AT LEAST ONE CONSERVATIVE GETS IT

From the New York Times, conservative boy-wonder Ross Douthat on Occupy Wall Street relative to institutional liberalism:

The Decadent Left

But there’s a sense in which the pipeline protesters and Midwestern unions are exactly the people that the O.W.S. crowd should not learn from, if they aspire to appeal to a wider audience than left-wing activists usually reach.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few.

The union rallies and the Keystone demonstrations, by contrast, represented what you might call the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole.

More here.

Setting aside for the moment such catty barbs as "flakes" and "fantasists," and observing that blocking the Keystone pipeline and crusading for worker rights does, in fact, speak for the many, right-wing Douthat makes an extraordinarily good point: the decades old liberal penchant for chasing single issues within an institutional framework has left liberalism, as a big tent, addressing the big questions, to atrophy utterly.

I remember arguing with a liberal friend years ago about how I had voted for Nader. I told him I was voting my conscience. He told me that the Greens were in no position to get anything done. I responded that the Democrats weren't, either, that they were all about rearguard action, defending (poorly) liberal victories from long ago, while allowing liberalism itself to be chipped away incrementally--in effect, I argued, the Democrats were doing less than nothing in that they had ceded the overall narrative to the conservatives, which is why dramatic change, however hopeless it seemed to be, is the only hope we have. He was unconvinced. The only liberal show in town, he thought, was the Democratic Party, so we might as well throw our lot in with them, instead of some lefty upstarts who had no hope of getting any legislation passed, ever.

OWS has shown a third way. Fuck the liberal institutions. Fuck the Democratic Party. Fuck the political system. Fuck legislation. Fuck elective office. Instead, change the rules of the game. Change the way people think. Change what people expect from the government. Redefine the conflict. Show the true oppressors in all their sordid opulent decadent glory. Change the whole fucking culture. Once that happens, once we pass a certain as yet unknown threshold, legislation becomes just a formality, a ratification of what the people already want.

Politics, as practiced by the Democrats, have become an insider's game, something those other people over there do, but not us right here. OWS is about us right here. It's about the people. And it's very nice that even conservatives are starting to understand this.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$