It’s general strike day in Oakland. I don’t really know what to expect — this isn’t going to be a true general strike in the sense of completely shutting down the city like in 1946, but it could still be an exciting step forward. And since I’ve underestimated the impact of everything that’s happened since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, I won’t make any confident predictions until I see what happens in the streets. But one big wild card, once again, is the response of the Mayor and the police.

What’s been remarkable about the events in Oakland and elsewhere, so far, is how much they’ve freaked out and disrupted the political system. For my whole life, it seemed like the governing elite could easily get rid of mass protest through some judicious mixture of ignoring and repressing demonstrators. But that seems not to be working this time. When Michael Bloomberg tried to sweep away the Wall Street occupation under the pretext of “cleaning” the park, he was met with thousands of solidarity protestors and forced to back down. When the Oakland police tried to gas their city’s occupation into submission, they not only made a martyr out of Scott Olsen, but felt they had to issue a bizarre open letter in which they distanced themselves from their own violent actions. In Albany, the police simply defied the governor and mayor’s order to evict protestors. In Tennessee, the state government first tried to dispel protests with mass arrests, but then declined to defend the policy in the face of a court injunction.

In all these cases, it seems that the system is incapable of handling the appearance of any kind of mass civic participation that doesn’t go through the expected channels — and this problem is not limited to the United States. The European Union’s attempts to contain its banking crisis are, it seems, not robust to the outbreak of democracy, since Greece’s Prime Minister was able to plunge the continent into turmoil by merely threatening to give his people a say in the current bailout and austerity plan for the country. In Britain, an occupation has set off crisis and resignations in the Church of England, while directing uncomfortable attention to the bizarre and authoritarian structure that runs central London. What’s going on here?