Our Privileged Revolutionaries

By Jordan Bloom • January 30, 2013, 4:51 PM

NRO sums up the findings of a recent study on the demographics of Occupy Wall Street:

According to a new study from sociologists at the City University of New York, more than a third of activists in the Occupy movement in New York City had household incomes above $100,000, placing them at the cusp of the top quintile of income distribution in America. Researchers surveyed 729 people who participated in a May 1 rally last year and were involved in the “occupation” of Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011, and found that they were more affluent, whiter, younger, much more highly educated, and more likely to be male than the average New Yorker.

Upper-class radicalism is nothing new, of course. You need leisure time to start a revolution, not to mention time to read all those incomprehensible deconstructionists. It was the bourgeois National Guard that stormed the Bastille. More recently, Students for a Democratic Society, the storied left-wing group, drew its membership primarily from the affluent, as Paul Gottfried details in his book The Conservative Movement:

“…the campus revolution was largely an upper-class affair. Students were sensitive only to fashionable segments of the underclass but remained openly hostile to blue-collar workers. Michael Lerner, a former student radical, complained of the double standard by which the “respectable bigotry” of “an upper-middle-class peace matron toward a lower-middle-class mayor” is not scrutinized with the same care as a policeman’s bigotry toward blacks. The most prominent radical group, Students for a Democratic Society, was a predominantly upper-middle-class organization. At a time when family income in the United States averaged $8,000 a year, and the Harvard family average was $17,000, Harvard SDSers came from families averaging $23,000 a year. Stanton Evans’s informal survey of conservative students (taken about 1960) pointed to a family income of only $5,000.

The big difference between then and now is that the left used to be honest in articulating its goals. Heck, that it even had goals at all contrasts with Occupy Wall Street’s approach. Radicals love to warn about the dangers of co-optation, which can’t happen in the traditional sense with movement as amorphous as OWS. The flip side of that is a narrative vacuum MSNBC and even MTV were more than happy to step into. And as it happens, their target audiences just happened to coincide with the composition of the movement itself.

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Posted in Education, Politics, Uncategorized. Tagged National Review, Occupy Wall Street, Paul Gottfried.

21 Responses to Our Privileged Revolutionaries

tz says:

January 30, 2013 at 5:37 pm

1. I doubt the demographics or even the opinions would apply to #occupy in places like Ft. Wayne, IN or Montana.

2. For all the complaints, they did occupy – stay for months, many days overnight, bearing witness to the corruption. The pro-life movement doesn’t even do that. Those wishing to advocate either a conservative or libertarian agenda don’t either. In some ways it is like trying to invalidate St. Paul as being a big-wig theologian prior to his Damascus road encounter.

3. That said, they were more about feeling than reason. Yet that is typically something easy to resolve – to align their intrinsic disgust with the corruption with solutions. The difficulty is that the Wall Street whores of both parties weren’t offering a syphilis contaminated “hell on wheels” they would patronize. Smart fish avoid Hookers. They were easier to dismiss than evangelize (in either the religious or political sense).
Bryan says:

January 30, 2013 at 7:07 pm

People calling for a larger, more powerful form of the existing government are not “revolutionaries.” They are more like the squadristi of Mussolini, who also began his career as a committed socialist.
Alan Vanneman says:

January 30, 2013 at 7:33 pm

“more affluent, whiter, younger, much more highly educated, and more likely to be male than the average New Yorker.”

It’s not too surprising that an “occupation” would tend to attract young males, would it? As for whiter, more highly educated, and more affluent, that was true of the Tea Party crowd. Any sort of activity that attracts white folks, whether left or right, is likely to be more highly educated and more affluent than the general population. That’s grounds for moralizing about white folks, I guess, but not about either “Occupy” or the “Tea Party.”
Mark says:

January 30, 2013 at 7:33 pm

I would expect those numbers in New York. What are the demographics in smaller cities and rural areas? Without more complete data, we may have a case of unintentional cherry picking. I’m sure it’s unintentional, right? I attended an active Occupy assembly out of curiosity in a town of under 10,000. I didn’t see any expensive cars parked in the lot but a lot of bikes and walkers, the people had concerns like getting the local supermarket to label foods more thoroughly, stopping a fracking project up the peninsula and keeping fast foods joints from invading the lovely community. It seemed like pretty innocent grass roots concerned citizen stuff to me.
John Drinkwater says:

January 30, 2013 at 7:47 pm

You insult the OWS people by straining to connect them with the Obama loving sycophants at MSNBC. Most polls also showed that the vast majority of OWS folks are against Obama. That clearly puts them at odds with the Obama suckers.

