Jeremy Kessler responds to Reihan Salam: Over at National Review Online, my friend Reihan Salam has a post up critiquing my recent piece on Occupy Wall Street. In it, Reihan suggests that the Occupation is a familiar caricature of an American left-wing movement, spearheaded by a vanguard of college-educated elites and backed by the power of relatively privileged, and economically poisonous, public sector unions. In doing so, I think he misunderstands both the composition and the politics of the Occupation, and my claims about them. First, in terms of composition, I don’t think I suggested—and I would not concede—that the core of the Occupation is a “relatively small collection of radicalized women and men, many of whom feel as though they should enjoy higher status by virtue of their cultural capital, sensibilities, and credentials.” There are a lot of people down at Zuccotti Park who are neither college-educated nor members of public sectors unions. The fact that 99 percent—or some large portion—of the nation is not currently occupying Wall Street does not indicate that a credentialed elite is. Second, Reihan appears to misread the Occupation’s politics or at least my rendering of them. The politics of the Occupation, whose sincerity I have so far seen little reason to doubt, is explicitly opposed to vanguardism. While a vanguard first seeks to seize power and only then to convert the majority to its cause, the Occupation admits that it will not have power until the majority stands with it. It is the Occupation’s rejection of vanguardism that leads to the tactical challenges that my piece seeks to address. Reihan’s critique, on the other hand, proceeds by assuming that the Occupation—or my rendering of it—depends on a vanguard in classic Leninist fashion. Here I think Reihan may be trying to fit my acknowledgement that the Occupation has not yet secured the participation of a majority of the nation into a standard right-wing paradigm that assumes the elitism of leftist movements. Putting these two misunderstandings aside, Reihan is correct that my piece looks forward to a broader base of support that would include unionized public employees and college-educated elites. His post helpfully raises two worries about the
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