Why 60s models of protest won't work today

So I'm heading down the hallway to my office when a colleague passes and says, Deemer, what's the first thing that comes to mind when I say Occupy Portland? And in a millisecond, a fraction of a millisecond, I said ... masturbation.

Ha! He thought I was going to say the sixties. It may look like the sixties, but it's not. I began to think about why -- and came up with an hypothesis.

When I marched against the Vietnam war or for civil rights, there was a strong "increase public awareness" component to my motivation. Nobody heard of Vietnam in the early stages of protest. The public had to be educated. Similarly, whites living in the north didn't know about civil rights abuses in the south. Increased public awareness was necessary. When the first articles and books about poverty in America came out, we were all shocked by living conditions in Appalachia or in an urban ghetto.

Occupy Portland says it took over the parks to increase public awareness. On the surface, this makes sense. But under scrutiny it doesn't make sense at all. Not only are we bombarded by news media far more today than in the sixties, with so many sources of news available that escaping the news is the challenge, not listening to it, but the 99% doesn't have to be educated about their own financial grief. You don't have to convince a struggling family that they're struggling. You don't have to convince the 99% that corporations are getting richer as they are getting poorer. They are living it! The difference between the need for increased public awareness in the sixties and now, in this context, is a difference of night and day.

Instead the challenge is to rope as many as possible of the 99% into a powerful voting bloc so actual change can begin to happen. This won't be easy. Remember, there are many Tea Party members in that statistic (which is all it is, a statistic, and in no way evidence that 99% agree on a damn thing). But this challenge is where the Occupy movement's energy should be going. I happen to think the voting bloc needs to be a third party because I don't trust Democrats any more than I trust Republicans to bring change.

At the same time, there is an area of increased public awareness to attend to but it's complex and, well, anti-American. We need to learn about capitalism. About the nature of corporations. About the undemonic nature of socialism. About the undemonic ideas of Marx. Teach ins, one of the best tools of the sixties, are a model to emulate for this purpose. Whether this can happen in a country that's even more anti-intellectual today than its strong anti-intellectual tradition suggests, where today politicians get votes for being ignorant, is another matter.

So the Occupy movement has to stop trying to make the public aware of what it already knows. In practice, the present strategy changes the focus from economic issues to law and order issues, which fractures whatever the 99% had in common and pushes progressive thought into the minority. Progressive thought, remember, has never been a majority opinion in this country.

We need vision, creativity, and a third party, bringing together a wide spectrum of political opinion under a single umbrella of common economic goals. Far from easy. But not at all helped by all the symbolic 60s-style protests going on today. Let's have some real change -- for a change.