Even if the two groups were of similar demographics in terms of income, race, etc. that doesn’t mean anything if they hold starkly different views. Most OWS organizers are radical academics and activists who consider themselves anarchists or Marxists. They have as little use for the Democrats as they do the Republicans.

Also, I question this latest research. There was an important difference between the hardcore OWS activists who committed to living in tents, etc. and the people who went for a day or two to partake. I spoke with journalists who spent a considerable amount of time with OWS activists and they insist that these were young people who certainly were not rich kids. (The rich kids in OWS checked into hotels.)

Lastly, this survey’s sample is limited to NYC. There were numerous encampments around the country, some as larger or even larger than NYC.
Neil says:

January 30, 2013 at 9:44 pm

The study surveyed protestors mostly in May-July 2012, long after the peak of OWS. It had already died down a lot in winter 2012.

One-third with household incomes above 100,000 / year is probably similar to whites in the NY metro as a whole.
Erik of Mpls says:

January 31, 2013 at 12:58 am

Wait, I thought the Occupiers were a bunch of unwashed thugs who needed to get a job! Now they are snooty elites? The media really needs to come up with a consistent reason for me to hate these people and dismiss their critique of our glorious and infallible financial system.

For God’s sake, this spontaneous and leaderless uprising of hundreds of thousands of people couldn’t even come up with a unified, practical program to transform our economy! Get it together, people.

Next time you can learn a lesson from those of us who stayed in our nice comfy homes: No one questions your motives or identity if you keep your mouth shut and just go along.

End of snark.
Traddy Catholic in Cleveland says:

January 31, 2013 at 7:36 am

Dear TZ,

The pro-life movement’s staying power is inside thousands of church basements every Sunday for going-on four decades.

If the Occupiers came by one of those church basements, they might actually have the chance to meet the real working-class grassroots: high-school-educated with a surprisingly high rate of military experience; auto-didactic but paranoid; pious but cantankerous; “Jacksonian” (to use W.R. Mead’s term) in foreign policy; distrustful of bankers and politicians as any Occupier; wisely skeptical of those outside of clan and creed; more likely to be reading Drudge or St. Matthew’s Gospel than Herbert Marcuse or Elizabeth Warren; they are nevertheless savy and experienced grassroots organizers who mix the occassional street campaign (the March for Life or an HHS rosary protest) with real day-in-day-out letter-writing, pamphleteering, and lecturing.

Lacking the institutional power of the left-wing professor-pariahs or the big money of the unions (who should be their rightful allies but who constantly betray them on issues of family values, gun ownership, and free trade), the pro-life Christians see government sucking the life blood out of the family, community, and the human spirit. They regard the Occupiers as little more than a blip… the temporarily lost children of the 1% who (like their hippie forebears) will eventually graduate into the positions of power they now claim to despise.

The real solution to corruption by big business and big government is the local. And despite what you have heard about farmer’s markets or lefty book clubs, the pro-life movement are the real masters of the local. They have been for going on two-thousand years.
Rebecca Trotter says:

January 31, 2013 at 8:13 am

OWS has actually been surprisingly active in the last few month. The NYC police credited their work on the ground for keeping peace in project buildings affected by Hurricane Sandy. They also just completed a pretty high profile debt forgiveness campain. (Year of Jubilee, I think it was called. Or Occupy Debt.)
Cris P says:

January 31, 2013 at 10:47 am

So it would appear these members of the Occupy movement were not in the 47% or “takers” category.
Gen says:

January 31, 2013 at 3:16 pm

If we want to be fair most of the AmRev agitators (especially their LEADERS) were rich white liberals, banksters and low-level terrorists. Of course, this is no reason to like the Occupussies; but it is a good reason to spit on the Founding Failures and recognize what a bunch of communist fruit-loops they were and how their whole revolution was insane and doomed to failure.

The American Conservative movement is dead until it stops worshipping the ghosts of a mythical and obviously inadequate past.
John Drinkwater says:

January 31, 2013 at 6:58 pm

Bryan,

I wish you would pay attention. OWS was founded and guided by anarchists (left-wing of course) like the anthropologist David Graeber. Anarchists would smash the State (defined as government + military + police + corporations), take an axe to centralization and diffuse power as much as possible, spreading out and transferring all power to small communities of people.

This is something that would crush both liberals and conservatives alike, which is why the anarchists are so hated.
Jones says:

January 31, 2013 at 7:51 pm

What exactly is this supposed to show? I’d like to see you translate the point into something other than an ad hominem argument, but I think you’ll have a hard time doing that.

Also, the number you mentioned described about a third of the protesters. So, what’s the actual average?

Ultimately, college and graduate students are highly represented in these kinds of movements, for obvious reasons. They have the time and the education.
Jones says:

January 31, 2013 at 7:55 pm

“The pro-life Christians see government sucking the life blood out of the family, community, and the human spirit.”

