How to explain this seeming contradiction?

The protestors benefit by treating Wall Street as an abstraction because it permits them to tap into familiar narratives. Allies are made of everyone who believes, as so many do, that dishonest financial elites take advantage of the basically honest masses; that big, greedy corporations maximize their profits by screwing regular folks; that the top one percent of Americans possess wealth that is obviously incommensurate with what they've earned relative to "the 99 percent."

For Occupy Wall Street, the problem is that a counter-narrative every bit as familiar also appeals to many Americans. These are people who believe that wealth in this country accrues to talented people who work hard and benefit their fellow man through the market; that envying the successful is a kind of poison corrosive to any society; that to attack Wall Street is the same as declaring that you've got no confidence in capitalism itself; and that for all its flaws, our free market economic system has generated tremendous wealth and prosperity for rich and poor alike.

So long as the protestors in the financial districts of American cities attack symbolic Wall Street, they'll attract folks who see the world the same way that they do. As Matt Yglesias writes, it's "an incredibly useful platform for engagement and education." But an attack on symbolic Wall Street inevitably provokes a backlash by defenders of symbolic Wall Street, for whom it symbolizes different things. The ensuing debate is no likelier to end in a declared winner than a long conversation about political philosophy between Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter.

There is a time for battling over first principles and political philosophy, especially for those of us who enjoy doing it. But it isn't all the time. How remarkable that in America, where the political spectrum is so narrow relative to other countries, and the consensus in favor of being a mostly free market liberal democracy so large, our politics is so frequently mired in ideological battles; and waged in rhetoric that is absurd when one reflects on the continuity in ideology and policy from one Congress and presidency to another. It's no wonder that so many Americans are frustrated by political debate, political protest, and political campaigns. More often than not, they're all conducted at a level of abstraction that is both needless and maddening.

What drum circle would I join?

One dedicated to the proposition that it's often enough to grapple with the world as it is -- to see that we're not confronted by the impossible question, "Is Wall Street basically good or malign;" what we must actually answer are questions like, "What sort of regulations, if any, should govern the market for derivatives of mortgaged backed securities," and "Should the federal government subsidize home ownership," and "What should the reserve requirements be for lending institutions."