Death to the Facilitators: Why Grits won't be "occupying" anything anytime soon

With public support weakening, police today will roust Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in multiple cities, most notably at the epicenter in New York. In general, Grits disapproves of police rousting protesters of whatever ilk, but since the OWS folks appear to have no goals and no endgame, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.

OWS has accomplished one amazing thing. They've re-framed how Americans talk about wealth inequality in a way that gives most Americans an "us" (the 99%) to align with. But there's a lot more to do to turn that important but potentially short-lived shift in public perception into tangible reform. Getting to actual change takes more than vague ideas and slogans. It requires leadership, decision making, and long-term movement-building and mass organizing.

Sign at OWS protest, via the International Business Times

The main reason I won't join the OWS movement any time soon has nothing to do with its lack of a well-defined agenda (there are plenty of opportunities for good work on their issue areas), but mainly with its lack of a well-defined leadership. Sun Tzu said millenia ago that formations dictate outcomes, and it's true. I vowed several years back never to join another political group that operates based on a "consensus" decision making process, which unfortunately is one of the hallmarks of the OWS movement. Indeed, I wrote a disgusted polemic several years ago articulating a detailed case against that bane of lefty movements and corporate retreats titled "Death to the Facilitators! In Favor of Roberts Rules of Order." The issues addressed in that unpublished essay are incredibly relevant IMO to why the OWS movement is losing steam as winter sets in: Their structure disavows leadership to the point that their decisionmaking processes become as frozen as Zuccotti Park campers in a snowstorm.

Your correspondent has never been a big "joiner" when it comes to political groups, and I'm not much of a "little d" democrat. I'm as suspicious of the mob as I am of law enforcement. In general, I do not consider public camping a viable nor sustainable political tactic. When I hear a protester chant into a bullhorn, "This is what democracy looks like," I must (usually successfully) resist the urge to physically attack them. When sitting through any meeting involving a "facilitator," I harbor dark fantasies of hitting them over the head, covering them with a sack, and transporting them to a dimly lit warehouse where I'd hold a gun to their head and force them to read aloud from Robert's Rules of Order.

So while I share many of the "Occupy Wall Street" critiques of society - particularly regarding the complicity of the financial sector in both a casino mentality and severing middle-class wage hikes from productivity gains - I think we're witnessing the limits of their tactics. Professional lobbyists and political campaigners are disdained as sell-outs by the drum-circle crowd, and Robert's Rules are considered antiquated and hierarchical compared to cool, supposedly more democratic "consensus" approach. But the OWS folks could learn a thing or sixty about the nuts and bolts of mass organizing from those who've organized successful mass movements in the past. For reasons presaged in my 2005 essay, reliance on a "consensus" decisionmaking structure doomed this effort before it ever got started. The OWS episode may have symbolic resonance going forward, but regrettably, in its current form, it's unlikely to have much structural impact on laws, regulations, or how Wall Street operates.