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The Protestor as Person of the Year; It’s His Ideology, Stupid

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In his post last week on Time magazine’s decision to name the Protestor as its “Person of the Year,” Ed Morrissey thought the magazine a “little late to ‘the protester’ story in terms of real impact“:

In 2009, Time had the same opportunity to pick “the protester” when the protests were the Tea Party and Iran’s Green Revolution, which followed from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and so on.  Who did they pick?  Ben Bernanke.  When the Tea Party movement actually delivered results at the ballot box in 2010 in a historic midterm drubbing of Barack Obama’s Democrats — they lost 68 seats, the worst outing since 1938 — they could have hailed The Protester then, too.  Who did they pick?  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

What impact, he wonders, “has ‘the protester’ actually had in 2011?  Has the Occupy Movement, such as it is, had any kind of ground-breaking impact on politics in the way the Tea Party did in 2010 and still does in this cycle?  Not even close, and even people on the Left have begun washing their hands of the literally pointless display.”

Well, the folks in the various Occupy movements did chant the right (er, left) slogans (at least according to our friends in the MSM).

Comments

  2. What impact…has ‘the protester’ actually had in 2011?

    Well, our city-center parks are dirtier and tougher to access… if they’re open.

    The main thing is, OWS has given our “mainstream” media an excuse to keep their left-wing delusions going… despite the financial crises (which spell DOOM for the left-wing project) and their thrashing at the polls in 2010. The media are super grateful for that. Hence, returning the compliment.

  3. Time? How strong is its subscriber base? It is up to 16 pages yet? How much does it cost on the Newsstand? Does it have a credible world wide news bureau?

    I remember a Time magazine of years ago. It was a highly regarded weekly news magazine which specialized in analysis and in-depth reporting. But then it got to be more and more of an opinion journal and finally lost every shred of its credibility. Is this the Time that we are talking about?

    If so, why didn’t they name Eric Holder Man of the Year? After all, it is his turn.

  5. Ed also drops a few clangers in that article though.

    First, the idea that political protest originated in the 1960s is nothing but nostalgic nonsense

    It’s also a brilliant strawman, the Time article doesn’t even come close to saying that.

    and quoting the long-debunked Fukuyama at this point is almost self-parody.

    Even when (as reading the Time article makes obvious) they were quoting him to demonstrate how he seemed right at the time but has since been proven conclusively wrong?

    From our own history, we had massive anti-war and anti-draft protests in the 60s … the 1860s, in New York. It had the same effect as anti-war protests in the 1960s, which was that the war continued apace (and the nation elected a Republican as president in the next national election).

    Self-parody? Trying to equate the American Civil War with the Vietnam War? Pot, meet kettle.

    Also, Ed does seem to struggle about who should have been Person of the Year.

    Nicolas Sarkozy might be one good choice for championing the mission to unseat Qaddafi.

    Or David Cameron, or Barack Obama, they all got in there pretty quickly. I doubt many remember Sarkozy as taking a lead on that, which kinda blunts any attempt at claiming him as notable.

    Angela Merkel and her nearly singlehanded effort to keep the EU from melting down and creating another global financial crisis might be another.

    Probably a good idea to wait to see if her efforts actually work though, just about everyone in Europe agrees that German action has always been one step behind the problem and may end with the collapse of the Euro. More time is needed to see if Merkel has actually done anything worthwhile.

    So after mocking the idea of The Protester being the most newsworthy person of the year (which, we shouldn’t forget, is supposed to be the entire point of the Person of the Year) Ed can’t find any convincing alternatives. Possibly because from the Arab Spring and English riots to Occupy Wall Street and the latest protest in Russia, it’s been seemingly wall-to-wall protests all year. Also, in contrast to the Tea Party and Green Revolution, these protests were a global phenomenon. Look at the examples I gave, the Middle East, Britain, the United States, and Russia right off the top of my head.

