The Occupy movement is increasingly about the Occupy movement.

John Robb, who has strongly supported the movement since its inception, has written a fascinating take:

It appears that Occupy’s extreme non-violence/passivity has finally generated a social system disruption. Videos and pictures showing policemen using violence against passive protesters have gone viral (UC Berkeley students, Grandma, and open mouth were the leading examples). Stories about this violence are now sweeping the media (7,910 news stories over the last 24 hours). Is this going to have a strategic effect?
Let’s look at this from the late, great American strategist John Boyd’s perspective. The dynamic of Boyd’s strategy is to isolate your enemy across three essential vectors (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same vectors.

Robb goes through the three vectors and then offers the following conclusion:

This can be counted as a win for Occupy and a loss for totalitarianism. However, we’ve been sliding towards totalitarianism for decades (from caged protest zones, storm trooper attire, urban tanks, bans on pictures in public spaces, a plethora of laws/regulations against assembly, Presidential assassination lists, closed courts, no warrant searches, CCTV coverage, attempts to ban private ownership of weapons, SWAT for even tiny cities, indefinite detention, rendition, etc.). So, in relative terms, this is a very small win.

I am not inclined to share Robb’s favorable interpretation of the movement, and I am extremely uncomfortable with his use of the term “totalitarianism.” When I see images of police officers engaging in suppressive tactics, I am inclined to think about the larger circumstances: was there a credible threat of large-scale disorder, etc.? Modern police departments have been shaped by the experience of the urban riots of the late 1960s, and by the the longer-run threat posed by armed provocateurs. This may well lead to overreaction. Yet it is hard to calibrate whether or not a reaction is excessive or appropriate in the midst of the “fog of war.” The truth is that I’m ill-equipped to weigh these issues.

What I can say, however, is that the Occupy movement has moved in a different direction: it has become recursive. That is, it is increasingly about the right of its members to form encampments and to engage in sustained protest. And so the ideas of, say, a Herbert Marcuse regarding “repressive tolerance” gain credence among a larger swathe of those who self-identify as left-of-center while the aim of winning over the persuadable “mainstream” to a more expansive egalitarian movement is largely abandoned. Indeed, one effect might be to further discredit the effort to build larger coalitions, as the mainstream is defined as morally culpable in contrast to the righteous minority that possesses rarefied knowledge.

The following is an excerpt from Marcuse, the Frankfurt School social theorist who was celebrated by much of the New Left:

The political locus of tolerance has changed: while it is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies. Tolerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice to non-practice: laissez-faire the constituted authorities. It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted authorities.
Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs–the mature delinquency of a whole civilization.
According to a dialectical proposition it is the whole which determines the truth–not in the sense that the whole is prior or superior to its parts, but in the sense that its structure and function determine every particular condition and relation. Thus, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. To take a most controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude. And yet (and only here the dialectical proposition shows its full intent) the existence. and practice of these liberties remain a precondition for the restoration of their original oppositional function, provided that the effort to transcend their (often self-imposed) limitations is intensified. Generally, the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced. Tolerance itself stands subject to overriding criteria: its range and its limits cannot be defined in terms of the respective society. In other words, tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled, by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by their victims. And such universal tolerance is possible only when no real or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education and training of people in military violence and destruction. As long as these conditions do not prevail, the conditions of tolerance are ‘loaded’: they are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality (which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), i.e., by the class structure of society. In such a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police, armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held by the predominant interests and their ‘connections’.

For some of the initial organizers of the Occupy movement, its goal has been achieved. At least some people who had thought of themselves as mainstream left are now more inclined to embrace a more vigorously oppositional take regarding “the system.”

Part of the success of the Occupy movement, understood not in terms of achieving broad political and economic objectives but rather as a meme that has successfully gone viral, flows from the universal hunger for narrative. At the encampments, people are experiencing moments of solidaristic joy that others have experienced, sometimes fleetingly, through participating in team sports, religious revivals, and other intense shared experiences. The desire to be part of something larger than yourself is very strong — even if the something in question is diffuse or less than credible.

For a much richer take on Occupy, I recommend reading Matthew Continetti’s article on “Anarchy in the U.S.A.” Matt is always worth reading. Though I don’t agree with Matt’s take in every detail, it is thought-provoking as heck.