Certainly providing the populace with some rather zesty food for thought, the Occupy Wall Street protests have criticized pervasive international corporate greed. They have also provided us with a dignified form of political theater in streets and parks across the globe.
These protests signify a declaration of contempt against existing institutions, and such dissent, at the very least, encourages us all to think about the individual role in the democratic process.
Aristotle — whose sentiments, though not contemporary, are nonetheless relevant to our current situation — wrote that, “It is necessary for the citizens to be of such a number that they knew each others’ personal qualities and thus can elect their officials and judge their fellows in a court of law sensibly.”
The relevance of Aristotle’s sentiments to the Occupy Wall Street protests is as follows: in many ways, activism within the current political process ceases to be relevant when the existing complexities of both sentiment and interests are thrown onto the assembly line of the political machines, which more or less continues to dominate our political process, leaving the individual largely voiceless.
Certainly, many — myself included — would contend that our society isn’t even remotely close to the polis that existed in Ancient Greece, but shouldn’t there be a more direct way of participating in the political process, rather than donating a few dollars to a political action committee, or perhaps handing out fliers for Democrats or Republicans?
Certainly we can become educated citizens and grow righteous through our intellectual pursuits, but is that honestly enough?
James Madison warned against the onset of large factions crippling democracy.
Accordingly, Madison wrote, “A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.”
And although Madison’s argument points out a fundamental problem that exists within the framework of direct democracy, one that perhaps theoretically existed in Ancient Athens, there is large ambiguity with how we are to deal with such problems in our existing state.
How can we, as citizens living within the modern framework of representative democracy, attack factions — specifically, I would argue, corporations — that have largely become insurmountable through democratic means?
Can we merely rely on the checks and balances of our current constitutional framework to effectively deter expansive powers of corporations, whose powers internationally may actually exceed the power of our existing government?
These questions, at least for this column, provide just some more food for thought, but nonetheless, the “Occupy” protests indicate that citizens are unhappy with the answers that our current system provides.
It’s quite possible that corporate factions are largely “too big to fail,” but I don’t want to concede that point, and neither do the countless activists situated in Zuccotti Park, Binghamton, Seoul, Rome, London, Hong Kong and other cities across the globe.
Hopefully “progressivism,” as vague as such a term is, can provide an answer. It already seems to represent the efforts of “the 99 percent,” and can hopefully deter the possibility of a second gilded age.