We live in difficult times, but the political capacity to address the difficulties may be emerging in America, none too soon and in the right place.

The Republican presidential nomination debates reveal how far the GOP is from addressing the concerns of the American public. It seems, as a consequence, that President Obama’s re-election is likely, even with the persistent tough economic situation. He makes sense. The Republicans don’t. They offer the 999 plan and other fantasies as economic policy. Obama proposes sensible realistic programs, the jobs bill and the like. The re-election, further, may very well have very significant consequences. The Obama transformation, which I have reflected upon in an earlier post, may proceed and deepen.  I have this hope because of Occupy Wall Street.

OWS is already a resounding success, and it has the potential to extend the success for months, indeed, probably for years ahead. We at Deliberately Considered have been discussing the occupation. Scott and Michael Corey, like observers elsewhere, are concerned that the occupiers don’t have a clear program. They seem to be a hodgepodge of disparate misfits, anarchists, druggies, vegans, feminists, trade unionists, environmentalists and veterans of left-wing battles past, with no clear unified goals. The political causes they espouse seem to be as varied as they are as a group. They express a sentiment and sensibility, but they do not propose any policy. Yet, I think it is crucial to note that there is a simple and telling coherence in the protest and that there is a discernable achievement already that is being deepened as the occupation persists.

The occupiers are telling a simple truth. America is becoming an increasingly unequal society. The rich are getting rich and the poor (and working people) are getting poorer, especially the young and people of color. The occupiers call upon the media, the political class and the population at large to take notice, and notice is being taken as the occupations spread around the country and the world.

In the U.S., popular discontent is no longer identified with a tax revolt and with people who think the primary task of government is to do as little as possible. The rich can no longer hide behind the title, “job creators.” Public opinion polls point to the popularity of taxing the super rich to fund public services and jobs development for the vast majority. And as the occupation persists, this simple message will be underscored.

Persistence through the winter is likely, building on the achievements already linked to the special power of the ground zero occupation. Cost versus benefit balance applies. Something approaching sacred space has been occupied, down the road from the “Ground Zero Mosque,” across the street from Ground Zero of 9/11. Whispers there are heard around the world.  What frustrated the local Muslim community is the great resource of today’s occupiers. The police forbid bullhorns, but the park itself has become a global microphone, enabling the people now occupying it and occupiers to come, to be heard, to show their concerns to the world. The power of showing, the power of monstration as Daniel Dayan puts it, is a great resource. The costs of staying for a few hundred people are relatively low. And the benefits of staying are great. Occupying provides a life time experience of what Hannah Arendt calls the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition, making a difference in public, public freedom, acting with great consequence in a world that provides few chances to do so. As this treasure is mined, American politicians, Republicans and Democrats, will have to respond, as they have had to respond to the Tea Party. There is a new and qualitatively different popular pressure. And this I think will help Obama succeed where he hasn’t thus far.

He sought to demonstrate that a democratic government is a way that Americans can address their pressing problems. He has tried to rebalance the relationship between state and market in the American political economy. A moderate Democrat, he has been denounced as a socialist by Republicans. With the Tea Party active and progressives complaining in the blogosphere but not much more, the political center moved right.

Now with the winds blowing from Zuccotti Park, a new popular pressure is emerging. The President will be criticized to be sure. But the pressure to pass a serious jobs bill will either yield results before the Presidential election or shape it. There will be serious popular demands for taxing the super rich and pressure to develop healthcare reform, to escalate the disengagement from Afghanistan and Iraq, to enact serious immigration reform, to work to de-militarize American foreign policy.

There will be pressure on the President to fulfill his promise, which will enable him to do so.

I think that the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content, as Scott Beck showed in his earlier post on the occupation. I observe, further, that the way people use social media contributes to this form, as does the setting of the occupation. And I believe deliberating about the movement and connecting the debate to other political, social and cultural activities are keys to the democratic contribution of the movement to broader politics in America and beyond.

Jenny Davis in her post last week makes cogent points about the role of social media in social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Her key observation is very important. Digital activism is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. I would add that it can constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture. This is especially telling as David Peppas and Barbara note in the two comments to Davis’s post, because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of protesting, as well as the act of posting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world differently is what is most needed at this time, to face up to stark social realities that have been ignored and develop the capacity to act on this. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media, while the power of the movement, is quite material. It’s embedded in a specific geography and its link to political culture.

The place of the occupation in an important way contributes to its power. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, to my mind, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement.

Ironically, mine is first of all a “pedestrian observation,” based on very particular experience. In recent weeks, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack, including a stroll on Wall Street. And last week, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

Because it is at the symbolic center, the media are paying attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration is capturing global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. A report yesterday indicates that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces are spreading around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world is watching. Occupations are going global, eminating from ground zero to London, Seoul back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and many points in between.

