Occupy Wall Street: Rebels With Divergent Causes

A friend of mine asked me how I felt about the Tea Party movement.  I replied that this was a group of people who had various different opinions about various different subjects, some of which I agreed with and some of which I did not.  If the Tea Party is not a completely coherent movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement is even less so.  Even participants themselves recognize their movement as being less politically coherent than the Tea Party.

This is part of a wider moral issue.  Under what conditions should we see political protest as being morally legitimate?  By this I do not mean to give government the moral legitimacy to clamp down on political protest, I mean to question under what circumstances  such protest ought to have widespread public approval.

For this I suppose it depends on the sort of protest we are talking about.  Political protest can take several different forms.  The most mild form would be what I am doing right now, simply expressing an opinion.  This should, of course, enjoy widespread public approval and support.  What I am doing is a great public service.  But seriously, if people don't like my opinion it is quite easy for them to ignore it.

On the other hand, we have widespread public disruption and blocking traffic.  This is a tremendous inconvenience to the general public.  In order to determine whether the public should approve of this we will need to look at the benefits and consequences.  Of course approval and tolerance are two different things.  Our tolerance should be much wider than our approval.

Without making a coherent statement of purpose, such a movement produces an inconvenience to the public without stating any set of countervailing benefits that it hopes to achieve.  There is no reason that the public has been given to support this political action.  Statements about the right to free speech are irrelevant.  We are not discussing whether such a movement ought to be tolerated, but whether we should approve.

Without a coherent statement of grievances and a proposed method of addressing those grievances, we are given no idea about what might be done to satisfy the demands of the movement in order to restore public order.  Opponents of the movement are not given any idea about what sort of concessions they would need to make as a price for restoring this order.

These are reasons for opposing the movement, regardless of the merits of their grievances. Until they coherently state what their protest is about and what they hope to accomplish, we have been given no reason to support them, and a serious  reason to oppose them.