Occupy Wall Street: the Id of the Liberal Elite

Nearly fifty years ago, Hollywood provided the perfect metaphor for understanding what we now see happening: in the classic 1956 science fiction motion picture Forbidden Planet, loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, a twenty-third-century spaceship from Earth arrives on the planet Altair to rescue a reclusive but very kind, gentlemanly scientist and his beautiful daughter.  The rescuers are soon menaced by an invisible monster who possesses unimaginable powers to terrify and destroy.  In the end, we find out that the monster is actually the professor's "id" made manifest as a powerful being, ravaging all those who threaten the utopia that the professor has created for himself and his daughter.

Like the rampaging monster terrorizing the planet Altair, Occupy Wall Street is the physical manifestation of the monstrous, collective id of this nation's liberal elites. 

Sigmund Freud coined the term "id" to describe the lowest realm of functioning in the human psyche.  It represents the most base, instinctual portion of the human mind.  He defined the id as "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ... and most of that is of a negative character[.] ... We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations" (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933).

Occupy Wall Street has never been about what the occupying young people have had to say.  It has been about creating a window of opportunity for left-leaning commentators and political activists to seize control of the national conversation leading up to the November 2012 elections.  It is meant to be the launching point for a revolution.  And if the revolution has to turn violent, so be it.

Adbusters, home of the masterminds behind Occupy Wall Street, describes its organization's mission as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new socialist activist movement of the information age.  Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century."

This toppling, it seems, entails a lot of extreme, foul behavior.  So far, Occupy encampments and events around the country have set the scene for more than 4,000 arrests, multiple alleged rapes, anti-Semitic harangues, attacks on police, child endangerment, public defecation and urination, public sex and masturbation, drug use, thefts, assaults, vandalism, the destruction of private and public property, devastating blows to local merchants' businesses, a few deaths, and much, much more.  The list continues to grow.

 

By any measurement of objective truth, this "movement" is appalling.  What is more appalling is this: adult progressives -- politicos, pundits, self-interested activists, and activist organizations -- are inhumanely manipulating these poor clueless kids who are experiencing degradation all for the sake of a flawed, failing ideology.

Occupy Wall Street belongs less to the kids who are doing the occupying and more to folks like Van Jones, Robert Reich, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Jeffery Sachs, and E.J. Dionne -- to organizations such as ACORN, SEIU, and a host of other leftist groups who have felt neutered by the Tea Party.  Promoting Occupy gives them a way to express themselves with more than just words; it is a means of engaging in vicarious violence, lashing out at those who stand in the way of advancing their ideology.  They are perfectly happy to overlook all of the occupiers' extreme behavior because it is an expression of their contempt for the recent resurgence of populist conservatism.

This rising conservatism represents an existential threat to the Axis of Liberal Power in this country, which continues to reel from the powerful blows of the elections of 2009, 2010, and 2011.  Liberal elites are now determined to wage an ugly war in 2012 in order to prevent what could be a fatal blow to their position of power in Washington, D.C.  While the presence of Occupiers has diminished with the onset of cold weather, they will no doubt return with greater force next spring and intensify through the summer.

Through Occupy Wall Street, liberal elites reveal who they are deep down inside and how they would behave if they themselves were free to cast aside all societal restraint.  Their unwavering support and cheerleading for the Occupiers prove that they are comfortable with some level of both anarchy and tyranny if either will bring about their impossible utopian vision for the United States of America.  Many seem to be longing for a "Kent State" or "Tiananmen Square" moment to win public sympathy and spark the revolution.

The big story concerning Occupy Wall Street is not about the protesters.  It's about the media, pundits, public- and private-sector unions, and other elites whose ideological contempt breathes life into the movement.

Occupy's promoters fail to realize that the Tea Party has thrived and grown in power and influence precisely because it truly has been a spontaneous grassroots movement, not an engineered one.  No matter how much money and effort liberal elites invest in Occupy, no matter how much chaos they create and no matter how much soaring rhetoric extolling their Occupy dreams they publish and broadcast, elites on the left cannot manufacture a groundswell of support for a flawed ideology which is antithetical to American exceptionalism.

Doug Mainwaring is a co-founder of National Capital Tea Party Patriots.

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