To say "the situation is in flux" would be an egregious cliche under these circumstances - has there ever been a situation that was not in flux, "rapidly developing," and whatever other media bullshit language saying that time continues to pass? Nonetheless, I see many symmetries between today's Occupy movements and the 1930s, but the consequences of those similarities are not yet in focus - many of our assumptions about ourselves, the energies powering the present climate, and the strength of the institutions that protect us (yes, Virginia, this is still a free country - that we can identify abuses is part of how that works) are thus far untested. It boils down to this: Energy is blind, and can veer in unexpected directions. It can diverge into multiple streams, and those threads can cooperate beneficially, interfere and cancel each other, or cooperate destructively. It can (and will) trigger hidden potential in the surrounding environment, both positive and negative. Awareness and thoughtfulness are no longer optional.
Active freedom means that no decision is without cascading (and often unpredictable) consequences - something very different from the "natural," primitive social state where everyone is largely acting on unexamined motives, making the environment relatively static and damping out the actions of individual genius and morality. The corporate/consumer world that is replacing (or has already replaced) most of the cultures on the planet depends on the latter, because only in that situation do the equations that guide everything from advertising to stock speculation fail to spiral off into useless infinites due to the confounding factors of a fully conscious mind. That is the state now being challenged, but the challenge is not necessarily the positive incursion of something else - in fact, a large part of the strength of OWS has been deliberate generality. This holds both promise and peril.
As history shows us, society does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. When something is weakened, something else that already exists is strengthened. All societies have a distinct subculture preoccupied with governance and power, regardless of what they do with it, and when this group of people has lost touch with reality and begun shitting where it eats, other active elements of society are empowered to challenge them: The military, academics, artists, and so on. Usually this is bad, because these other groups are not good at creating sane, stable, functional governments. Militaries are a one-dimensional culture whose only action principles are either destruction or stasis, and that is all they can provide to societies they take over. Academics and technocrats craft elaborate theories and mechanisms that either grind to a halt in practice or proceed only by punishing people for being more complex than the system can handle. And artists/aesthetes are mainly concerned with surfaces, myths, and quixotic imagery, while elements they deem flawed are removed from the picture. This is not an insult against any of these types of people, just the reality of what happens when their particular type of mind is tasked with reinventing a political state.
So it is always dangerous to challenge the subculture that arises around power - always carries the risk that social elements unsuited to the task will take their place and punish the public for their own failures. The American Revolution, ironically, was more successful and civil than most others because it was simply an assertion of a local ruling class over a more distant, extended ruling class - it was not a direct challenge to underlying social organization. The people who entered government in the new republic were the same people who were in local government in the colonial system: There was no wholesale takeover by a group of outsiders. It wasn't for lack of such people, of course - there were plenty of strident, radical groups and individuals in the Revolution who probably would have led the republic to tyranny and ruin if they had become powerful rather than being marginalized after the war.
Unfortunately, there is one element in American culture unsuited to govern that has repeatedly accumulated undue power, and today has led government completely off the rails: Business. As a result, our society has been subjected to decades of caustic over-exposure to the overwhelming principle of unregulated markets: Entropy. Our infrastructure decays, our public officials become corrupt, and every uniting or guiding principle is undermined by a house-of-mirrors of idiotic advertising and propaganda designed to promote a helpless, ignorant, infantile, and emotionally stunted populace. Under the control of business, the people normally involved in governance instead act as businessmen, and often parrot the red-flag-raising statement that "government should be run like a business." Obviously this attitude is delusional: Government should be run like a government, not like something it isn't. Not like a business, not like a military, not like a theory, and not like a painting or a poem. These are things that are supposed to arise from a governed society, not to form government.
Anyway, getting to my point, there will be an ongoing threat - as we seek to dislodge the out-of-control business interests from government - that some other sector of society, newly radicalized, would gain undue influence and derail the whole thing either through collective incompetence or simply the madness of individuals. Let us not forget that the situation which led to WW2 Europe was the dissolution of their society's values in the preceding war, whereas in the US the culture remained relatively unchallenged. That which had been identified as culture in Europe for close to a thousand years was just gone, irrelevant, and people had nothing to replace it. Industry destroyed the institutions, making them irrelevant pageants while merchants became the real rulers, and the active classes scraped and blundered looking for something to "restore" or replace their lost values. Hence, fascism and totalitarian communism. Those mistakes will not be repeated, but to paraphrase Mark Twain, history often rhymes even when it does not repeat itself.
