Man, I can’t tell you how critical the progressive activists I knew were over the Occupy movement. I saw its potential right away, but they were all too busy arguing over what they were doing wrong:
Study suggests Occupy Wall Street movement undone by liberals’ need to feel unique (via Raw Story )
Liberals tend to underestimate their similarity to other liberals, according to a recent study, while conservatives overestimate their similarities — and those differences may account for the relative political success of the tea party in comparison…
Maybe. Not quite. A big reason for the failure was the insistence on “consensus” – which actually grants all power to those few who insist on total uniformity.
You either believe in democracy or you don’t . You take a vote, see what the majority wants to do, and move on. If you’re not willing to put some trust in other people; people you likely haven’t met before, but you seem to have some beliefs in common – pretty soon it shows and they get sick of you. The “professional consensus insisters” within the Occupy movement were no more adherents to democracy than Turtle McConnell, and they largely destroyed the movement.
As to “…conservatives sometimes make hasty decisions without truly building broad consensus for their plans…”, of course they’re not going to build consensus. Outside of their bubble, nobody likes their foisted-on-the-world-astroturf plans. Their plans either consist of “hey, how about more money and power for rich people”, or, “hey, we’re so powerful, let’s pull some wings off of flies just for fun”.
Most on the Left were shocked to hear that Senator Elizebeth Warren was an “extreme Leftist.” That is what the Clintonites are calling her. They know that she’s not so why are they lying and labeling Warren an “extreme Leftist?” First they want to damage Warren’s standing with every Democratic voter who is ‘not’ an actual populist or Leftist. Secondly they want to scare the hell out of Republican and Libertarian voters. By suggesting that if the “extreme Leftist,” Warren, has a shot at becoming the next president, Hillary appears to be the moderate and acceptable Democratic candidate. Isn’t that clever? Most Progressive activists are fairly dumb human beings. They still haven’t figured out that the Occupy Wall Street Movement was nothing more than a massive teach-in. Anarchists don’t much approve of or support any hierarchical political governing organization.
In my personal experience, making decisions by consensus often resulted in the loudest and most insistent getting their way. I really dislike this process.
This comment thread is a good example of why the Occupy movement did not get anywhere and only got as far as it did (much farther than any liberal political movement) by bypassing the liberal political experts.
Also the movement was crushed by a nation wide and even internationally coordinated violent attack by police and security forces determined to stamp it out and teach everybody a lesson on what happens when you defy the establishment.