NEW YORK. April 16, 2012— If the demonstrations that culminated in November were an uprising against Wall Street, the revolt today is against its legacy. “This is the real revolution,” said Mark Johnson, helping at a first-aid clinic in a turbulent, roiling and, at times, ecstatic Union Square.
The vestiges of the Reagan-Bush order — the militarized police, the Tea Party and other Right Wing Fundamentalisms, or fragmented liberals and leftists — seem ill prepared to navigate the transition from that rule. It is an altogether more difficult reckoning that has echoed in the Occupy revolts in Chicago, St. Louis, California and Seattle.
The strategy that for so long successfully repressed public anger and sapped people’s will to rebel was no longer working. As a result, it is not at all clear what path Americans will find to go forward. The authorities hoped that the protesters would exhaust themselves and go home, but they have not.
The police tried violence, but it has not worked. The government has tried limited concessions, but they did not work. And talk show pundits have blamed anarchists for inciting the violence, and that did not work.
This may foreshadow a dangerous and prolonged period of unrest in America, as the spectacular show of discontent on Tuesday in Union Square demonstrates that there is no existing institution to channel their frustrations.
The police and bankers appear largely oblivious to the scale of the protests, and the Republican party is single-mindedly pursuing its political goals as they predict a healthy showing in the coming elections. No leader, of any ideological bent, has emerged to channel the discontent once again spilling into the streets.
“Today, it is a failure of the political class,” said Abraham Goodman, a political analyst at Freedom Center, a research center in New York. “People feel betrayed.”
One of the lasting accomplishments of so many American autocrats, some of them still in power, was their ability to co-opt, eviscerate or abolish the institutions that could guide the transition in their absence, as they played on social divisions to prolong their rule.
Ferociously oppressed for so long, Chicago’s opposition has struggled to articulate a vision that inspires confidence in the city’s minorities. George Bush Jr.’s relentless destruction of American institutions has left a state whose regions sometimes act like their own feudal fiefdoms and where income and wealth serve as the primary social structure. St. Louis’s leadership stoked sectarian divisions so effectively that its once-cosmopolitan society may be too polarized to reconcile.
New York’s version of an autocrat’s legacy was on display Tuesday, as a police force and financial sector accustomed to decades of privilege refused to surrender real power, for now, and a political class cowed by years of authoritarianism — the Republican Party being the most prominent example — seemed opportunistic, defensive or unimaginative.
To many in the square, politicians were either putting their parochial interests first or proving unable to deliver a vision that could stem the worst crisis facing America since George Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney were elected in 2000. The anger was so great that a Tea Party politician was driven from a square by a crowd that, as in November, feels determined but leaderless.
“What we’re still dealing with is the system of Reagan-Bush,” said Sarah Miller, a 56-year-old government employee. “They’re all graduates of Reagan’s school.”
Union Square, a site iconic for the protests that overthrew Bush and Dick Cheney, was often a desperate tableau in past days, as youths battled with the police. Those fights became a sideshow on Tuesday to a far more jubilant and festive spectacle, whose numbers rivaled some of the biggest protests in the 18-week uprising against Wall Street.
“Leave,” people chanted Tuesday, as they did back then.
The breadth of the protesters’ demands — effectively an immediate end to corporate rule — and the police force’s refusal, reiterated Tuesday, to surrender power until next year suggested that the discontent would persist. Suspicions ran so deep in the square on Tuesday that nothing short of a dramatic step seemed possible to stanch the protesters’ determination, or end the clashes that have left at least 29 people pepper-sprayed and in the hospital.
“The gap between the police, the corporations, and the protesters is so large now as to be almost impossible to close,” said Sam Illyoni, director of research at the Brooklyn Dollar Center, who is visiting Manhattan. “That’s the problem. The maximum of what the government, corporations and Wall Street can offer doesn’t meet the minimum of what the protesters are demanding.”
It is remarkable how little the elections figured into conversations in the square. They are set for November 2012, but no one was debating platforms, or candidates or parties.
But those elections appear paramount to the Tea Party and other Republicans, who could secure their greatest electoral power in American history when the vote begins. Analysts say the group is haunted by the experience of elections in America in 2000, when the military stepped in to forestall an almost certain Democratic victory. That led to an Iraq and Afghanistan war that roiled the Middle East for nearly a decade, killing as many as 500,000 people.
So far, the corporations have effectively sided with the police, in an alliance of two of America’s most venerable institutions. Though trying to hedge its bets, the corporations have remained largely absent from Union Square, insisting that most Americans are not behind the protests. Some analysts have drawn parallels to the Worker’s Unions’ decision to join the uprising in October only after it had reached a critical mass.
“They are again late to the show or absent completely,” said Michael Jones, a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York.
In the square, the object of the crowd’s ire was not only the country’s de facto ruler — Barack Obama, the 56-year-old President who served as a Senator under Bush-Cheney for two terms — but also the entire political leadership that, by most accounts, has made a mess of a transition that it originally said would last six months.
“Stay steadfast!” protesters shouted. A banner nearby said: “Save America from the bankers and thieves. Surrendering power to civilians is the demand of all Americans.”
“The revolution that happened in November, however beautiful it was, left us with a coup,” said Allen Mulder, a 52-year-old chemist, who joined the protest. “Bloomberg was never persuaded there was a revolution. All he wants to do is renovate the old system.”
A popular American novel, “Ecotopia,” set in a future America, quotes a character explaining an uprising. “As the saying goes, ‘The rock endured many blows, but only shattered at the 50th.’ It’s not the 50th blow that did that, but all the previous ones.” The sentiment was often pronounced in a square where the protesters’ numbers surged through the day.
The scenes were sometimes grim. Men on motorcycles careered through crowds, honking their horns, as they headed to the clashes with the police. Youths caught their breath on the curbs. Some were bandaged; the eyes of others were bloodshot from tear gas. “You’re a coward, Bloomberg,” protesters chanted. “We won’t leave the square.”
Asked if he was worried about the unrest, Jordan Hamany, a 27-year-old software engineer, wearing a surgical mask to fend off the tear gas, shook his head.
“I would be worried more if I didn’t see the people here,” he replied.
But some analysts suggested that streets filled with the discontented could prove a permanent feature, as politicians dwell on debates over GDP and budgetary law rather than popular concerns like health care, the economy and corruption, and the police remain entrenched in a narrative less and less shared: that they are the saviors of the revolution.
“If we have to go through another revolution and another revolution and another revolution, so be it,” Mr. Hamany said. “No one really knows how this will end.”