This has disturbing parallels to today: Business has destroyed our culture, period. There is no money in promoting a conscious, healthy, active, responsible society (although there is plenty in co-opting the symbols of such a society as brands for various products). What do we have to replace it as the guiding force of society? On the one hand, we have a poorly-articulated, diffuse, and not very cogent understanding of the liberal and progressive principles of our Constitution and the democratic philosophy surrounding it. An understanding that is no longer supported by the education system, no longer exists in mass media, and even among its advocates often borders on a cargo cult level rather than a real, functional awareness of what these principles mean and entail.
And on the other side...religion. Religion, conversely, is everywhere, infiltrates education and military, supplies the want of public services as a means of spreading itself, and is implicitly advocated throughout entertainment media. Its underlying authoritarian principles flourish, and are pervasively regarded as "morality" while actual morality - i.e., a rational philosophy of benevolence and honesty - is treated as something alien and unwelcome. Even though it largely rejects the values of fascism, it knows instinctively that it can coexist with fascism, but reason and democracy are an existential threat. When a decision point is reached, debased religion will always side with fascism - with the authoritarian, controlling, destructive impulse over the liberating, diversifying, and creative. This is a huge and pervasive destructive potential in our society, and a very real trip-wire that may be activated if OWS succeeds in challenging the ruling order.
It is important to understand that the system being fought right now is not fascism even in a general sense, even though it can be murderous under some circumstances - it is something more akin to feudalism. But the seeds of fascism are buried in it, and the soil of an ignorant, self-involved, highly religious society is fertile ground for it. The 99% know they are being cheated, but no matter how often it is repeated to them, and no matter how clear the terms, the understanding of who is doing this to them will never be quite clear to most people, even if they can say it's "Wall Street" - what that means is infinitely malleable in the hands of people sufficiently versed in the Big Lie. A far more educated population once got in line behind a "workers party" supported by industrialists and aristocrats, and stood by while it eradicated trade unions and reinstituted slavery.
There is cause for great hope in the Occupation movements, because they indicate that people are willing to be active. But there is also cause to be watchful and responsible, because the circumstances of today far more closely resemble Europe of the 1930s than America of the 1930s. We are not merely financially threatened, but nationally humiliated in a variety of ways that cover many political bases - ways that a sufficiently competent right-wing demagogue could exploit quite effectively to woo people who have no interest in their underlying agenda.
I kind of inwardly chuckle at some of the ecstatic "revolutionary" rhetoric around the Occupy movements, because in point of fact revolution is the last thing - the very last thing - the people of this country want. In fact, this is an attempt to avert revolution, just as every progressive reform in our nation's history has been. In a revolution, something must replace what is overthrown, and if that were to happen in this situation, what resulted would probably not even be in the ballpark of something considered progressive. I doubt it would even be one country. With the political ingredients we work with today, I wouldn't be surprised if what came out of such a process - one dominated by the very elements being fought - would be something like a Christian version of Pakistan with some token social benefits so it could still attach itself to the energy that spawned it.
We must recognize and understand something very important: OWS is not radical. Most of the people in it are not radical. It is an assertion of that which has been long established, both legally and morally, but which has come under attack - fundamental rights and thoroughly reasonable, civilized expectations. It is an assertion of reason against increasingly irrational and arbitrary power; an assertion of mutuality against a climate increasingly dominated by one-sided, exploitive relationships; and an assertion of responsibility in light of a circumstance that promotes the opposite from top to bottom. Being fully mindful of this, and rising to the challenges this knowledge poses, will make the Occupy movements and America in general stronger and better able to deal with the hidden pitfalls that may lurk in the uncharted territory we now dare to explore. It will allow us to see through follies that we might otherwise stumble into, ignore people who should be ignored, and watch very carefully the ways in which we unintentionally empower worse, more-evolved versions of the predators we fight.