The rabble of dissidents who hoped to stop the outsourcing of a university’s services to private businesses have themselves outsourced the meaning and purpose of their protests – they have outsourced those things to a past era and its surviving representatives. All that’s left is a small community of self-defined ‘activists’ pumping out the political sound of the Eighties, complete with period rhetoric and grievances. Moreover, calls to form a ‘national movement’ to join up all the small-scale actions ignore the fact that nowhere have these occupy-and-chant tactics been able to secure the things protesters demanded.
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These are the same types of people who mock Civil War reenactors and Tea Partiers who wear tri-corn hats.
