Andrew Sullivan: How I Learned to Love the Goddamned Hippies

kateoplis:

“You can ignore much of this if the economy is generating enough jobs and sufficient dynamism to distract attention. That’s why Dancing With the Stars exists. But after the deepest recession since the 1930s, the patience runs out. That, it seems to me, is the core of what has been happening. The global public, more aware than ever of what is going on in the world, and more able than ever before to share ideas, facts, experiences, and testimonies, is acutely sensitive to the vested interests of the powerful who stand in the way of their dreams. In recent years they have risen up outside the box of conventional politics. In 2008 vast new numbers of Americans transformed the political process through social media and small-donor fundraising, electing a rank outsider, Obama, who challenged the natural heirs to the old system, the Clintons. The next year Iranians, empowered by the same technologies, called their own leaders’ electoral bluff and nearly changed the world. This year the very same empowerment gave us the Arab Spring. Even now, in Syria, after unimaginable intimidation and brute violence, thousands still manage to protest in the streets—at night if they have to. More obscured, but just as tenacious, public demonstrations in China have rattled the government. Even the Burmese junta recently gave in to public pressure and scrapped a major dam development. [Add to that the recent victory of Bolivian protesters over the controversial Amazon Highway.]

The revolts in the West require nothing of the courage displayed by Egyptians or Syrians or Tunisians standing up to tanks and bullets and torture. But they have a similar dynamic. They have occupied public spaces in the center of cities, as if to reclaim ownership of a society they feel has been privatized into nonexistence. This is not Protest Wall Street; it is Occupy It. It does not march through; it stops and sits and waits—as if the genie of Tahrir Square could not be kept bottled up in Egypt for very long. The very act is empowering, a form of theater as well as politics. But the theater works only when it reflects underlying truths—truths that cut through cultural divides. Because this is not the 1960s. These are not the children of the affluent acting out for sexual and personal liberation. They are the children of the golden years of hyped-up, unregulated, lightly taxed capitalism—now facing the same unemployment and austerity as the rest of the world.”

You Say You Want a Revolution | Daily Beast

Andrew Sullivan. In the tank for Obama, bandwagon-jumping, power-respecting, part-of-the-problem-never-part-of-the-solution, cunt.

Source: kateoplis