Riffing off this New York Times story, Steve Sailer thinks about the uniformity — mostly white, all middle class — to the way people claiming to represent the 99 percent look:

Anyway, let me take a stab at a general theory of Occupy Wall Street. There’s been much criticism of the movement for not having a coherent manifesto of political demands. What exactly are they doing during all these endless meetings with their weird hand signals if not coming up with a political agenda?

What they do spend time talking about is how to keep everyone housed, fed, safe, healthy, and entertained. With this protest, logistics are political too: By creating a self-contained, self-governing, radically transparent and egalitarian community, they’ll model how the rest of society ought to work.

So, they are organizing the logistics of their campout: How many different kinds of recycling bins should we have? That sort of thing. Middle class white people find this kind of self-organizing to be pretty fascinating. It also bores the heck out of most minorities and non-middle class whites, which has the salutary effect of driving away undesirables.

This is key:

In summary, I think one of the stronger emotions in the world right now is the desire for restrictive communities where people with something in common can exclude everybody else, such as what Burning Man achieves for a week each year. But 21st Century young people lack any kind of vocabulary for explicating their forbidden desires for exclusion. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Sailer’s point about wanting to be exclusive without seeming like you’re being exclusive is a big one, and not just confined to OWS. This is what the professional, educated class means by “diversity.” They love to believe that they are being truly diverse and open to Others, but in fact the last thing they want to deal with is someone who is Other in a way they find objectionable. The irony, obviously, is that they use the language of inclusion to disguise from themselves how exclusive they really are — but exclusive, you understand, of the Wrong Sort of Other. It’s like Christian Lander’s point on the Stuff White People Like site about SWPLs and Hating Corporations:

When engaging in a conversation about corporate evils it is important to NEVER, EVER mention Apple Computers, Target or Ikea in the same breath as the companies mentioned earlier. White people prefer to hate corporations that don’t make stuff that they like.

Anyway, about the SWPLs of OWS, I certainly don’t begrudge them their right to protest, and as I’ve repeatedly said, like large number of Americans, I agree that they’re onto something important. Still, they’ve been at this for a while, and they haven’t really turned this into a mass movement. Shouldn’t they ask themselves why, even though 43 percent of Americans polled broadly sympathize with them, they have remained a small movement of middle-class, (mostly) white people? Why are they not connecting outside their narrow demographic?