Not to my surprise, I'm smarter than a Wall Street occupier.
I establish my above assertion on the results of a poll conducted by New York magazine last week, which – in a refreshing juxtaposition to the publication's generally not-so-subtle liberal slant – cast the Über-liberal dogmatists of the Occupy Wall Street movement (outburst? Cry for attention?) as baselessly radical and tragically ill-informed.
The survey asked the long-haired young protesters in downtown Manhattan fairly basic questions of economic current affairs – basic, at least, for someone swarming the nation's financial districts, commanding some diaphanous, anything-but-defined-but-yeah-we'll-scream-about-it notion of "economic change."
No, the chairman of the Federal Reserve is not – as more than twenty percent, believe it or not, of those surveyed replied – "some old Jewish guy." And for the 65 percent who don't know who Elizabeth Warren is, let me phrase it in terms they'll understand, or at least not pillory: she hates Wall Street as much as they do.
Placing all personal political convictions aside, I'm troubled. For the purpose of this article, I'm a critic of neither liberals nor conservatives, but of idiots.
Idiots, it seem, have no particular partisan predisposition. Take, for example, the Tea Party movement, of which Occupy Wall Street has been called its liberal counterpart. I mean, really. The ultraconservative rhetoric of many of the populist advocates is as polemic, erroneous and grotesquely baseless as the Radiohead-rocking egalitarian punks currently camped out in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, the plaza of Dallas's city hall, and, yes, Baltimore's Inner Harbor. These are the voices of what some have dubbed second American Revolution. Stellar.
There is absolutely no denying that the U.S. is in a state of political and economic flux, if not sheer entropy. And so it goes with the rest of the world. 2011 has been a year of upheaval, perhaps best manifested in the case of Arab Spring, when hundreds of thousands of oppressed individuals in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and other Middle Eastern states successfully tore the fabric of their authoritarian governments by means of protests, demonstrations and – a favorite, now, of the Occupy Wall Street scene – Twitter.
Some protests were civil, some were brashly violent. All, however, were guided. The movements for liberation across the Middle East trafficked in calculations and were committed to specifics, stressing that unfair rule be eradicated and absent liberties be imposed.
Meanwhile, there's us. There are the Tea Party radicals who genuinely believe that President Obama is a veritable Communist (he's not) and the sizable margin of Occupiers who think Elizabeth Warren is Warren Buffett's wife (she isn't).
While my critique likely manifests itself as a shout from the ivory tower, the scoffs of a WASP-y political science major, I assure you that education and financial means are not the issue here. The majority of the Arab Spring protesters, after all, were uneducated and poor, to put it frankly.
Meanwhile, the U.S. sees some highly educated, highly accomplished individuals making some pretty brash statements – or, worse, making some even brasher policies. My point: the American political game, at least via the common man's pursuance to the First Amendment, has become frighteningly stupid.
What's even more frightening is that its foundation often politically sound, politically legitimate, only to be warped by radicalism.
The kangaroo court of today's political activism is, ironically and tragically, rooted in brilliance. For example, one of Occupy Wall Street's few concrete stipulations – the demand for public input in constitutional revisions – derives from the scholastic work of Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School professor and political scientists.
Where, then, are the Lessigs in Zuccotti Park? Where are the Tea Party's Joe Plumbers analyzing and rebuking Obama's retreat from neoliberalism, just as those in Egypt critiqued Hosni Mubarak's gross interpretation of Sharia law? Political change in America is contingent on its people. For such change to not prove dire, its people must know the country they seek to reform.
Yes, Ben Bernanke might be – as eight percent of Occupiers claimed – "some asshole/idiot," but there's more to it, believe it or not. Behind every opinion, there must be facts to substantiate it. And behind every revolution, there must be people – if even just a few good outspoken men – who know those facts.
