THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION

Suddenly, unlooked for, there is the leaderless mass movement called Occupy Wall Street, with its encampments, its street theater, its "Occupied Wall Street Journal", its humor in the face of outrage, its offshoots in various places.

It is represented as made up of young people and neo-hippies but is in truth diverse; there are many in it who are "square" and long unemployed or newly broke, who otherwise might be relatively conservative. There are traditional liberals in it and socialists and right-wing libertarians and even some tea partiers, as well as grannies and businessmen and others.

Right now, they are what is happening in this country, as everyone else seems frozen in fear and bile.

The news media, that fervent guardian of the status quo, at first ignored or downplayed what some are calling the American Spring (after the Prague and Arab "springs"). But the movement is too big, too colorful, too assertive, too prone to growing and morphing, for them to continue that.

Those who love privilege and hate equality are complaining as though aggrieved that the Occupiers have no manifesto and no list of unconditional demands. Anything specific that they published would of course become a target as well as weakening their unity. Their genius is in their maintaining the diffuseness of their overlapping objectives.

Yet what they basically stand for is evident to anyone who will pay attention: accountability of economic power to the government, accountability of the government to the people (and not to economic power), and accountaility of the people to our now-compromised ideals: equality, personal freedom, and human rights. These and not the tea party Tories are our real patriots.

The massive anti-war and civil rights movements of the tumultuous 'sixties eventually succeeded in shutting down the Vietnam war and racial segregation. They were a hard sell to most Americans because they seemed to embody socialism, drugs, revolution, scruffiness, free love, and distaste for the work ethic. Occupy Wall Street is quite different, as it represents "the 99%" of us who have gotten hurt by this economy, by the criminals of finance who created it, and by the implicitly bought politicians who are protecting accumulated wealth and not us.

Politicians have sized up this new force differently. That some profess to be more-or-less favorable to it hints at their fear of its potential.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg, hitherto supposedly a good guy, is surly toward it and says it will cost jobs. (What will cost jobs, Mr. Mayor?) And Herman Cain (who also says that blacks are brainwashed, that he would not consider putting a Muslim in his cabinet, and that it's your own damn fault if you're unemployed) alleges that it is unAmerican, a term better applied to himself. Mitt Romney says it is scary class warfare.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, spins it as a justified anti-Obama display (though in truth it seems indifferent to the president, probably regarding him as irrelevant). Rick Santorum sees it as righteous in demanding that crimes be punished but is against government "intrusiveness" to set the economy right. Another GOP aspirant, Buddy Roemer, endorses it outright, saying that Main Street stands for jobs and Wall Street for greed.

The sincerity of the movement's political admirers will be established by whether they are now ready to tax the rich. I don't see many takers.

Mr. Obama is calling for that, but he waited to do so till he had lost the clout to make it happen. Though he says what most people believe according to polls, his popularity keeps declining; he is probably seen as maneuvering for political advantage rather than as sincerely a populist. He is out of options, while the economy remains stalled or in decline.

Tea party types are calling the movement anti-capitalist. But I would bet that most of its members would welcome the return of a taxed and regulated and competing capitalism, as feudalism isn't working out so well. Capitalism is possible only where large groups of people are not kept artificially in poverty by bigotry and economic royalism.

Soon it will be too cold for camping out in parks and public squares. What will Occupy Wall Street do then? Getting behind a Democratic nomination fight could be an option. The candidate would have to be as free from the rigid going assumptions as the movement is yet fairly believable as a possible president -- unconventional but not marginal.

In the previous Great Depression there was no leveraging of events by mass movements. Struck down by conditions, Americans looked to the New Deal for hope. This time it will be the people who will directly drive events and cause the government to do right. Continuing public vigilance will be the necessity and is the essence of democracy.

For the longer term there will have to be larger innovations. Climate change, peak oil, peak coal, and other grave problems may be upon us. Even apart from that, there will never again be jobs enough; but there will always be more than enough work that will have to be done.

Under a far-sighted and responsive president, our options should be laid out for us and discussed democratically in every community throughout this land.

The time is coming to occupy the White House!