Better late than never: Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White has had an epiphany, and now believes big protests are ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive.
“We could have large-scale marches for every year of Trump’s presidency. It would do nothing!” he told NPR’s Eric Westervelt.
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“You would think that with the triumph of Trump there would be a fundamental re-assessment among activists. But there hasn’t been. They’ve just doubled down on the same behaviors!” he added.
To be clear, White’s politics haven’t changed. He is still a progressive. It’s just that he realizes now that drum circles and shutting down traffic and are likely the least effective ways to bring about actual change.
He admits now that Occupy Wall Street was a bust, and he is encouraging those who oppose President Trump to learn from its failure.
Namely, he is encouraging all like-minded progressives to run for office at the most local level, and build from there.
White ran for mayor of Nehalem, Ore., and lost. Badly.
“It’s awkward and painful, and you’re a black guy living in rural Oregon talking about revolution and one out of five people really gets it and loves it. But 80 percent don’t,” White says and laughs. “And do they want you to leave? Yes, they want you to leave.”
Still, the Occupy co-founder says getting into the office and engaging in the legislative branches of government is the best way to bring about change.
Westervelt reported: “White now sees [protesting tactics] — including mass street protests and sit-ins — as almost futile. Protesters, he says, keep repeating the same mistakes: fetishizing the pageantry of protest and confusing online social marketing wins with real change.”
White himself added, “Success now has become something like getting a lot of people to hear about my meme. We have become obsessed with the spectacle of street protest and we have started to ignore the reality that we are getting no closer to power.”
He reportedly plans to keep after the idea of getting into office, and hopes that at some point he can bring his progressive ideals to a larger audience.
“We could have activists take over small towns for the benefit of people who live there and the people who are going to move there, and actualize all of the grand ideas that we have on the left,” he said. “We have to do this. There is no other option. We could do protesting forever. And it would do nothing.”
The trick, he added, is figuring out how to own City Hall, not just occupy it.
“I think when we figure this one out,” White said, “it’s going to be quite beautiful.”
That’s nice and all, but couldn’t he have come to this conclusion before staging the Occupy protests that New York City millions of dollars, including the $17 million that went to overtime for the NYPD?