    So yeah, I think Time did a fairly good job this year. Though I think the Person of the Year already jumped the shark a decade ago when Rudolph Giuliani got the title while everyone was still talking about Osama Bin Laden. It seemed they were scared of giving such an ‘accolade’ to a mass murderer. Yeah, think about it! Osama Bin Laden rubbing shoulders with figures such as Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939 & 1942), and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979)!

  6. What impact…has ‘the protester’ actually had in 2011?

    Increased levels of disease, rape, homicide, theft, sexual harassment, child harassment, public defecation etc.

    I was actually waiting for an outbreak of bubonic plague.

  8. “So yeah, I think Time did a fairly good job this year”

    “These protests were a global phenomenon.”

    So, we have solidarity through the similarity of protest; not the cause of the protest, but the fact of the protest. You can read your own cause into the meaning of protest, but in the final analysis: “It’s the protest, stupid!”

    And then there are the flash mobs. Why not the flash mobs? If you can divorce the TEA Party from the protest movers and shakers, then you can certainly find commonality with the flash mobs.

    Know why? If you are stuck in the rut of praising amorphous protesters, the real person of the year should have been Twitter. All these occupy scabs and flash mob trash and social welfare recipients demanding more, organized and moved around instant messaging from their cell phones. So, if you are applauding the chaos, at least single out the one strand that was consistent in the chaos.

    And, Pomposity, it is clear that your rules require anyone disagreeing with the Time choice to offer a better one so that you may have the pleasure of ridiculing it. OK. Here is my choice for the Time Person of the Year:

    The incandescent light bulb.

  9. Time magazine is no better than Newsweek given they are virtually the same magazine in liberal content; both are shrinking in credibility much like the New York Times & other liberal rags.

  10. Time awarded the 1939 Man of the Year to Nazi Dictator Adolph Hitler then they followed up with Communist Dictator Joseph Stalin a few years later. It’s been downhill ever since. The erosion of journalistic integrity has followed. Time is nothing more than a Democrat mouth piece at this point.

  12. These protests were a global phenomenon

    Except that the OWS ones were faked, in significant respects. Tent camps emptying out at night (up to 90% in some cases), union thugs and/or apolitical immigrants paid money to enlarge the crowds, decisions actually being orchestrated by a tiny cadre of politicos (as opposed to the OWS-publicized ‘consensus’), etc.

    And hey, Pomposity – I love the moral equivalence implicitly drawn by your comment, between the OWS protestors and the Islamo-fascist mobs who, tragically, trampled a woman a couple days ago in Egypt. Which means I don’t love it, but I point it out. We at GP have long noticed the basic thuggishness of the Left, including its back-handed love of Islamo-fascism.

    But now for what I came to say. Via Ace: A little in-depth ‘motivational’ study of OWS protestors (not the paid ones of course) confirms what we all knew. The rank-and-file member is on average a lost soul in search of identity, your basic person without a life:

    a new report concludes, “while their rhetoric might decry crony capitalism or bank bailouts, their values reveal self-centered and fear-based motivations”…

    What did Frontier Lab discover? First, that many of the rank-and-file occupiers feel isolated in their lives, and appear to lack basic community ties such as are provided by participation in clubs, churches, and strong families…

    No surprise. These are the people doing the up/down twinkles, the faithful echoing of the leaders’ speeches, etc.

    …the leadership, is less existentially lost, and derives its fulfillment from the “prestige,” “validation,” and “control” afforded by the movement’s coverage in the media… They are waiting for the revolution and hope to be in its vanguard. Their careers depend upon it.

    Again what we knew. But there’s more; RTWT.

  13. Well, Occupiers did defecate in public and ruined a lot of public spaces for their faux revolution, which I guess is pretty heroic. And all that raping really did a great deal to make people think about income inequality.

  14. Time is just another mag for the “enlightened” folks who sneer at people who disagree with them. Occupy was and is a destructive and mean spirited movement of useful idiots and faux revolutionaries, and they act like a lynch mob much of the time.