From the local public radio station’s interview with one of the Occupy Philadelphia protesters, a mom who took her four-year-old to camp out in the tent city overnight:

She’s just excited to be at the protest.  As soon as she heard people could sleep down here she was really excited for that.  She kept saying, “I want to sleep at the protest!”  This movement is very … it’s almost amorphous and it’s almost like there’s not the most clearly declared, “This is what we all believe in,” but that’s probably its strength.

There’s a lot that’s wrong and there’s room in this movement for whatever you’re upset about.  And I think that we’re mainly upset about jobs–people not being able to feed their families and the 1 percent are taking away what more people should have.

It’s terrible that I’m working more than full time, and I’m worried about how we’re going to pay for health care.

There’s room in this movement for whatever you’re upset about. Sigh. Look, you regular readers well know that I believe that we’ve got to have real structural change in our society, but it sure does look like that Occupy Wall Street, at least, is pretty much what its critics say it is. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen did some survey work with the Wall Street contingent. This is what he finds:

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%).

… Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That’s why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for their party.

OWS is meaningless, except as an outlier for what comes next. It is striking that, given all the economic pain and suffering this country has been through over the past three years, and given how Wall Street has done so very much better than the rest of us (even though its banks, in collusion with government, played a key role in engineering the debacle — and being bailed out by the government) — anyway, it’s striking that OWS are the first real protests of this sort we’ve seen. And, come to think of it, if it has taken three years to get the most committed lefties to turn out for these poorly attended protests nationwide, what does that tell us about the lack of restiveness in the body politic?

We had the Tea Party on the right, but that movement appears to have been co-opted by the GOP, more or less, and in any case has been a feeble force for populism.  Ho hum.

Understand, I’m not saying the dirty commie hippies are wrong to be frustrated with Wall Street (as a symbol of the corporate-government nexus). They are! But they aren’t connecting. There’s room in this movement for whatever you’re upset about means that the movement is about nothing more than being malcontented in a very progressive way. Who has the time or the interest to join a protest like that?

If you broadly sympathize with OWS (as I do), then why won’t you join one of the protests? What are your reasons?

UPDATE: I did want to mention this bit from Elizabeth Scalia’s First Things essay today:

Stipulating that I am not wholly out of sympathy with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement—I wouldn’t mind seeing a few bankers frog-marched, as long as the politicians and bureaucrats who colluded with them wear leg-shackles, too—it is nevertheless worth noticing that the very same people who were duped into amassing enormous student-loan debt at the behest of a government unable to project so simple a cause-and-effect equation as “easy loans equal tuition spikes equals more loans” are now advocating for greater government control over their lives. The street rhetoric roughly translates to: “the government is corrupt and too stupid to know how to write and administer student loan policies; let it manage everything.”

I’ve been hearing that line a lot on the Right: that OWS is saying the government can’t be trusted to regulate high finance, but ought to regulate high finance more. Ha-ha! Aren’t those protesters dumb?! Well, no. There is nothing illogical about saying: The government did a terrible job of regulating the financial sector, and needs to get its act together and do regulation right. 

What is the alternative? The government did a terrible job regulating the financial sector, and therefore shouldn’t even try? Some on the right would like that, I suppose, but I doubt Elizabeth Scalia, or most sensible conservatives, would.