The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the...

“The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide. The mainstream right will not challenge those who’ll exploit the system for their own ends, and exploit others for their own profit, because so many have off-loaded their moral thinking to the market. Nor, not in a million years, will the Republican Party. That may be one of the worst results of the sixties, that the politics of gesture and emotion have been privileged, as the academics put it, which means a politics with no actual political content will drive a publicly successful movement like Occupy Wall Street—even though it is not going anywhere in particular.”

Occupy Wall Street’s Empty Anger | First Things (via ayjay)

In posting the quote above, Alan Jacobs commented:

I agree with this analysis completely. I sympathize with, and feel, the anger behind #OWS, but with every day that passes the various acts of “occupation” seem emptier, more pointless. How do we get from these gestures to legitimate political action?

Jacobs has been posting some great stuff lately, and this is one of them. The thing about the quote above that really gets to me is that the right is not immoral in regards to capitalism, but that they’ve “off-loaded their moral thinking.” And for an increasingly Christianized movement, as the Republican party is, to off-load their moral thinking anywhere is troubling. Adam Smith’s invisible hand which controls markets has become synonymous with God, both of which/whom work in mysterious ways.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day which read, “I believe in capitalism.” But of course that’s an incomplete statement. When one believes in God, it implies that she believes in what she does not see: it’s a statement of faith in God’s existence. But the existence of capitalism isn’t in question (is it?). I wondered exactly what the rest of the statement of faith about capitalism would be: “To protect the interests of the public at large”? “That it will grow indefinitely and infinitely”? “To fix the perceived problems of society”? “As an appropriate and virtuous force to govern society, and therefore really don’t need a government at all”? I’m struggling a bit with this: is there a reasonable way to finish that statement without sounding like an insensitive, privileged jerk?

Which is, I think, the problem on the right: that they’re not asking the questions that need to be asked about our relationship to The Market. But the problem on the left is perhaps more urgent, since the most visible wing of the left are currently spending four hours a day beating drums in NYC and spend their time doing performance art and wiggling their fingers as a form of absurdist democracy. They’ve gotten themselves stuck: there’s no easy exit at this point from #OWS because there’s no way to satisfy them. They’re mad as Hell, sure, but they’re mad at an idea. And ideas are eternal. If they want to get something done, get mad at something that can change, and then make it hurt until something changes. As it stands now, the easiest thing (and perhaps the only real workable response to #OWS) is to ignore it and hope it goes away.