Following Julian Sanchez's lead, I've argued that now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns -- rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage -- Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic semi-privatization of public spaces, and endeavor to reform public policy through the democratic institutions established to make the collective determination of binding public rules legitimate. Moving on to seek reform through established democratic channels would require giving up the insolent and frankly disrespectful presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them. It would require Occupiers to square up to the fact that their movement's implicit ideology is an ideology, and a minority ideology at that -- just one among our society's many rival moral and political worldviews. The intransigence of the Occupy movement suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism, and the corollary impossibility of consensus, which makes majoritarian democratic procedures necessary in the first place.  

The replies I've most often heard to this line of argument are (a) that America's democratic institutions are too corrupt, too far gone to serve in the quest for progressive social change, and (b) that agitating for social and political change through the sorts of public protest and civil disobedience the Occupy movement are engaged in is a kind of democratic action.

Shawn Gude makes a case for (b) in this thoughtful post  replying to Julian and me. Let's start here: 

Parliamentary bargaining and cerebral discussions have their place—indeed, I wouldn’t blog at the League if I thought otherwise. But agitation outside the ballot box or the walls of Congress is a necessary antecedent to social change. As Howard Zinn felicitously phrased it, it’s “that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.” ...

To democratic minimalists like Sanchez and Wilkinson, democracy is electoral politics. Citizen participation means voting, if one is so inclined. Enhancing citizen power is gratuitous. But this is exactly the kind of narrow, elite-enhancing conception of democracy that the Occupy movement so clearly eschews. What many occupiers do seek is a more vibrant democracy in which corrupt influences don’t dictate policy and average citizens can meaningfully influence the forces and decisions that shape their lives.

I won't presume to speak for Julian, but I don't believe either of us said or implied that agitation or protest is not often a necessary antecedent to social and political change. The function of democratic rule-making procedures is to reflect public opinion, not to change it. And no one thinks the proximate cause of public opinion is the sort of cerebral discussion we're having here. Of course rallies, protests, letter-writing campaigns, sit-ins -- all manner of Zinn's "healthy commotion" -- help shape the inputs to formal decisionmaking. We couldn't do without it. So I happily affirm (b). It's perfectly consistent with my argument. 

For my part, I'm glad OWS came along. I'm glad it's drawn a bunch of young people into political engagement, changed a bunch of people's opinions about important subjects, and refocused the public debate about the direction of this country. Moreover, I happen to like commotion, whether or not it's healthy. It makes life more interesting. And I've got an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide. When it comes down to a crowd of people who haven't done anything really wrong versus the cops, I'm reflexively against the cops. That said, my idiosyncratic preferences are hardly a reliable guide to the nature of a decent liberal social order. So, as much as I might love commotions generally, and unauthorized camping specifically, at a certain point you've got to ask whether an ongoing commotion really continues to be healthy. The Occupy movement's commotion served a healthy purpose, but that's done. It's not so healthy anymore.