From my experience (mostly vaguely connected through labor organizations and unions) they’re quite articulate in what they’re opposing. How one can oppose is usually the hard part (and also part of the reason for the protests – one is also protesting against how there is no possibility in entrance and participation on what will shape their lives. Much is undefined, compared to the deals themselves, because too much of what they oppose is undefined to the public – something also protested against – and one can’t even begin a dialogue since they’re usually just treated as “anti-globalization” and “anti-jobs” and so on).

I think there’s a sense of generational anxiety to blame. People want to feel like they’re doing something, but they really can’t figure out what to do. What most people don’t appreciate is that the peace movements, the civil rights movements, homosexual rights movements, and the feminist rights movements were all responding, in one way or another, to attacks (real and perceived) on their or their community’s well-being. They had direct issues and used protests as an organized tool to call down public attention on them. It’s not like they didn’t have to deal with their dumbshits, either — idiots in the crowd with no agenda and lots of anger have always been an organizer’s bane — but they had demands instead of mere desires.

Forty-five or so years later, the whole mess has been lost in this haze of hero-worship and middle-class anxiety (“holy shit, we might actually have to admit we’re effectively rich!”). So you get a lot of intellectuals trying to find their identity in myths about the past.

Or maybe I’m just bitter I never got in the pants of that one girl who was in the Radical-Left Cheerleaders, back in college. Yeah. Maybe that was it.

For those unfamiliar.