Steve Fraser - The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

O ccupy Wall Street, a movement that began as a small encampment of young people in lower Manhattan, became a riveting public spectacle in the fall of 2011. A mere month after the first sleeping bags were unrolled in Zuccotti Park, a stones throw away from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, millions of occupiers in a thousand cities around the world all on the same day echoed the plaint of those New York rebels that the whole planet had been hijacked and then ruined by a financial elite and its political enablers. The 99% who were its victims had had enough. Nothing of this scope and speed had ever happened before, ever. It was testimony not only to the magical powers of the internet, but more important to the profound revulsion inspired by institutions that just a few short years earlier had commanded great authority and respect. Now they seemed illegitimate and disgraced.

Peering back into the past at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against the Street and the domination of empowered economic elites of all sorts, a historian feels compelled to ask a simple question: Why didnt Occupy Wall Street (OWS) happen much sooner than it did? During those three years after the global financial meltdown and Great Recession, an eerie silence blanketed the country. Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached levels not seen for a generation. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged, but only around the effort to save too big to fail goliathsnot the legions left destitute in the wake of their financial wilding. The political class prescribed what people already had enough of: yet another dose of austerity, plus a faith-based belief in a recovery that for the 99% of Americans would never be much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future waned and bitterness set in.

Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. Or rather it was invisible where it had always been most conspicuous: on the left. Right-wing populism, the Tea Party especially, flourished, excoriating limousine liberals and know-it-all government bureaucrats. Establishments in both parties ran from or tried to curry favor with this upwelling of hot political emotions. But the animus of the Tea Party was mainly aimed at big government and social liberalism. To be sure, it wasnt fond of financial titans collecting handouts from the Federal Reserve. Still, Tea Party partisans were waging war on behalf of capitalism, not against it. That mission had always belonged to the left.

What left? In the light of American history, its vanishing, or at least its frailty and passivity, was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again landed gentry, slave owners, industrial robber barons, monopolists, Wall Street, the Establishment, and assorted other oligarchs had found themselves in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry. After all, from the outset Americans had displayed an easily irritated edginess toward any sign of political, social, or economic pretension. Aristocrats had never been welcome here. No plutocrats or oligarchs need apply either. Hierarchies of bloodlines, entitled wealth, or political preferment were alien and obnoxiousin theory at least, not part of the DNA of the New World. Elitism, wherever and whenever it showed itself, had always been greeted with a truculent contempt, what guardians of the ancien rgime in the Old World would have condemned as insufferable insolence.

Is this a misreading of the American past, a kind of consoling fairy tale of the way we never were? If todays bankers, corporate chiefs, and their political enablers managed to perpetrate wrack and ruin yet emerged pretty much unscathed, at least until OWS eruptedand even then all the sound and fury spent itself quicklywhat else is new? Arguably, America is and always has been a business civilization through and through, ready to tolerate high degrees of inequality, exploitation, and lopsided distributions of social and political influence. The famously taciturn president Calvin Coolidge (Silent Cal was so mute that when social critic Dorothy Parker got word he had passed away, she waspishly asked, How could they tell?) once pointedly and bluntly pronounced that the business of America is business. Isnt that the hard truth? So long as people have believed the country still offered them a credible shot at the main chancean equal right to become unequalthe rest would take care of itself.

One version of the American story has it that the abrasions of class inequities get regularly soothed away in the bathwater of abundance. Rancorous conflicts, which anybody would acknowledge there have been plenty of, are, in this telling, more often about cultural and social animosities than about class struggle.

Class warfare, howeversomething that became virtually unspeakable during the last generationwas a commonplace of everyday life during what might be called the long nineteenth century. It was part of our lingua franca from the days when Jefferson and his democratic followers denounced counterrevolutionary moneycrats through the grim decade of the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt excoriated economic royalists, Tories of industry, and pillagers of other peoples money.