On Friday, I attended the first General Assembly for Occupy Davis, CA. After reading reports about Occupy Wall Street for weeks, I wasn’t surprised to quickly run into a conspiracy theorist. He was an older gentleman in a hoodie who seemed eager to suggest that we coordinate with other organizations around the state and try to take the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

I knew that the protests had drawn right-wing elements — gold bugs, Alex Jones fans, and Ron Paul revolutionaries — but I wasn’t prepared for the rest of the meeting. Everyone wiggled their hands in approval and immediately afterward a young participant added that we should also tap into Davis’s lively conservative scene and liaise with the Tea Partiers. The evening’s mediator seemed to agree. Speaking as if for OWS, she reminded us that the group was “bipartisan” and “apolitical.” Though some contested the idea that politics reduces to bipolar party politics, everyone seemed to concede that the movement was all-inclusive. As one man said, unconsciously repeating Mitt Romney’s assessment of the occupiers, the protests are about national “unity.” Indeed, serious discussion of political differences or common principles seemed to be ruled out in advance — we were all informed that we should simply “have our own opinions.”

The group’s emphasis on conciliation extended to its choice of tactics, as well. We moved quickly to discussing protest actions, spending more time talking about how we might endear ourselves to local institutions — Davis City Council, the police, and the university — than how we might challenge them. Several participants noted with approval that Seattle’s Occupation had the blessing of the Mayor. One of the highlights of the evening was when the mediator announced that we shouldn’t antagonize University of California administrators “because many of us work there.” This was particularly ironic because our campus has been the site of a number of struggles over the past few years, including numerous occupations and 50+ arrests after tuition hikes and a contentious graduate student worker contract negotiation. Indeed, UC system protest tactics provided one of the many inspirations for Occupy Wall Street’s. But, rather than occupying campus buildings, the favored protest action at the meeting was to get people to switch from Bank of America to credit unions en masse.