Remember the Coffee Party or No Labels? You don't? Both those movements quickly disappeared from the scene shortly after being heavily hyped in the mainstream media so you can be forgiven their absence from your memories. And now the latest liberal fad, Occupy Wall Street, seems to be fading fast as well. This is the claim made by liberal Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart in this obituary:
The massive protests over the weekend in Chicago during the NATO summit have folks wondering if that marked a resurgence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But I have to tell you, if those demonstrations are any indicator, OWS is going nowhere fast.
Although Capehart being a good liberal dislikes the beliefs of the Tea Party, he does compare it favorably with OWS in terms of effectiveness:
...Just like the tea party, OWS is an organic movement that resists having recognized leaders. But unlike the tea party, OWS continues to resist having a clear goal that can be achieved through the political process. And it doesn’t help that it has an aversion to the political process.
Think about it. When the tea party got real angry, folks who adhered to its overarching concerns about federal spending and overreach made their voices heard in protests in Washington. But they weren’t content to simply protest. Whether out of conviction or co-opting by Dick Armey or the Koch brothers, those protesters became office seekers. They upended the Republican establishment by running primary challenges to the right of sitting members of Congress — and winning. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) is the most recent example. They provided the GOP the majority it needed to take back the House in 2010.
Unfortunately for Capehart and other liberals, OWS will never go much beyond street theater as happened most recently in Chicago. Actual political organizing just takes to much of the work they have an aversion to although Capehart still holds out a faint hope for them:
If Occupy doesn’t use this time to get actively involved in political process, it will never move from protest to power to achieve the goals it says it has.
The big question now is what was the Jump the Shark moment for the OWS non-movement? I maintain that it happened in early October, shortly after its much heralded birth, when this video from Occupy Atlanta was posted online. It displays all the hilarious self-indulgent OWS eccentricities including twinkle finger signals and human echo chambers topped off by a complete inability for the group to make any real decisions such as simply allowing Congressman John Lewis to speak. Watch and laugh as the OWS movement killed itself off by being laughed out of existence. It's kind of hard to attract adherents to a movement that made itself a national laughingstock.
