Occupy Wall Street: Fact and Fiction

Justin Paulette, a blogger at No Left Turns and an alumnus of Ashland University, has a great column on the facts and fictions of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Here are some excerpts:

Global Span. Claims that OWS has spread to countries around the world — that is, Europe — fail to recall that circuses of this sort have been common in Europe for years. The OWS brand of demonstrator belongs to a quasi-professional cadre of anti-everything crusaders who follow protests like a Grateful Dead tour. Euro-protesters launch copy-cat OWS rallies because that’s what they do — they follow protests, not issues. Euro-protests have now reached America, not vice versa.

And:

Direct Democracy. Commentators report that OWS presents an alternative to established republican government and reacquaints Americans with a strain of direct democracy. This is true, but confuses virtue and vice. OWS looks like direct democracy because it is disorganized, leaderless, inefficient, susceptible to demagoguery, overly influenced by passions and incapable of articulating a coherent philosophy or forming a consistent governing policy. These are precisely the reasons the Founding Fathers prudently rejected direct democracy in favor of representative government.

You should definitely take some time and read the whole thing.