This article is a contribution to ‘Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street,’ A TNR Symposium. Click here to read other contributions to the series.

TNR’s editorial clucking at Occupy Wall Street suffers from weak sociological imagination compounded by wrongheaded stuffiness. Stamping your foot and demanding that the world conform to your standards—cram its demands into the formula you prefer, dress as you prefer, enunciate as you prefer, curb its radicals as you prefer—before you go out to play with it may be, to use the buzzword du jour, “understandable,” but it’s neither adequate to the situation nor helpful. In fact, it’s counterproductive. You do politics in the society you have, not the society you wish you had.

The rudiments of the American political condition can be summed up as follows: A bloated, short-sighted, self-dealing, revolving-door plutocracy owns a large share of one major party (partnering with the evangelical Christians located in the former Confederacy and elsewhere), and somewhat uneasily shares ownership of the other party with progressives. It finances politics and substantially determines and limits outcomes. Three decades of rampaging inequality have followed. The most recent upshot has been the financial calamity that wrecked millions of people’s lives—not only in this country—and produced an unending cascade of calamities. A president who shares the divided soul of the Democratic Party, and whose election stoked the hope that he could achieve—among other things—a substantial reversal of this trajectory, backed off short of full-throated reform, and has, moreover, especially since the midterm elections, been fought to a standstill by a ferocious backlash.

Enter Occupy Wall Street, an initiative of romantic, more or less radical—and crucially, to this moment, nonviolent—bands. Some are revolutionaries of a sort. Many are utopians. Most, in my experience, are sweet-tempered; some are not only apoplectic but apocalyptic, and some are both in succession. Hot-blooded and insouciant, their watchword might as well be: No Future. The icecaps are melting. So are reliable jobs (not that many of them would want corporate jobs in the first place). “Work within the system,” you say. Sure. Some of them worked for Obama or John Edwards in 2008, but when Obama fell into the polluted water they thought he could walk on, they had no trouble returning to everyday life—and nonvoting. They find the entire political system grotesque. They want to occupy. They don’t demand, they encamp, in community. Some are enraptured by comic theorists like Slavoj Zizek or not so comic ones like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

The deeper truth is that they’re in an American vein running back to the early nineteenth century—in fact, all the way back to colonization. They want to talk at length and decide everything together. So what does Occupy Wall Street “actually believe”? This is a question far easier formulated than answered. There are the placards held by the people camping in Zuccotti Park, which, as I wrote in the New York Times (Oct. 9), include such items as “End the Fed” and occasional denunciations of capitalism. There are their statements, as elicited by reporters from men-and-women-on-the-street. Then there are the increasingly numerous supporters who form, for now, an increasingly active penumbra—the outer movement, one might say. These include the thousands of union members, Moveon members, community groups, professionals, and students who made up the vast majority of those who marched on Oct. 5; and the AFL-CIO, Steelworkers and others of organized labor, who have vigorously embraced (at least verbally) the Occupy movement. There are also the citizens—some unknowable fraction of the 99 percent—who send food and donate books, equipment, and money to the Zuccotti encampment, or signal V’s and clenched fists from the upper decks of tourist buses. The bulk of this outer movement is not so actively disaffected from the entirety of the political system. But it’s angry and available.