From the Sam Adams Alliance blog:
Who says the Tea Party is ‘disciplined’?
By Alan Pell Crawford
Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society and one of the last genuine New Left activists around, takes pains in a long piece in the New York Times to point out how Occupy Wall Street is “totally unlike” the tea party.
But despite his best efforts, he actually shows how much alike they really are.
‘Let the People Decide’
Occupy Wall Street, he argues, represents the “anarchist impulse” in American political life and thought. Anarchism in America “is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy.” Its creed, dating back to the 1960s at least, has always been, “Let the people decide.” It is characterized by its profound “distrust of outside authority.” It is for the most part “leaderless.”
And Occupy Wall Street is only the most recent form this “anarchist impulse” takes. Because Occupy Wall Street has not settled on an official hierarchy of leaders and refuses to be shackled to a program, it can “slip laughingly through the nets of journalism, which prefers hard-and-fast answers to the question, ‘What do you people want?’”
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