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The long winter in Canada and the United States is going to challenge the OWS movement.  Living in a tent sucks at the best of times, but add snow and cold temperatures to the mix and the proposition becomes quite untenable (at least to my delicate tastes).  I hope that the organizers of the OWS have planned for the elements, perhaps moving the focus south during the winter and then coming back in force in the north during the spring.  Whatever their plans may be, I hope no one is injured due to exposure to the elements.

The weather aside, another feature playing prominently into the future of the OWS movement is its apparent resilience to the corrosive effects of the right wing media.  Quite simply, it would seem the OWS seem to have resisted so for being tarred and feathered by its main ideological opponents.

“Hardline conservatives struggle to find a candidate to go up against Barack Obama in 2012. Sarah Palin gets booed in public. Tea Party numbers are dwindling and now the group is ranking amongst the least popular groups in the country. Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street has surged forward both in public consciousness and in popularity. The right-wing response to Occupy Wall St. has been limp and incoherent, mainly centered around spreading urban legends about dirty hippies and avoiding any substantive engagement.  

How did the right-wing lose hold of the narrative? Here are four reasons it has been unsuccessful (so far) in steering and reframing the discourse surrounding OWS and the movement’s focus on the injustice of the 1%’s dominance of our economy and politics.”

The focus away from the mostly incoherent babble from the Tea Party is a good thing.  The sheer amount of stupidity amalgamated into one movement was dangerous for the political discourse of the US, polarizing even further the divide between people.

1. Its “woe is me” pose may have lost luster in an ongoing economic crisis. 

“The stock and trade of the American right is to play the victim. Right-wing propaganda in the form of Fox News, talk radio and direct mail is full of whining about how conservatives are just so oppressed because they can’t impose their agenda on others by fiat. The Tea Party’s motto was one of victimization: “I want my country back!” At first, many perceived the Tea Party as a populist uprising against unpopular initiatives like the bank bailout. As time has worn on, however, it’s become clear that the Tea Party has no real interest in holding corporations accountable, and that its leadership generally seemed interested in exploiting the bank bailout as part of a larger anti-government ideology coupled with a heartfelt devotion to the typical culture warrior nonsense.”

The persecution experience of the majority plays out on many levels.  Encountering this juxtaposition while arguing with people is most distressing as it shows the extreme inversion of values that has taken place that have mostly swept reasonable debate away.

2. The obsession with sex.

“The Republicans swept many state elections and the U.S. House by convincing the voters that they intended to do something about the economic crisis and lower the unemployment rate. Instead, they devoted most of their attention to the supposed crisis of people having unauthorized orgasms. The House can’t pass a jobs bill to save their lives, but they can pass one bill after another attacking abortion rights or defunding family planning spending. The first big showdown between Obama and the House Republicans, in fact, was over condoms and the pill; House Republicans threatened to shut down the federal government in order to prevent American women from getting subsidized birth control pills from Planned Parenthood. On the state level, voters saw the newly elected Republicans do the same thing. One state after another is falling into disrepair and seeing unemployment numbers stay high, but their state legislatures are more interested in defunding contraception and restricting abortion than in paying attention to people’s economic concerns.”

I though “the plan” for Republicans was to promise social conservative reform to get elected, and then once elected deliver right of centre economic policy while ignoring their social promises.  It would seem rather than following the plan they’ve actually dug their heels in and decided to make the social agenda a sticking point.  Apparently no one has told them that the items they are supporting are regressive anti-woman measures that seemed designed to take the US back to the Dark Ages.

3. The looniness.

“Between the Tea Party and the electoral sweeps, the right seemed to decide that it was popular enough that it could let it all hang out without getting any blowback. The American right has always been loony and paranoid, but 2011 was when the looniness really came out and became unavoidable. There were Glenn Beck’s paranoid rantings. So many right wingers became loudly fixated on President Obama’s birth story that he was eventually forced to release his birth certificate. Republican presidential candidates find they must pay tribute to all sorts of irrational nonsense, from denying global warming to creationism, in order just to get their foot in the door. Average Americans have come to expect that we’ll be hearing about communist mind control chemicals in the drinking water soon. It’s hard to see the Tea Party as rational actors who can make solid economic decisions when they spend so much time emailing each other with lists of reasons they think President Obama was born in Kenya.”

Not much to add here, other than to highlight the sad commitment to delusional nonsense.

4. The out-of-sync ideological preoccupations.

“Beyond the obviously loony right-wing nonsense is the inability to set aside unpopular preoccupations. The right assumed the electoral sweeps meant the country was ready to hear ideas the far right has been nursing for a long time in the underground. Right-wingers talked bank bailouts until they got into power and then switched to talking about permanently eliminating major taxes on the super-wealthy, ending Social Security and privatizing popular government services–all ideas that don’t sit well with the public at large. On the contrary, in economic hard times, Americans hang on harder to social welfare programs like Social Security, and they stop thinking it’s so great that rich people have more money than they know what to do with while people are starving in the streets.  

Because of these ideological preoccupations and wealth-worshipping, the American right was wholly unequipped to deal with the rise of liberal protests in the form of Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent. The protesters have addressed record unemployment, the foreclosure crisis and growing inequalities between the wealthy and the rest of us; hence the reference to the 1 percent of Americans who control 40 percent of our nation’s wealth. The right couldn’t even grasp the actual complaints of the protesters and instead responded with We Are the 53 Percent, a reference to the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income tax. The problem with that is no one was talking about most federal income tax payers; the liberal protesters are defending the vast majority of Americans, a group that includes people currently paying federal income tax, and those who can’t because they’re poor or students or retired.

The whole point of Occupy Wall Street is that a middle-class person who struggles to get by has more in common with an unemployed person than with the rich; in fact, a middle-class person could easily become a poor person in this economy. That is untrue of the 1 percent. The utter inability to grasp that basic argument has exposed the American right for what it is: a group of intellectually bereft people whose reliance on empty ideological platitudes prevents them from engaging with a changing world.”

UsneakydevilU gets the Fail Award for Lack of Argumentative Prowess.

I’ve highlighted the author’s assertion because it seems many discussions get sidetracked when it comes to discussing what the OWS protests are about.  More importantly though, what I find most disturbing about debating with many people who self identify as holding right wing opinion is the lack of commitment to grounding there presuppositions in fact.  Consider the response garnered from my last attempt at discussing educational issues with a religious conservative blogger.   After thoroughly dissecting and refuting his arguments the responses offered in return were sadly bereft of any substantive counter arguments.

Nothing.

No content, no assertions, just assorted whinging about tone and how angry atheists are and how not having a skydaddy is bad for me.  Admittedly, the format chosen by me was very critical (what else can you be when confronted with nuclear grade stupidity?) but not insulting to the person in question, just their argumentation.  How do you grow as a person if you cannot interact reasonably with ideas that conflict with your own?  The alter.net article struck a chord with me as it seemed to mirror my experiences while debating a ‘conservative’ from the US.