Editorial: What do you call Occupy Wall Street? A start.

Editorial: What do you call Occupy Wall Street? A start.

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What is happening these days at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis and in dozens of other cities around the country, may or may not be of lasting national significance.

To watch MSNBC is to see the Occupy Wall Street and its spin-off demonstrations described as the first stirrings of class revolt. To watch Fox News is see them ridiculed and dismissed as theater.

To delve into news accounts, blogs and Facebook posts of the Occupy groups is to come away confused about their goals, baffled by their tactics, shocked their political naïveté and disappointed in their weak grasp of detail.

But it's useful to remember that the whole thing began only a month ago. It's too young to be a full-bore movement, too scattershot to be very effective. It is, however, an outcry — a recognition that some fundamental tenets of the American social contract are in tatters.

Will it spread and coalesce? It's too early to say. When the rains of November and snows of December start to fall, will people still be willing to live in tents pitched on concrete? Or will it have a metamorphosis into something else, perhaps more radical, perhaps more effective?

It's possible, maybe even probable. The problems the Occupiers have sort of identified really are far worse than they know.

The Occupiers style themselves as the heirs of the Arab Spring protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, which is to overestimate the burdens of, say, overdue student loans and underestimate those of, say, government torture and corruption.

America has its own set of problems. Massive wealth inequality has converged with structural economic dislocation caused by globalization and digitalization. The result is an economy that doesn't offer much promise of a middle-class lifestyle.

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