America's Arab Spring?

PJ: Ms. Slaughter captures the impression the many of us on the outside have of the current unrest in the US.

New York Times

Op-Ed Contributor
Occupied Wall Street, Seen From Abroad
By ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER
Published: October 6, 2011

THE American mainstream media is gradually beginning to pay attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spinoffs springing up in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Seattle. But from the very beginning the movement has attracted extensive coverage from Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern news outlets and Twitter users — probably because they recognize the forces that are reshaping politics across their region.

Indeed, the twin drivers of America’s nascent protest movement against the financial sector are injustice and invisibility, the very grievances that drove the Arab Spring.

Go on the Web site “We are the 99 percent” and you will see the Mohamed Bouazizis of the United States, page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out loans to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses and a piece of the American dream, worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up unemployed or radically underemployed and on the precipice of financial and social ruin.

They are not setting themselves on fire as Mr. Bouazizi did in Tunisia. But after electing a president who ran on the theme of hope and change, these Americans feel betrayed. The only change they are seeing is a tiny percentage of rich Americans getting richer while they are getting poorer. That is the injustice.

The invisibility is even worse. Human dignity is about being recognized, listened to, and acknowledged as an individual human being with an irreducible moral worth. But at a time when one in six Americans live in poverty and virtually all of our social indicators are worse than at any time since the Great Depression, the political system is locked in partisan paralysis. They are not being heard, so increasingly they will make themselves seen. And given unemployment rates, millions of Americans have nothing better to do with their time.

If we have learned anything from watching the Arab Spring over the past nine months, it should be that efforts to ridicule, ignore and block these kinds of protests only fuel them further. The only effective response is a political response, of a nature and magnitude that convinces protesters on the streets that they can in fact secure the change they seek within, rather than outside, the system. The news anchors and political commentators who scoff at the Occupy Wall Street marchers’ lack of direction or articulated demands only make them madder and more determined.

Moreover, it’s not hard to discern a political agenda taking shape. If the Tea Party is obsessed with debt and hence the size of government, the “99 Percent” movement is focused on problems that depend as much on the state of our political system as on any specific government policies. In the words of one protester interviewed in San Francisco, “We don’t have a government for ‘we the people’ anymore.”

Our political system is skewed to extremes by party primaries and beholden to donors at every subsequent stage. Neither Democratic nor Republican candidates can win without the support of the wealthiest 1 percent. And even if they could finance their campaigns more broadly, moderate candidates on both sides of the aisle who are willing to compromise and make the dramatic economic, environmental and energy policy changes our country needs cannot survive partisan primaries. The result is a government that does not actually represent the majority of the American people.

Yet solutions are not hard to find. California has replaced party primaries with open elections, a measure that passed easily. New York City has a matching campaign finance system that offers $6 in public funds for each of the first 175 dollars that a donor gives to each candidate, an approach that has been endorsed by campaign finance reformers on both the left and the right.

Proposals abound for universal voter registration, and Oregon’s vote-by-mail system resulted in over 80 percent voter turnout in the last presidential election. There are also proposals for proportional representation schemes, electing our presidents by popular vote, amending the constitution to bar private money from federal elections, and ending the filibuster in Congress. The common theme of all these proposals is simple: each citizen should get a vote that counts as much as the vote of every other citizen. The deeper point is that our economic system will work for all Americans only when our political system works for all Americans.

In the past month, it has been odd to read Twitter and blog posts from the Middle East taking the Wall Street protests far more seriously than anyone here has. My reflexive response was to explain that they didn’t understand our politics; after all, that is so often what citizens of other countries tell Americans when we opine oh-so-knowingly about their politics.

But in this case, I am beginning to suspect that people abroad with long experience of disenfranchisement and trampling of their dignity may in fact understand the fissures in our society better than we do ourselves.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, was director of policy planning at the State Department from 2009 to 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/occupied-wall-street-seen-from-abroad.html?_r=1