"Meet the New New Left: bold, fun, and stupid, " in TNR

[Michael Pugliese]

   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