The Occupy protests galvanized a dormant spirit of American protest, but they have also prompted a certain amount of skeptical condescension. Even as the term “occupy” has shed its anticapitalist overtones and entered the vernacular as a zeitgeist-y term for the enthusiastic willingness to get involved with anything (“Occupy Wawa!” “Occupy this gym’s air conditioning!”), the protesters themselves have been subjected to trivializing trend pieces like “The Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street” that imply the protests are essentially about parading around for attention. They may say they have no demands, but that’s because it’s really just the same old demand: “Look at me!”

Are the occupiers just douchey hipsters, professional activist types, and far left outcasts, whose self-righteousness conveys contempt for others who let petty concerns like their family and their job inhibit their participation in protests? Sometimes I want to believe the worst about protesters because it would exempt me from having to do more. I let myself be persuaded by the argument that, as libertarian Economist blogger Will Wilkinson puts it, “the Occupy movement fails to take pluralism seriously.” That is, a “self-selecting community” of protesters with short-sighted arrogance believes that everyone in their right mind agrees with its methods and its message. This leads to tactics that alienate the “real” people who show up in polling figures, who live outside urban centers, and so on. I start to think that doing nothing will allow me to be real too.

My eagerness to dismiss the protests as so much ego and vanity speaks to a deep and pervasive cynicism about the political sincerity of the Left, and particularly middle-class leftists, who some would say have no legitimate reason to be complaining. The view that leftist protest is fundamentally inauthentic is a legacy of the youth movements of the 1960s, which were recast and denigrated as so much hippie hedonism. But it wasn’t the reactionaries on the Right who gave that interpretation its credibility and staying power; rather its broader plausibility has its roots in an intra-left debate about the role of lifestyle consumption in emancipatory struggle, a sort of proxy war in the fight over who can claim to be an organic intellectual (to use Gramsci’s term) and what exactly would constitute the genuine class composition of the revolutionary subject. Are the stupefied masses waiting for thought leaders to liberate them from their vulgar tastes and the pacifying, infantilizing culture that is administered to them? Or are the masses the only genuine, authentic people who can inhabit a different subjectivity, who can see beyond capitalism’s enticements and occupy a space beyond it?