Will Wilkinson advises the Occupy Wall Street movement to actually think about participating in the democracy as it exists instead of agitating for something else:

There is something profoundly satisfying about believing that one’s own team alone has seen through the fog of disinformation and propaganda to the real truth about the treacherous interests that stand between our condition and the reign of justice. And there is something terrifically exciting about the sense, often engendered by visible protest movements, that one’s own team is growing, that its narrative is catching on. Conversely, there is something profoundly dissatisfying, and a little bit demoralising, in acknowledging that most people will never accept many of ones’ most ardently-held convictions, and that, therefore, none of us will ever get to live in a society that closely matches, or even roughly approximates, our beloved ideals. But it’s true all the same. And it’s true all the same that our actual democracy, for all its problems, does about as well as democracy can be realistically expected to do, given the size and diversity of this country. Frankly, we’re pretty lucky our democracy works as well as it does. There’s a great deal we can do to make it alittle better, but there’s very little we can do to make it a lot better, because we’ll almost never agree enough about the really big stuff.

I think a lot of the protesters — or, at least, the organizers — will find this sort of advice profoundly unsatisfying (and paternalistic and self-serving and all sorts of other things), precisely because — as Wilkinson also notes — they believe “our system is so badly broken that honest democratic politics is no longer possible.” And if I’m right that a lot of them hold that position, then I’m back to wondering about the endgame of these protests. Do they want more (or better) democracy or do they actually want something else entirely?

HT: Allen Stairs.