The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession

Protest as Symptoms

Nils C. Kumkar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319736877
• eBook ISBN: 9783319736884
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure. It shows that the protests have to be understood as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie's lived experience of crisis, which also plays a crucial role in current political developments like the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The book explains the Great Recession as an acute phase of the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, identifies the social classes from which the core-participants of the respective protests recruited themselves and the socioeconomic developments to which they were exposed in the years leading up to the protests, and interprets interviews and group discussions conducted with activists to reconstruct the habitus that structured both their experience of the crisis and their resonance with the respective protest practices. It thereby provides an encompassing understanding of the social logicsnot only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.

© The Author(s) 2018

Nils C. KumkarThe Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great RecessionCritical Political Theory and Radical Practicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73688-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Protests in the Wake of the Great Recession

Nils C. Kumkar¹

(1)

University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

End Abstract

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the USA came as a shock to most observers and commentators. As such, it was the (preliminary) culmination point of a decade of surprising events: In 2008, the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers precipitated the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. One year later, the Tea Party, an explosively growing, right-wing conservative protest mobilization, helped to dampen or to stop the reformist programs of the newly elected Obama administration and injected radical ambition into the Republican Party which many had already seen as being in inevitable decline after Obamas election. In 2011, just as the economic indicators seemed to suggest that the crisis was over, a group of young, left-wing activists, inspired by the uprisings around the Mediterranean, began a symbolic encampment in the heart of the financial district of New York City. After a short incubation period, Occupy Wall Street spread to cities all over the USA and many other countries, voicing sharp criticism of rising inequalities. In 2015, observers of the primaries of the two large US-American parties began to register signs of anomaly: In the Democratic Party, the social democrat and self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders managed to win important primary elections against Hillary Clinton, who had already been considered the de facto crowned presidential candidate. The leadership of the Republican Party began to abandon their favorite candidate Jeb Bush and to support the so-called Tea Party candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as contenders against the rise of Donald Trump—as we know, ultimately in vain.

It is striking how similar the political public reacted to these events: Almost nobody saw them coming. Early signs were ignored and those that did warn about them were ridiculed or excluded from ‘serious’ debates. When the dynamic of the event became undeniable, its scope was first talked down before the mood quickly turned: The events were now seen as unprecedented, tide turning, and teaching ‘us all’ important lessons. And after their momentum faded, they were either forgotten or relegated to the dustbin of the anecdotic.

Freud theorized that the symptom is to be understood as the return of something repressed, and such a recurring surprise by seemingly random events nurtures the suspicion that there is something we avoid to confront and which therefore continues to haunt us. It is the wager of this book that this is indeed the case. There is something the public debate was avoiding to confront and which threatened to resurface in these moments of shock. And however fleeting their appearance and disappearance might have seemed, the protests of the Tea Party (TP) and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) offer a window into the social processing of the hard subjective and objective reality that subterraneously connects the Great Recession and the election of Donald Trump—and even points beyond it. The economic crisis was no “black swan” that interrupted the normal course of events out of the blue.¹ Instead, it represented the escalation of deep economic imbalances rooted in the contradictions of the current state of global capitalism. In the same vein, these protests should not simply be reduced to a (more or less) consequential but ultimately random event. Rather, they should be seen as symptoms of the very crisis they reacted to, thereby revealing social tensions at the heart of contemporary capitalism. Given that the political economic contradictions that became visible as the Great Recession are far from resolved, it is all but surprising that the wishes, tensions, and grievances that drove these protests surfaced again—and with force.

This book understands and analyzes the protests therefore as symptoms of an underlying socioeconomic crisis. Its guiding question, which will be further theoretically and methodologically nuanced and unfolded in the rest of this introduction, is: How can the lived experience of the Great Recession by the social classes that drove these mass protests be understood as shaping and informing their very protest-practice? Or, the other way around, how can the protests as a social practice be interpreted as a symptom of the socially specific lived experience of the political economic crisis?

To answer this question, I focus on the first, explosive phase of OWS and the TP. The aim is to analyze the respective protest-practices’ rootedness in the socially specific lived experiences of those that expressed their longings and discontents in them. I did not choose these examples because they effected or initiated important political changes, nor because I deem them politically more relevant than other protests in the same period of time. Instead, I chose them for two main reasons. First, pragmatically speaking, they were accessible to me. Thanks to generous funding provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG), I was able to travel to the USA for three extended periods of field research. My experiences with both Leftist activism (especially of the college campus variety) and with interviewing conservative activists and personal ties provided an opportune combination that allowed me to quickly establish friendly and open relationships to people active in the TP and OWS. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s metaphor, it does not matter much from which point of the surface of a given moment we lower the lead (Simmel 1994, 71)—if we proceed carefully, it will start to swing with the same deep currents.

