The egalitarian lie: Every group has leaders, even Occupy Wall Street

By David McElroy · October 27, 2011

For reasons that will never make sense to me, many on the political left don’t like leaders. What’s more, many of them go so far as to say that their groups don’t even have leaders. The various “Occupy” groups around the country claim that they make decisions by consensus and that none of the groups has leaders.

I don’t know whether they actually believe this, but I do know it’s not true. Unless you have a very limited variety of people, opinions are going to diverge quickly in any group. When a group is new and goals are fuzzy and everybody is happy with everybody, consensus might be easy. Pretty quickly, though, things can turn ugly. For instance:

At the original Occupy group — the one on Wall Street — the issue has become drums. That’s right, drums. Some of the protesters have brought in drums and beat on them incessantly. It attracts attention, but it would get irritating very, very quickly. (Here’s a short video to give you an idea of what it’s like.) Because it was annoying so many people (and preventing some protesters from sleeping and preventing kids from studying at a nearby school), the group decided — allegedly by consensus — to limit drumming to two hours a day. However, if you read the details, the people who wanted unlimited drumming say they were prevented from bringing up their own proposal. That’s clearly not consensus. It’s clearly a matter of the majority forcing its will on the nuts who wanted to beat on drums all day. (I have no sympathy with the drummers, but the actions make it clear that “consensus” is a lie.)

In Portland, Ore., the Occupy group there is in an uproar — and at least one person received death threats — because the finance committee registered with the state as a non-profit corporation. (Isn’t that ironic?) The group’s PayPal account had something like $20,000 go missing because there was no accountability, so the finance committee took steps to protect the money. The rest of the group is apoplectic. At least one member of the finance committee has received death threats. It certainly sounds as though consensus is working there, huh?
In Charlotte, N.C., one of the organizers of the Occupy group there was kicked out of what he started after he admitted to media that, yes, he was indeed a leader of the group. That didn’t go over very well with people who were blinded by their “no leader” ideology.

I don’t follow orders very well, so I understand the desire not to be forced to follow a leader. But the difference between a libertarian or anarchist who doesn’t like leaders and one of the Occupy types who don’t like leaders is simple. We believe that everyone has the private right to go his own way. The basic flaw of the ideology of the Occupy types is that they don’t believe people do (or should) have a choice. They believe everyone must follow the “consensus” — which they will happily enforce, since it’s ultimately their own will. And they will happily use coercion to force you to obey them in the end.

All of the communist dictatorships that took control of dozens of countries last century followed the same plan. They took over in the name of “the people.” It just so happened that “the people” wanted what the people with control wanted. It always ended up strongly dictatorial, but the rhetoric was always about everyone. This is the way leftist dictatorships work. The Occupy people have the same basic flaw in their ideology. They believe there can be One True Way that everyone must follow — but they believe it’s their way that must be followed. As groups such as this splinter and fight, someone always takes control over the long run, but the fiction is maintained that he’s just a “comrade” making decisions and sacrificing for the group.

The entire Occupy “movement” is ultimately nothing but a continuation of collectivist ideology. It was originally organized by the Canadian anti-market group called AdBusters, and some of the Wall Street organizers are now from the NYC office of the disbanded and discredited “community activist” group, ACORN.

If the radical left wants to pursue its collectivist goals, it certainly has that right, but what it’s doing now is dishonest. This isn’t a leader-less outpouring that’s spontaneously springing up. This is an orchestrated campaign by leaders on the organized political left. It needs to be seen for what it is.

If you favor a socialist system, that’s your business. But if you don’t favor a socialist or collectivist system, these people are not your friends. They are not fighting for liberty. They’re fighting to take away even more of our liberty.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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