This is absurd. I don’t think I will ever understand why any religious person could think that government, rather than big business, is the main force “sucking the life blood out of family, community, and the human spirit.” I just can’t think of an explanation aside from ignorance of contemporary capitalism.
EliteCommInc. says:

January 31, 2013 at 8:09 pm

Traddy Catholic in Cleveland,

Having experienced those protests where I live, might add that the staying power is far more intense because populations composition required that manuever around, job, child pick-ups for football, ballet, and colds — while keeping their families intact.

I no longer do sit-ins, but I think my position is clear and don’t regret one second in unison with my Calvary Chapel family.
John Drinkwater says:

January 31, 2013 at 10:05 pm

Jones,

You reveal an ignorance of capitalism by not understanding that government enables our corrupt economic system, rather than checks it. And if you read the history of capitalism, you’ll see that government and big business have been in collusion from the very beginning, conspiring to protect their own wealth against the interests the vast majority of people.
stef says:

January 31, 2013 at 10:41 pm

Rich Easterners paid for the weapons and support that went to guerilla fighters in “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s, including sending some of their own to “Occupy Kansas” for the Jayhawkers. After John Brown’s execution, some of them even fled to Canada.

Nothing new here.
Traddy Catholic in Cleveland says:

February 1, 2013 at 7:46 am

Interesting statements by Jones and John Drinkwater regarding capitalism and the state.

Here is the key fact hidden in plain sight:

Capitalism as Smith and Ricardo and Marx understood it, no longer exists. It has not existed in Europe since about the time of the First World War, and it has not existed in the United States since Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to remove the requirement that U.S. dollars be backed by gold, and Congress dutifully obliged (roughly 1968-1970).

Capitalism, as Von Mises showed, is precisely that social arrangement whereby citizens inhibit their governments from issuing state-backed commercial drafts (paper money) not backed by actual commodities (i.e., capital), typically gold held in reserve. Capitalism restrains governments fom issuing fiat money backed by nothing more than the “full faith and credit” of the government printing it. This arrangement existed for about two centuries in England (from just after the so-called “Glorious Revolution” to the 1920s) and less than a century in much of Europe (roughly, the later nineteenth century after Napoleon’s defeat).

Genuine capitalism is not perfect. I am no libertarian gold bug with Atlas Shrugged in his back pocket. Capitalism has flaws. Marx saw some of those flaws, but so did other more conservative voices. Indeed, some of the greatest critics of Capitalism’s excesses were Roman Catholics, including the brilliant Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Conditions of the Working Classes”) FDR would later exploit to sell Irish-Catholic Democrats on the New Deal.

But capitalism did act as a natural restraint against government tyranny. It effectively neuters some the worst aspects of government (including its ability to fund wars, exchange empty promises for votes, and promote speculation). But it does grossly penalize debtors, stiffels certain kinds of risk, cheapens human labor, and encourages speculators to exploit foreign markets (colonialism).

A genuine capitalist regime constrains governments not only from making war but from making untenable promises regarding the social welfare. When arch-conservative Ohio Sen. Robert S. Taft (“Mr. Republican” to friends and critics alike) opposed the New Deal, he feared the betrayal and demise of his beloved Founders’ capitalist republic, which he analogized (somewhat roughly) to the Augustan dictatorship that overturned republican Rome with imperial wars in Gaul and North Africa and bread and circuses in the Agora at home. You would never know it watching Fox News or listening to Newt Gingrich or the Bush dynastics, but the old conservatives raised a cry and hew against both welfare and warfare. War and welfare together are the lifeblood of the state. Both offer promises of safety and abundance, but end in peril for freedom and, in the case of war, worse miseries still.

So, if we no longer live under a capitalist regime, what do we live under? Economist Richard Duncan has called the current regime “creditism,” or “creditopia.” (The book to read is his “The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy”).

Not quite a century ago, the incredibly precient British MP Hillaire Belloc and his friend G.K. Chesterton described the highly-centralized quasi-socialist/quasi-free-market state as a “Utopia for Usurers.” In good times, the banks would make money off of compound interest (“the most powerful force in the universe,” quipped Albert Einstein), but when times were bad, they could rely on Keynes and even Milton Friedman to explain why the government should simply print money to “ease liquidity” and keep the ball rolling. Now Krugman gets rich explaining why Geithner and Bernanke simply have to print more money and hand it out to their friends on Wall Street… for the little people, God bless them.

Our regime is one in which the state issues paper dollars without any restraint but the mandate to “avoid” inflation. No matter that inflation may come late (as it did in the 70s), or in the case of a deflationary bubble (like we should be having now, or that Japan should have had twenty years ago), it may be stalled indefinitely while the Keynesian fat-cats steal from the public trough.

