Lunar Obverse

The key thing here is that critiques like Schoen’s are designed to get people to conflate those two questions. They are designed to make the prediction that mainstream Americans will be repulsed by Occupy Wall Street into a self fulfilling prophesy. The exploitation of these cultural tensions is also an old story, one perhaps best documented in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. By painting the movement as scary and radical, critics hope to bring about a cultural reaction against it by focusing attention on its radical aura, its radical-seeming optics and tactics, rather than on what it actually stands for. That’s the game here.