Well, if the Washington Post, apparently, is leaning towards "sympathy", for the protests, the New Republic, is fulfilling it's usual role of policing the parameters of acceptable discourse, all in it's trademark, smirky style.
Michael Pugliese ............................................................................ .
A woman dressed as a lamb stands atop a pile of debris, chanting into a bullhorn, "This is what anarchy looks like! This is what anarchy looks like!" She has a point. Everywhere you looked at last week's World Bank-International Monetary Fund protest there were anarchists. Thirty members of the Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc, an anarchist cell, hurled pylons from a construction site onto the street. Three topless women in gas masks paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue with Magic Marker slogans on their backs urging protesters, smash the state. An anarchist pom-pom girl in a yellow sweater with an "A" tacked onto it danced in front of the Treasury Department. The small groups that wreaked havoc around Farragut and McPherson Squares were largely modeled on the anarchist brigades of the Spanish Civil War. Welcome to the New New Left. For close to a decade now, commentators have wondered what would define the post-cold-war generation of student activists. For a while, the answer was identity politics. But the movement for ethnic studies, affirmative action, sensitivity training, and speech codes lost steam years ago. Anarchism has filled the gap. In the last few years, anarchists have helped launch flashy websites and a slew of organizations that go by menacing names like Direct Action Network and the Ruckus Society. They have started anarchist soccer leagues and held an "Alternative Spring Break" in Florida, where students got to practice hurling banners off 60-foot structures. The Seattle and Washington, D.C., protests were their coming-out parties. Why anarchism--a movement with deep roots in Italy and Spain but not in the United States? One reason, of course, is the demise of its competitors. The old socialist parties that used to haunt college campuses have fallen on hard times. Their long-standing advantage over anarchists--the existence of real-world Communist and socialist experiments--has been rendered a liability by the collapse of communism and the demise of leftist governments in Western Europe. At least anarchism hasn't had a chance to fail. And, if communism doesn't have anything new to say about the manic global capitalism of the 1990s, identity politics doesn't have anything to say at all; in fact, corporations long ago turned multiculturalism into just another marketing tool. (One result of the shift from identity politics to anarchism has been to make the activist left much more white; according to The Wall Street Journal, World Bank-IMF protesters even hired organizers to recruit African Americans, but it didn't work.) But anarchism is more than just a fallback ideology--it suits the moment. In fact, globalization's most vociferous critics share important assumptions with its biggest boosters. Like the Silicon Valley CEOs they disdain, the anarchists complain about overbearing government and champion decentralization. Like House Majority Leader Dick Armey and his libertarian cronies, they seethe with hostility toward the IMF and many of the other institutions that regulate the world economy.
The rest at the below URL. (Have to say the illustration is pretty funny!)
http://www.tnr.com/050100/foer050100.html