At the recent Modern Language Association convention Keith Spencer from Carnegie Mellon University presented his paper “Class, Race and the ‘Common Man’: Interviews with Occupy Pittsburgh” and the results shouldn’t come as a shock to conservatives or anyone else who closely watched the Occupy movement.
Spencer interviewed fourteen protesters and found that the movement was unequivocally leftist, with nearly half of those interviewed identifying themselves as Socialists or Marxists, and two who though identifying themselves as Libertarians, also mentioned Socialism and Marx. The rest were of the left-liberal mindset, including anarchists.
Despite the views expressed by the Pittsburgh demonstrators, Spencer’s review of 951 Occupy websites found no mention of Socialism on any of the sites.
That really isn’t surprising since publicly the Occupy movement refused to admit that they were driven by any ideology in particular, but was a movement of the ninety-nine percent. But as Spencer discovered in his visit to Occupy Pittsburgh, the movement did have an ideology- one that was far to the left of most Americans, and not really as unified as they appeared to be in the media.
As much as members of the MLA are in sync with the Occupy movement’s overall goals, even these left-wing professors were forced to admit that the movement was extremely flawed and that its language was one that even they struggled to fully embrace.
Don Irvine is the chairman of both Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
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