Anarchy in the U.S.A. … The roots of American disorder.

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Ever since September, when activists heeded Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn’s call to Occupy Wall Street, it’s become a rite of passage for reporters, bloggers, and video trackers to go to the occupiers’ tent cities and comment on what they see. Last week, the day after New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to dismantle the tent city in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times carried no fewer than half a dozen articles on the subject. Never in living memory has such a small political movement received such disproportionate attention from the press. Never in living memory has a movement been so widely scrutinized and yet so deeply misunderstood.

If income equality is the new political religion, occupied Zuccotti Park was its Mecca. Liberal journalists traveled there and spewed forth torrents of ink on the value of protest, the creativity and spontaneity of the occupiers, the urgency of redistribution, and the gospel of social justice. Occupy Wall Street was compared to the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, and the civil rights movement. Yet, as many a liberal journalist left the park, they lamented the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasn’t more tightly organized. They worried that the demonstration would dissipate without a proper list of demands or a specific policy agenda. They suspected that the thefts, sexual assaults, vandalism, and filth in the camps would limit the occupiers’ appeal.

The conservative reaction has been similar. A great many conservatives stress the conditions among the tents. They crow that Americans will never fall in line behind a bunch of scraggly hippies. They dismiss the movement as a fringe collection of left tendencies, along with assorted homeless, mental cases, and petty criminals. They argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake embracing Occupy Wall Street as an expression of economic and social frustration.

A smaller group of conservatives, however, believes the occupiers are onto something. The banks do have too much power. Wages have been stagnant. The problem, these conservatives say, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn’t really know what to do about any of the problems it laments. So this smaller group of conservatives, along with the majority of liberals, is more than happy to supply the occupiers with an economic agenda.

But they might as well be talking to rocks. Both left and right have made the error of thinking that the forces behind Occupy Wall Street are interested in democratic politics and problem solving. The left mistakenly believes that the tendency of these protests to end in violence, dissolute behavior, and the melting away of the activists is an aberration, while the right mistakenly brushes off the whole thing as a combination of Boomer nostalgia for the New Left and Millennial grousing at the lousy job market. The truth is that the violence is not an aberration and Occupy Wall Street should not be laughed away. What we are seeing here is the latest iteration of an old political program that has been given new strength by the failures of the global economy and the power of postmodern technology.

To be sure, there are plenty of people flocking to the tents who are everyday Democrats and independents concerned about joblessness and the gap between rich and poor. The unions backing the occupiers fall into this group. But the concerns of labor intersect only tangentially with those of Occupy Wall Street’s theorists and prime movers. The occupiers have a lot more in common with the now-decades-old antiglobalization movement. They are linked much more closely to the “hacktivist” agents of chaos at WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

When the police officers and sanitation workers reclaimed Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s supporters cried, “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.” Whether the sympathizers or the critics really understand the idea and the method of the movement is a good question. The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism.

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This essay just gets better as it goes along.
I was a bit surprised Matthew Continetti didn’t go all the way back to the earliest American untopian set-up.
Seems the earliest settlers tried the same thing Owen did.
But before they all starved to death they abandoned their collective and allowed each person to have some farm land for his own personal use.
That ended the starvation.
Amazing how many lessons from history are not learned.
Guess that’s why these public school educated occupiers are repeating those same old mistakes.

Attempting to establish a state of sovereignty within an already existing state in an act of sedition (insurrection) and can be marked as treason if a foreign power or domestic entity attempts to seize power through use of arms or taking of property. In all society there is evil so perhaps there should be a return to public pillory or the gallows. For the record, I sell guillotines, wind powered or solar, at $100,000.oo fob-ups shipped anywhere.

THE SOOTHSAYER
yes, I have seen those guillotines in old history book but not powered by solar or wind,
what do they called the guy with a mask who was in charge of head chopping,
they had a special name,
bye
I think I got it, was it LE BOUREAU ?
that’s french because it was done in FRANCE

My invented and patented Solar or Wind Powered Guillotines are an environmentally “green” friendly means to, with quick swipe, cut off heads. They convert the solar power or kinetic energy into a battery storage with adequate strength that can lift a ten pound blade twenty feet for repeated use covering about 30 beheadings between charges. At extra costs I have included CFL socket government approved lightbulbs for evening or nightime beheadings. Marketing strategy, we are considering advertizing on The View and OPRAH.

THE SOOTHSAYER
the way they are acting in parks now with ow,
you are on the way to hit the 1 % group,
around CHRISTMAS, and you will have to hire those ow to keep the their head together,
and discard it somewhere else, and you will collect the hoods and sell it back to them,
yes you have a great idea, there is money to be made,
not counting the mail order.
oops, we must not let anyone steal your creation,
and go ahead silently and stay ahead of the task,
and keep your head up toward success
and they will call you le boureau,
in english that is the green f.,,r
bye

THE SOOTHSAYER
THERE IS MANY OWS running without their heads,
you must have worked hard all night,
bye