When the Tea Party first emerged, one of the notable features of the gatherings was the simple fact that there appeared to be no leadership whatsoever. However, as time passed, a few people became the spokespeople for the movement, and now whenever the “organization” is discussed, people can point at a few politicians and say “that’s their leader”. However, at one point, there were no leaders, and when the news media was trying to get comments from the protesters, it was very interesting to see how they tried to manage the fact that there was no one to actually interview.
Fast-forward to today, and we have yet another movement taking place that has virtually no leadership whatsoever. Unlike the Tea Party movement, this “organization” tends to hail from the liberal side of the political spectrum, but like the Tea Party, it shares the one attribute of having more in common with anarchy than actual political representation. The movement I’m talking about, of course, is the Take Back Wall Street movement that is currently occupying a lot of the current news.
It is yet another fascinating moment in people politics because it has absolutely no organization and has more in common with flash mobs than it does in any previous type of organizing behavior. Most events tend to be sporadic, immediate and out of nowhere, but unlike a flash mob, these movements tend to be stationary once they actually occur, meaning they don’t appear and then go away a few minutes, or hours, later.
But there are no leaders. And because of that, it is very difficult to determine exactly what they want, or what it would take to make them satisfied. The consensus, if there is one, is that people are outraged, upset and not going to take it any more, but when it comes to defining what they’re outraged about, why they’re upset, or what exactly they’re not going to take any more, that’s a little less apparent. Taking it one step further, what they actually want to fulfill their movement’s charter, if there was one, is even less tangible.
Analyzing it, they appear to be upset that Wall Street, or the people who work on Wall Street, have their own interests in mind at the expense of the rest of the country, or world. The claim is often made that the 1% (those who profit off of Wall Street antics) are profiting at the expense of the rest of the 99% of the country (and world). So, the desire is to somehow convince the 1% that the 99% are not going to take it any longer, and if things don’t change, that 99% is going to do something. What exactly, I’m not sure. No one else appears to know either. But they’re pissed, and they’re going to do “something” if “something” isn’t done to change things.
With a charter like that, it appears very difficult to figure out what they’re going to want or need to appease their members. Even worse, there’s no way to figure out who their members are, or even if they would be satisfied if “something” was done to appease them in the first place. I’m reminded of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action, in which he pointed out that people have a tendency to free ride their way through collective action, expecting to achieve results but aren’t willing to do much to achieve those results. There appears to be a lot of free rider activity going on here, as was noticed during a recent Chicago flash mob of the Take Back Wall Street variation, reported by the Wall Street Journal, in which an independent trader named Roger Brownworth points out that he was disappointed at the turnout (he had seen only about 20 protesters), but at the same time didn’t seem all that interested in joining it himself.
But Olson isn’t the only source that should be of interest here. I’m also reminded of Poor People’s Movements by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (a great book, I HIGHLY recommend), who remind us that when people get together and form major movements to benefit their own interests, they’re often appeased by very minor reforms or benefits and then don’t show up for future gatherings, convinced that because there was such great outpouring the first time, they won’t be expected to show up for the next one, kind of backing up Olson’s projection. The Chicago gathering is a direct example of Piven and Cloward’s argument.
But that’s the movement itself, which in Piven and Cloward’s book usually points at an organization that has some type of leadership. With the Take Back Wall Street movement, we have no apparent leader where everything seems to be organized a lot like a flock of birds all turning together at the same time as a part of a social being rather than a collaboration of like-minded individuals. During the Gulf War protests during the Bush Administration, many gatherings of protesters were similar to this flash mob mentality, but quite often they were derailed by one or two individuals doing something uniquely ridiculous, like Woody Harrelson trying to climb up the gratings of the Bay Bridge during a San Francisco protest. Other major demonstrations were often turned by one or two individuals who acted as spontaneous agitators, yelling out something like “let’s take City Hall” which would cause throngs of people to start running off in one direction, causing a riot where a peaceful gathering was taking place only moments before.
That’s probably the biggest fear we have right now as when you have a mob (the obvious physical make-up of a flash “mob”), there’s a very real possibility that an agitator or two, either spontaneously or surreptitiously placed, may cause a group of people to react in a way that they were not intending to do when they first gathered to protest over concerns they may have had about injustices and unfairness. How many major sport events have turned violent because one or two individuals started doing or saying something stupid that somehow riled up a group of people who were already excited by the happenings of the particular event they were attending? Quite a few actually. Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Blink that one of the biggest problems with excitable events, like a police car chase, is the excitement of the chase itself, which often can lead to adrenalin requiring some kind of release, which would explain why so many car chases end up with a physical altercation that might not have happened if people hadn’t been overly excited by the chase in the first place. The same thing occurs at these major social gatherings, like sports events, or for the sake of this essay, a flash mob. People are excited, they are yelling, and quite often it only takes a nudge in one direction for a group of people to start doing things they might not normally have done if they weren’t already overly excited.
Which means, there’s a good chance that one of these Take Back Wall Street events is going to turn violent if they continue to remain without leadership. However, if someone, or some people, arrives to take charge of this venue, there’s no promise that the presence of leadership is guaranteed to be in any way more positive. History is replete with examples of mob leaders who did some pretty horrific things once empowered with that ability to lead a group of people. And then there’s the equal fear that the emergence of leadership might doom the movement in the first place. Since the creation of “leaders” for the Tea Party movement, the spontaneous nature of that process has diminished greatly because a lot of the people who originally affiliated themselves with an unaffiliated organization never really fell in line with self-proclaimed wannabe leaders like Palin, Bachman, and the 70 or so Republican legislators who have claimed ties to the Tea Party foundations. Many of its members have actually gone underground, realizing that what they had to complain about was never solved by having people claim their throne in their name while never actually espousing their true beliefs.
The same problems may be seen for a Take Back Wall Street movement. The current crop of wannabe leaders already showing up are the likes of Michael Moore and other already entrenched in Washington political Democrats who see the movement as a way to shore up more support for their positions they already hold. There is also the tendency of the media to try to control the movement so it can be easier to report. CNN is already reporting How Occupy Wall Street Has Evolved, when CNN is still as clueless as the movement itself as to how it is changing, what it actually stands for, and what it actually intends to do.
What’s probably most significant is that a movement is underway, but no one knows where it is heading. It can become distruptive, like the Bolsheviks in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, it can be innovative like the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, it can transform like the recent Arab Spring, or it may write its own chapter of unforseen future circumstances. Either way, it probably shouldn’t be ignored.
