wall Street members proposed list of demands calls first for nativist trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market, and then for one-worldist open borders migration, so that anyone can travel anywhere to work and live. The document, like the motivation behind it, is a hodgepodge of paranoia, entitlement, self-pity, self-righteousness, class warfare, and economic illiteracy. If this spotty protest moment becomes broad-based and loud the thorough airing of modern-day leftism will prove to be a conservatives election-year dream come true.

On Monday, with Occupy Wall Street spawning copycat demonstrations in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, the Washington Posts E.J. Dionne asked hopefully, Can the left stage a Tea Party? I dont know if it can but if I were a GOP strategist Id be praying that it does.

The true leftist agenda is so surreal Republicans couldnt satirize it if they tried. (Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of Americas nuclear power plants.) These leftists are so reckless that an extended, high profile occupation movement of national reach would bury liberalism months before November 2012. It would, in short, function for Democrats exactly as Democrats had hoped (in vain) that the Tea Party would function for Republicans in 2010. In unhinged Occupiers, conservatives would find an easy and clean target to run against and destroy. Whats more, this would force Barack Obama either to publicly walk back all the class-warfare rhetoric that the protesters have taken to heart or to sink as one of their number. He has long nurtured dual personae, vacillating in political style between inflammatory community-organizer and conciliatory high-office holder. A large national Occupier movement would require him to end that game once and for all.

Tea Partiers didnt dash conservative hopes in 2010 because they were on the right side of history. While they demanded smaller government and less spending we watched Europe nearly collapse under the weight of regulation and entitlements. Their message made sense to Americans. But watching Russell Simmonsthe anti-capitalist zillionairemeditate with nose-pierced 20-somethings on the hope that more stimulus will fall like rain is unlikely to sway independent voters. In the age of Solyndra, the Occupiers call for a fast track process to bring the alternative energy economy up to energy demand, (Demand Five) isnt going to resonate. Protestors appeal for the U.S. to stop supporting Israel is a non-starter in an America where Christian conservatives and Jewish liberals have been holding Obamas feet to the fire on his hostility to the Jewish state.

With all these ill-suited messages and hypocritical messengers its easy to overlook the one timely half-truth among the Occupiers gripes: government and big business have grown entirely too close. I say half-truth because the protestors fail to understand that the road to change runs through Washington and not Wall Street. As long as government tries to pick private-sector winners, green or otherwise, corporatism endures. And as long as regulatory regimes prohibit large-scale investment by all but the most seasoned lobbyists, the market will remain less open than it should be. Those have never been easy points for conservatives to make, but with the incoherent Occupy Wall Street taking the opposite position the American public might first be more open to a little counterintuitive analysis.
Click to expand...

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/04/occupy-wall-street-disaster-democrats/

It's hard to take seriously a group of people who have no realistic goals and no realistic ways to achieve them.

Also, if corporations are the problem, the bigger problem is big government loans, bailouts, and subsidies that choose one corporation over its competitors for special treatment. Obama and the Democrats are engaging in "crony capitalism" -- a unholy alliance of big government and big business that is bad for everyone but the corrupt politicians and corporate CEOs who get rich off of it.

Combining anti-free trade with open borders doesn't even make sense. What's the point of cutting off cheap labor in China if all the cheap labor can swarm into our country and compete with us here?

It's all pretty pointless, if you ask me.

Mad Conservative · Oct 4, 2011

It sure is hard to take seriously!
Watch this LOL

FearandLoathing · Oct 4, 2011

Blackrook said: ↑

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/04/occupy-wall-street-disaster-democrats/
Combining anti-free trade with open borders doesn't even make sense. What's the point of cutting off cheap labor in China if all the cheap labor can swarm into our country and compete with us here?

It's all pretty pointless, if you ask me.
Click to expand...

Well it's kind of hard to take any of them seriously, their demands that is.

http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/occupy-wall-street-their-demands/

# Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
# Demand four: Free college education.
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Demand three kind of says it all...no work at high pay....who wouldn't like that?

I agree though, the naivety and radicalism is a serious threat to the left. I have to disagree with the comparison to the tea party though. As far as I can tell tea party people are a little more realistic and a lot less angry...

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