THE video is pretty clear. A group of protesters come to a halt at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge roadway. There a cop tells them that if they continue walking, they will be arrested. The group continues walking. Within the next couple of hours hundreds of people are arrested.

We can debate the fairness of this police action. It seems if the police wanted to prevent the protesters from walking on the road they could've put up a barrier. People in the back of the procession couldn't have heard the police officer's warning; some may have willingly retreated. At the same time, the lead protesters knew they were guiding their comrades into illegal territory. As Natasha Lennard, a freelance reporter for the New York Times, reports, "The Internet was filled with pointed suggestions that officers from the New York Police Department led protesters onto the road as a trap to perform mass arrests; indeed, some video footage seems to show officers leading protesters onto the 'illegal' section of the bridge. From what I saw, however, a couple of dozen marchers made the decision to move off the sidewalk into the road at the bridge's entrance to chants of 'off the sidewalks, into the streets.'"

They also yelled, "This is what democracy looks like", a statement so obvious as to be boring. Members of democratic societies are free to protest everything and nothing, as this incoherent group is doing. The NYTrecounts a telling scene from the occupation of Wall Street in which a woman gives a pep talk to one of her fellow campers. "It's about taking down systems, it doesn't matter what you're protesting," she said. "Just protest." Viva La Revolución!, or something.

Many of these aggrieved youth believe that the government has become unresponsive, that their voices have been silenced, and therefore protest is the only option. But this strikes me as a fundamental misreading of the past three years. It is likely that few of the protesters have actually taken part in the more mundane aspects of the system they'd like to take down—for example, only 24% of 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the 2010 mid-term elections. And while they were quietly seething, the tea-party movement was showing America what democracy actually looks like, pushing their candidates forward and holding them accountable. When liberals complain that the Republicans are beholden to the tea-party movement, is that not an admission that the system is responsive?

Which is not to say that it is working perfectly. There is no doubt that some of what we are hearing out of the Wall Street encampment is correct, and there have been good suggestions as to how to translate these sentiments into action. But perhaps the biggest reason young people feel so alienated by their government is because they have removed themselves from the process of choosing it. Tea-party people have been known to take over public spaces, too. Then they go vote.