Re:Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
by AnthonyMouse on Sunday December 19, 2021 @01:15AM
(#29611853)
Basically the same thing happened to the Tea Party.
My impression is that the movement gets co-opted as a generic partisan force, and then having specific goals is a detriment when the unstated goal is merely to elect a particular party.
The best goal for Occupy Wall Street would have been to break up all the Too Big To Fail institutions. The "problem" with that was twofold.
One, if that's the goal, and they manage to turn the election, then they'll expect the people they elected to actually do it. But politicians didn't wanna do it. Both parties are in the pocket of the banks.
And two, if they actually did do it, it would be done. The movement would have succeeded and lost its raison d'etre. If you solve the problem then you can't run on it again.
So you're completely right. The question is how to prevent movements from getting co-opted like this. Because actually solving the problem is the thing we should want.
My impression is that the movement gets co-opted as a generic partisan force, and then having specific goals is a detriment when the unstated goal is merely to elect a particular party.
The best goal for Occupy Wall Street would have been to break up all the Too Big To Fail institutions. The "problem" with that was twofold.
One, if that's the goal, and they manage to turn the election, then they'll expect the people they elected to actually do it. But politicians didn't wanna do it. Both parties are in the pocket of the banks.
And two, if they actually did do it, it would be done. The movement would have succeeded and lost its raison d'etre. If you solve the problem then you can't run on it again.
So you're completely right. The question is how to prevent movements from getting co-opted like this. Because actually solving the problem is the thing we should want.