Today, fiat money (not capital) circulates through supposedly highly-regulated but actually un-transparent banking oligarchy. The highest levels of the financial community effectively retain control over the state. They effectively use the state to inflate profits in good times(expansive cash, means expansive credit, measns expanseive compound interest) and eliminate risk in bad times. Anyone who wants to see how this works should read the incredible expose of the Wall-Street-engineered, but state-sponsored commercial paper market for residential mortgages created in the 1990s: “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis” by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera.

Note that this arrangment is NOT the same as capitalism. It is, in effect, socialism for speculators. In capitalism, the state may not simply print money to ease liquidity. Booms and busts cycle as they always have, due to commodity bubbles, or little fits of speculation, or the natural limits of credit expansion. But they do not become violent. That is because speculators cannot simply print dollars and hand them out to themselves, while promising future benefits (Medicare, Obamacare) that have no serious, actuarially-sound chance of surviving the really violent deflationary bust that will eventually come. This happened before, in Europe. Today, we call it World War II.

All of this was predicted a long time ago by Chesterton, who put it this way (I am paraphrasing): No matter if the state takes over and centralizes the banks, or the banks take over and centralize the state, the people will suffer. Chesterton just barely lived to see how Weimar-era inflation would resurrect the German military state Britain had fought once before in his youth.

OWS and the Tea Party each see one side of this diabolical union of state and speculator, but like spectators on either side of a vast mountain range, they deny that the other sees the same object. One side believes (as Jones does) that it is “absurd” to think the government is not your friend.

I submit to you that government is not your friend. The OWS-ers with their cultic, third-generation Communist rhetoric, may think of themselves as anarchists. But anyone who really fears and questions the state would behave differently than they do. They would emphasize family, community, local ownership, the old virtues of thrift, hard work, charity, and defense of freedom. They would do this in the spirit of the greatest “anarchist” of the 20th century, who was not Noam Chomsky, but Dorothy Day. They would see that the institutions tough enough to survive credit bubbles, wars, and revolutions are the most de-centralized and bourgeoisie in history: the church and the multi-generational family. That is what they would be protecting; not some juvenile, individualistic hedonism made possible by the bread and circuses doled out by our “beloved leaders” to hide their thieving in plain sight.
PMMDJ says:

February 1, 2013 at 9:09 am

This comments section really shows how little most people understand the Occupy movement.
John Drinkwater says:

February 1, 2013 at 9:25 pm

Traddy,

I’m not going to get into the Von Mises, Marx, Adam Smith debate at the moment, except to say that I think Marx’s criticism of capitalism was dead on, but his solution — a pseudo-socialist dictatorship — was a nightmare that actually came to fruition.

As for the anarchists and OWS, I refer you to an article by anthropologist, anarchist and OWS guru David Graeber. The ideas he describes have nothing to do with “juvenile individualistic hedonism”. He wrote the following (link to full article below):

“As a result, Zuccotti Park, and all subsequent encampments, became spaces of experiment with creating the institutions of a new society – not only democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries, clinics, media centres and a host of other institutions, all operating on anarchist principles of mutual aid and self-organisation – a genuine attempt to create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old.

“Why did it work? Why did it catch on? One reason is, clearly, because most Americans are far more willing to embrace radical ideas than anyone in the established media is willing to admit. The basic message – that the American political order is absolutely and irredeemably corrupt, that both parties have been bought and sold by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, and that if we are to live in any sort of genuinely democratic society, we’re going to have to start from scratch – clearly struck a profound chord in the American psyche.”

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html

The anarchists support community-based institutions. Though church hierarchy — where it exists — often presents a serious problem for anarchist theory, there are people like Dorothy Day (who you point out, thanks) and churches that are run by the church-goers themselves. In short, what you’re arguing on this particular front is not necessarily inconsistent with what the contemporary anarchist theorists like Graeber argue.
Traddy Catholic in Cleveland says:

February 2, 2013 at 6:08 pm

John Drinkwater,

No offense, but the OWS model ignores human nature. The church basement model builds on it, chastises it, sacramentaizes it. One has the intentionality of a modern art exhibit, the other has the organic reality of a family dinner together. Yours tries to undo difference, mine accepts it and tries to deal with it.

You want to end hierarchy, and relationships of power. I want only to emphasize the diffused natural hierarchies of the local. Your ideal is a Transcendentalist commune, mine is a village of rowdy, old-fashioned Hobbits.

But hey, if you really think some bunch of anarchist professors paid for by the U.S. Department of Education have the bold new answers to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness complete without any natural divisions of power, privilege, intelligence, or resources, go for it.

It’s ludicrous. But people invest in worse projects.