Second, beyond pragmatic considerations, it was the hopes and fears projected onto and articulated through them, and the diffuse and often contradictory claims and issues raised by them, that made me think of them as a promising starting point for sketching out the fault lines and discontents that built up with the escalation of social contradictions during this socioeconomic crisis. True, their constituencies were not among those objectively hit the hardest by the Great Recession. Yet, through mobilizing hundreds of thousands and being vocal about their discontents, they prove to be very sensitive indicators of the developments. Furthermore, the class-generational units from which the core constituencies of the respective protest mobilizations were drawn—the older cohorts of the classical petty bourgeoisie in the case of the TP and the younger, aspiring cohorts of the new petty bourgeoisie in the case of OWS—tend to be very involved in the processes of political opinion building in the USA. As important factions of the so-called middle classes, these groups’ importance for the legitimacy of the political system can hardly be overestimated. Their perceptions of the crisis and their criticisms must therefore be carefully interpreted—independent of the degree of legitimacy that one intuitively is willing to grant them.

At first I was, for example, irritated by the son of two philosophy professors, himself a student and scholarship-recipient in a prestigious graduate program at New York University, somewhat martially declaring that his “generation” was hit by the Great Recession “with the force of a bomb” and that he experienced “wrenching periods of underemployment” before he joined OWS (Gould-Wartofsky 2015, 4). However, there is no denying that he and his fellow occupiers were the ones who articulated the most vocal criticism of rising social inequality and a general discontent about the way the crisis was politically and economically processed. Connecting the criticism to its social roots should therefore not be misunderstood as a veiled attempt at disqualification qua social reduction. Instead, connecting it to the social conditions of the possibility of its occurrence hopefully contributes to the overall potential of a critique of the very social conditions that underlie the suffering and the discontent driving the critique.

In the following, I will sketch out my practice-oriented, materialist approach through which I address this challenge and the corresponding reconstructive, critical-hermeneutic methodology employed in collecting and making sense of the empirical data. I hope that what otherwise might strike some readers as crude reductionism camouflaged in overly arcane jargon will instead be understood as a very careful, iterative attempt at identifying a limited number of essential determinants in the chaotic multiplicity of empirical ‘facts’ through which the inner logic of the protest-practices and their relation to the Great Recession presented itself. Following this explanation of the general theoretical and methodological perspective, the research question is reformulated through the lens of this approach, concluding with a short summary of the structure of the book.

1.1 Theoretical-Methodological Considerations: Protests as a Social Practice

Although OWS was a rather short-lived episode in the wave of protest that emerged three years after the beginning of the Great Recession, it captured the imagination and attention of the academic and journalistic public more than most other protests in the last decade: “(...M)easured by words published per square foot of setting, Zuccotti Park may well be the most intensely scrutinized landscape in recent journalistic history. (…) Measured in terms of words published per political results (sic), on the other hand, OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time” (Frank 2012). This polemical statement by Thomas Frank might be a slight exaggeration, especially given the difficulty of properly measuring the political results of OWS.² Published in late 2012, Frank’s article nevertheless evocatively describes the flood of journalistic, activist, and/or academic publications that sprung up after OWS marked the arrival of the wave of protests in the epicenter of the economic turbulences that had triggered the Great Recession. Despite this strong interest in OWS and the TP, throughout these accounts, three aspects of the protest mobilization remain under-researched and under-theorized. These aspects are crucial for answering this book’s guiding question and therefore together constitute the research gap which this book seeks to close (or at least narrow):

(1) On the macro-level, despite a broad consensus among those researching especially the Occupy protests, according to which the Great Recession is an important factor for explaining the protests (e.g. Della Porta 2015; Benski et al. 2013; Langman 2013), the exact nature of this link between the political economic dynamics and the protest-practice itself is still underexplored. (2) This corresponds, on the meso-level, with largely unsystematic accounts on the demographic composition of the protests, especially regarding social class, as I will discuss in more detail in Chap. 3. (3) On the micro-level, finally, there is a lack of reconstructive, qualitative studies on the experiences and motives of the participants, especially regarding the Occupy protests. It is the wager of this dissertation that these three desiderates cannot be treated separately from each other but are in fact attributes of one and the same research gap, and that filling this gap allows for a more systematic comparison of the different protests in this wave of contention, especially for a more symmetrical comparison with right-wing protests thus far excluded from comparative studies on the protests in the wake of the Great Recession.

To formulate these three research desiderates as attributes of one integrated complex already points to the theoretical and methodological perspective that informed the construction of this book’s research object. My practice-theory-oriented, materialist assumption problematizes the separation of micro-, meso-, and macro-level phenomena. I assume that the practice of the protests can be explained (to a relevant degree) via the socially specific experiences of their constituencies before and during their participation in the protests, and these experiences are (again to a relevant degree) determined by the dynamics of their socio-material living conditions. The key t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Protests in the Wake of the Great Recession
• 2. The Structural Crisis and the Emerging Patterns of Class Conflict
• 3. The Demographics of the Mobilized: The Core Constituency of the Protests
• 4. Theoretical and Methodological Considerations: Habitus and Habitus Reconstruction
• 5. Experiencing the Crisis: Results of the Habitus Reconstruction
• 6. Fields and Conjunctures: The Thick Opportunity Structure of the Mobilizations
• 7. The Acid Test: Reconstructing the Occupation of Urban Public Space as a Socially Determined Practice
• 8. Conclusion and Outlook
• Back Matter