They have been watching in Gdansk. I was surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there, and surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, is planning on coming to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

“Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.
They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’ ”

The news is spreading through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media are spreading the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

“This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.”

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and much more have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged. Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on fictoids, as we have been observing here at Deliberately Considered over the last year. As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long term power of the newest development on the global stage. As I observed in concluding my comparison between OWS and a social movement in South Korea, the candle light movement, a candle is, indeed, being lit.

A new kind of politics is upon us. Many observers have highlighted the technological characteristics of this politics. Cell phones and Facebook and other social media are the heroes in these accounts of the Arab Spring, the Israeli summer, and now of not only the Tea Party but also Occupy Wall Street. Yet, these accounts are unsatisfying, because they don’t take into account the human agency of the new politics, the specific political struggles. We should clearly recognize the importance of the new media, but it seems to me that what is extraordinary is the way a type of power, political power as Hannah Arendt understood it, is becoming increasingly important. People are meeting each other, now virtually and not only face to face, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert.

I analyzed the way this power works in our world in my book, The Politics of Small Things. It points to the way the power of “the politics of small things” was common to both the Solidarity Movement in opposition to the previously existing socialist order in Poland of the 80s and to the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign during the Bush years in America. Recently a Korean translation of the book was published. I wrote a special preface, including some thoughts on how the politics of small things worked in a social movement in South Korea, the Candle Movement. Now, those reflections are helping me understand what I am seeing in lower Manhattan and considering its potential. I think the power of the politics of small things is becoming a significant force throughout the world today in many different contexts, and that it is important to take notice in places far and near.

My general understanding as an outsider and non-expert of the Candle Movement:  Using a popular electronic public forum, Agora, a fourteen year old middle school girl called for a candle light vigil at the Seoul City Hall Public Square to protest against the resumption of American beef imports in early April of 2008. Initially, most protesters were teenagers from middle and high schools, between fourteen and seventeen. A group of text messaging Korean girls was discussing the dangers of mad cow disease, the need to act and then acted. The demonstrators shared their concerns among themselves in ever wider social circles and decided that they must do something about it. In relatively small gatherings, they met to demonstrate their concern, and there was robust response to the demonstrations as they became visible to the larger society. There followed a series of ever larger candle light demonstrations at the square and around the city and country, leading to massive nationwide candle light demonstrations around the country on June 10^th, with one million people taking part.

Intriguingly, the response to the Candle Movement was first from unconventional social actors, women’s groups of various sorts primarily among them, and then more conventional oppositional political parties, democratic activists and civil society actors of various sorts. The beef was the first issue, but then a number of unpopular plans and policies of the new administration were criticized: privatization, the Korea – United States Fair Trade Agreement, the Grand Korean Waterway, the educational reforms, the predominance of the wealthy in the new cabinet, and overly pro-business public policies in general.  What began as little more than a group of teenagers acting out became a mass societal movement, strong enough that it greatly and negatively affected the popularity of the newly elected President, Lee Myung-bak, led to the resignation in mass of his cabinet the day after the largest demonstration, and provoked a systematic response from the police, unseen in the country in over twenty years, presenting for all to see a repressive side of the political order. Small things added up.

It is notable how major events in our times follow this pattern. First, people with common concerns find each other. Then, they talk to each other. Then, they act, and sometimes people notice. The noticing, of course, is not random. There is a pattern to it. Big media, what is called these days, the mainstream media, play a role, as do cultural resonance and political inventiveness. Whether, and how, the mainstream media report on the concerted action matters. So does how a larger public understands the movement. In Korea, it is significant that women’s groups responded first and then the larger world of conventional political actors took notice. The teenage girls’ movement became a broader societal wide movement as women passed the message on. The message was positively received because it resonated with a broad skepticism about the unequal relationship between the U.S. and South Korea. The meat of the issue was not the meat itself.

I think of this as I am looking downtown at the ground zero social movement, Occupy Wall Street. Lower Manhattan, since 9/11/01, is central to the American imagination about who we are and what we stand for. This led to an outrageous flight from factual truth in the case of “The Ground Zero Mosque.” In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is empowering those who want Americans to look clearly at the facts of inequality in our country.

The movement started smaller than planned. Adbusters the organization that first promoted the protest, imagined initial participation in the thousands, and instead there were only hundreds. Yet, the movement sustained itself through the simple act of persisting at a symbolic center, Wall Street, when the values of that center are broadly questioned. The movement was taken over by those who participated. They became the leaders. Now others are taking notice, because of the political cultural creativity of the protest, first a hand full of celebrities, but now, crucially, trade unions. The police seem to be cooperating, creating periodic controversies that attract mainstream attention: last week pepper spray, this Saturday, mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. A visible social movement is coming into view. A candle is being lit.