Benjamin Wachs: Meet the new reform movement

In 1992, Ross Perot said the political system was broken, ran as a third party presidential candidate, and won a small but significant portion of the vote.

In 2000, Ralph Nader said and did the same thing, leading to the George W. Bush presidency.

Just after the 2008 presidential election, the Tea Party formed because our country needed to be taken back from Americans who weren’t real enough.

Now, in 2011, we have Occupy Wall Street, which has spread to cities around the nation, calling for … something … maybe … or not.

The lesson is that approximately every three to eight years Americans look for something to save them from America.

There’s nothing new here. We are a country that believes in grand gestures, like conquering the West or starring on reality TV. Both our puritan ancestors and our revivalist forbears believed that through repentance and demonstrations of devotion we could be made clean and godly. We look for the political equivalent of that all the time.

What is unusual is that the left and right are doing it at basically the same time. The left took a little longer because it really thought Obama was going to change everything, but it got here. Meanwhile the center is a few steps behind, desperately looking for a meaningful way to protest. (“What do we want?” “Comprehensive, responsible, policy proposals to be implemented by a non-threatening authority figure!”)

Count me among the Americans who want to save and/or stop America. Big business has become as reprehensible as it is irresponsible. Condemning the same government that bailed you out as “socialist” because it might help someone else is revolting.

But it’s worth pointing out the obvious: While all of these movements had an impact on the country, none of them actually did the job. America has not been saved. The malefactors are still wealthy, the crooks still in Congress, the bums most explicitly not thrown out.

Sometimes this is because a movement fizzles, like the presidential bids of Perot and Nader. Sometimes it is because the movement gets co-opted, like the tea party, which in just two years has gone from demanding a wholesale repudiation of bailouts to endorsing establishment candidates because they defend Wall Street.

So while my heart is with Occupy Wall Street (I’ll always prefer freaks to bankers wearing “I destroyed the global economy and all I got was this lousy taxpayer bail-out” T-shirts), I suspect it’s going to go the same way. It probably will have an impact, it probably will change the dynamics of our political system and the direction of our country, but it probably won’t solve the problems it was created to.

It’s hard for these American reformations to achieve their goals because reformations tend to be more interested in what’s in your heart than in establishing a comprehensive system of laws. Both the tea party and Occupy Wall Street are far more interested in saying “No!” with sincerity than in building institutions. That’s understandable. An honest “no” is important, and easy and fun compared to the work that needs to be done. But just saying “no” leaves us with no alternative between anarchy and business as usual.

We think building civilizations is easy because we do it in video games all the time, but in fact the civic instruments of a free and just society are fragile and tenuous until they’ve taken root. It’s far easier to bring a democracy down than it is to build one.

Our protest movements — tea party and Occupy Wall Street both — will ultimately be judged by how well they can build democratic institutions, not tear them down.

I think it’s fair to start with banks. Can we harness the millions of Americans, left and right, who are outraged by Bank of America to create a new credit union — one that won’t charge rapacious fees but will loan to small businesses? One that won’t create financial devices of mass destruction but will invest in Main Street?

Whether or not Wall Street gets charged for its very real crimes, we’ll need to build institutions like that. If we can, we’ll be fine in the long run. If we can’t, it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge. We’ll have another reformation, on schedule, in five years or so.

Benjamin Wachs writes for Messenger Post Media in New York, and is the editor of Fiction365.com. Email him at Benjamin@Fiction365.com.