Why Embracing Occupiers is Political Suicide
As the economy continues to run on empty, and numerous Obama administration scandals are simmering on the backburner, the Democrats have sought recourse in an unorthodox strategy: Self-parody.
While Democrats like good performance art, and nearly everything about the 2012 media charade surrounding the Obama campaign was staged, the Occupy Wall Street protests might be one Lollafoolooza they can do without.
The Occupy protests have not only energized the loud-mouthed liberal twenty-percent, they have provided conservatives with a nearly endless supply of fodder for the upcoming elections. For not only do the occupiers support the Democrats, the Democrats support the occupiers.
President Obama even doubled down on his support for the burgeoning protests, likening them to the tea party uprisings he initially denied knowing about before subsequently ignoring them; that is, until finally demonizing the demonstrators as “teabaggers.”
Like it or not, the Occupy protesters and the Democrats are joined at the hip. And just like Siamese twins, they are going to be difficult to separate.
Politically convenient tea party comparisons are not going to be able to run interference for the left-wing nature of the protesters, who like to pretend they are on the same side as their opponents with the “can’t we all just get along?” schtick. Any Troskyist tactic to “fuse” the occupy group onto the tea party and then hijack the swelling conservative opposition would fail miserably. Using salami tactics to try to divide the GOP and tea party conservatives, along with Alinsky tactics of ridicule and shamelessly playing the race card, is not going to persuade citizens in the tea party that Democrats have any respect for them.
No, the tea party wants nothing to do with the left’s “Oktober offensive.” As Ann Coulter pointed out in her book on liberal mobs called Demonic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Father of the French Revolution, believed that imagery was the soul of revolution. If that is the case, the would-be revolutionaries at these Occupy protests have failed miserably. The protesters have offered up a treasure trove of unflattering videos and unsavory images, which allows the oft-denigrated tea party to draw useful distinctions between itself and the Occupy activists.
An interesting aspect of the occupiers’ demands is how illogical and full of hubris they are. While tea partiers support a very sensible agenda of restoring Constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, and political accountability, the occupiers – all meaningless rhetoric about “promoting dialogue” aside – support radical policies like a living wage for all people whether they work or not, and immediate debt forgiveness for everyone, everywhere.
In addition to the occupiers’ pie-in-the-sky utopianism there is stark self-contradiction:
- Many of the occupiers pose as anarchists, while supporting big government-administered welfare programs.
- They are protesting Wall Street, who backed President Obama’s election bid more than any other candidate in history.
- They are against big banks and corporations taking unearned wealth, but de-emphasize the role of government in the bailouts and stimulus packages.
- They claim to be for a world where everyone shares, but complain when their own private property is stolen.
- They purport to be for more democracy, but say they represent “the 99%” of income earners below the top 1%, thereby publicly disenfranchising those who disagree with them.
- They propose wanting a world where people are more free, even as they advocate for more “free” stuff and certain “human rights” like universal healthcare, which logically requires the government to force people to provide those things.
- They are unwittingly promoting state slavery, where producers are compelled to provide for non-producers, or else become demoralized and become just another government dependent.
When Democrats support such incomprehensible and logically paralyzed radical protesters, ironically, they don’t necessarily wind up looking as foolish as the protesters. Instead, they wind up looking like cynical Machiavellian manipulators, who will instrumentally use anyone in any way, no matter how unethical, to achieve or preserve power. They appear like serial liars, willing to promise anything to anyone, no matter how utopian or impracticable, in order to garner their votes.
And when President Obama first scraps and then reverses himself on such a financially untenable aspect of nationalized healthcare as the CLASS act, no matter how much damage it does to the economy, it only reinforces this perception of the Democrats as completely devoid of moral principle. It shows he cares more about pandering to his base than the future of the country.
Thus, it not only associates the Democrats with the radical protesters to some, it makes them look like destructive and immoral power-seekers to others. And even to some Democrat analysts, it makes the party look foolish and unwise.
While some believe that the protests have been astro-turfed by Democrat supporters to deflect blame for the poor economy away from Obama and the Democrats, and to distract the public from focusing on brewing scandals like Fast & Furious and Solyndra, they actually provide a useful opening for conservatives to prove that the Democrats are as radical and immoral as the right has claimed all along. The occupiers thus serve a vital purpose in putting a very ugly face on the Democrat constituency, while shedding some light on the party’s actual long-term goals for the country.
This is very harmful for Democrats with moderates and independents, which fall into two camps.
The first camp votes how they “feel,” and tend to support the Democrats because they have been conditioned by the mainstream media to associate the Democrat party with compassion. If the branding of the Democrats in their minds switches from “compassionate” to overt class warfare and radicalism, as exemplified by protesters who trash the streets, call for violent revolution (as one protester did at an Occupy LA protest), wear zombie outfits and sport socialist slogans, then we can see a realignment of American politics to reflect the 20%/20%/60% split in terms of liberals, independents, and conservatives, respectively. That would be more “what democracy looks like.”
The second camp are middle-of-the-line pragmatists who are against ideological extremism, as they perceive it, and vote for the party that presents more “sensible” solutions to the nation’s problems. If the Democrats back protesters who are advocating extreme goals, such as free college tuition, single payer healthcare, and a living wage for people who work and don’t work, that sheds a lot of light on the Democrats themselves. One might even suspect that the Democrats lie constantly about their actual intentions, and instead are Fabian socialists who are incrementally pushing the country towards socialism, while posing as moderates and brandishing conservatives as “extremists.”
That theory will hold a lot more water with moderates and independents if the Democrat Party keeps using proxies who push totalitarian big government policies while wearing anarchist masks. If Democrats can’t maintain distance from a staged uprising of anarchist and socialist utopian radicals who have received backing from the Communist and Nazi parties, the Iranians, and the Red Chinese, among others, who will the Democrats distance themselves from?
The majority of voting Americans, that’s who.
RogueOperator
Image Credit: The People’s Cube
perpetuating the OWS protests requires refusing to show up for job interviews…what? work for money? if we stay here long enough Barry will bail us all out…….since we are standing NEAR Wall Street
The Democrats did try, only the Republicans didn’t. Not to be partisan here, but that is plsrieecy what happened.To convice the Republicans to pass the debt ceiling, President Obama came up with a budget plan that cut $4 trillion from the budget and added $1 trillion in revenue (a 1% increase in taxes on the uber-rich), and made cuts to Social Security and Medicare but did not get rid of either.The Democrats in Congress came up with a plan that cut $3 trillion from the budget, did absolutely no tax hikes, and left Medicare and Social Security alone.The Republicans came up with a plan that cut $1.5 trillion from the budget ($2.5 trillion less than Obama’s plan, $1.5 trillion less than the Democrat plan, and $500 billion less than the plan that eventually passed Congress), did no tax hikes, and got rid of Social Security and Medicare entirely.If Republicans had been serious about cutting spending to pass the debt ceiling, they would have jumped at Obama’s plan, which lowered the deficit by $5 trillion. Even the ones against tax hikes would have jumped at the Democrat plan, which cut twice as much as the Republican plan and did it with no tax hikes.Republicans were out for two things to get rid of Social Security and Medicare, and to deny President Obama a possible victory even at the cost of the American economy we are now seeing the economic effects of their efforts to defeat Obama. The Republicans wanted to keep the support of the TEA Party, and they sacrificed America to do it._______________Edit:Sorry, Neil, but it was Obama who had that plan, NOT the Republicans. The Republicans blocked the plan that cut $4 trillion not because it did tax hikes but because it did not get rid of Social Security and Medicare and because it would allow Obama to take some credit for saving America.References :