The Occupy Wall Street Movement has been mother’s milk for bloggers and political writers from all ends of the spectrum. Whether seeing them as kindred spirits of the Arab Spring or childish spirits in dire need of Irish Spring, almost everyone who writes about politics has weighed in. Aside from one brief post I’ve steered clear of this subject since it meets my two criteria for topic avoidance 1) Too many others have written about it and/or 2) Someone smarter than me has written about it. All of my regular readers (thank you, both of you!) have probably noticed this trait in my blog, but I haven’t seen any posts that actually connect the dots and draw up the one glaring similarity that both protests share.
Vice President Biden recently remarked that the OWS protesters and the Tea Party have a lot in common. OK, the vice president actually only said that the the two movements share common origins (protesting bank bailouts), but I thought I’d take this point a bit farther and compare and contrast them. Yes, I understand that the blogosphere has already got its share of postings comparing both, but I haven’t seen anyone tie all of the pieces together for the larger message that ties these two groups together.
First off, let’s look at the two minor traits that both groups have in common. Both have their share of critics who claim that these movements are nothing more than astroturfed mastermindings of George Soros / The Koch Brothers that have manipulated all of these hopeless rubes into dancing to their tune. There actually is a small degree of truth to the backing, as both protest movements have support that has received funding from their respective would-be overlords. That said, there are too many people who have come out on either side to simply dismiss either one as simple puppeteering. I’ve spent enough time at protests for both sides to state that the people at these protests are there because they truly believe in their causes. And yes, I know that left leaning groups play a larger role in OWS than group organizers did with the Tea party, and I’ll come back to that shortly.
Both the Tea Party and OWS are both opposed to the government bailouts, although OWS seems to be a day late and a dollar short in their complaint. Where were all of you two years ago, OWS? Still, better late than never.
And that’s about it in terms of the minor similarities. I’m sure that by now you’ve all read something listing differences between the two, but it’s a lot tougher to make my concluding point without briefly summarizing a few key points. So without further adieu, here are some key differences:
While the Tea Party has been portrayed as angry mobs on the verge of violence by the mainstream press, in reality you’ll never find so many law abiding, peaceful people in one setting. Compare that to how somehow the MSM narrative has managed to overlook this string of crimes and other inconvenient truths about the OWSers.
For that matter, the left had such a difficult time finding evidence supporting their claims about the Tea Party that they had to start planting people with fake signs. This had the dual effect of bolstering the Tea Party’s credentials while indicting the MSM, confident that any reporter would be so happy to find a sign that fit their narrative that they wouldn’t be bothered with such pesky steps like verifying that their source was an actual Tea Partier.
One of the reasons there is so little unrest at Tea Party events is that these are law abiding citizens who are unhappy with what the current political process has given them and work within the law to improve the situation. We saw this in what happened in the 2010 midterm elections and the efforts to fend off the leftist counterattacks against public union reform in Wisconsin. One of the reasons there is so much unrest at the OWS events is that the OWS group, under its sense of entitlement, feels that their objectives are too important to be worried about respecting the property rights of others, or their fellow protesters for that matter.
The Tea Party had simple, clear messages. Don’t destroy our health care system. Stop bailing out every company that spent more time donating money to your campaigns than running their business. Stop spending more money than you’re bringing in. The OWS is still trying to come up with a coherent message, or some demands that are actually feasible in the real world. Aside from the occasional “Repeal Glass-Steagal!’ (which quite a few Tea Partiers would support, actually), coherence and any connection to reality have been sorely lacking in their demands.
The Tea Partiers were accused of racism for opposing a president who has shown us higher unemployment, greater debt, and more regulatory invasion into our lives than George W. Bush could have ever dreamed of – all substantial reasons. Ironically, the same people on the left who criticized Bush for these very reasons now can’t be bothered with criticizing the current president. Apparently the press has not figured out that, unlike holding people to equal standards regardless of skin color, holding someone to a lower standard because of their skin color is actual racism.
The Tea Partiers get labeled selfish for having these radical Ayn Randian notions of wanting freedom from the government in their lives (and that the rest of the 99% also be allowed to share this same freedom). The OWS crowd has a list of demands to give them guaranteed high wages, free college education, unconditional employment, etc. To someone without a degree in journalism that might sound a bit…selfish?
Despite accusations of astroturf, Tea Partiers came to their events, protested, and left. They can’t occupy anything since they are part of the productive class and have to go back to their responsibilities, such as their jobs and families. Tea Partiers don’t have the time or money to simply take an indefinite camping trip in a city park. Contrast this with who makes up most of the OWS – people who live off of the labor of others. Most of these protesters are students, union employees (not workers who happen to be union members, but the people on the union payroll itself. Of course, this does include union members in a number of the protests), and other groups of professional agitators (ACORN, Code Pink, etc.) who could not exist without the productive class. Somehow the press seems to be uninterested in how the funding for these occupations and the donated food, etc. is coming in – certainly not astroturf.
Taking the last point a bit farther, the Tea Partiers can’t have prolonged protests because they contribute to society in different ways. They set about uninteresting tasks such as managing the Wal-Mart that sells power bars and bottled water, or driving the truck that ships iPads for Amazon.com, or running the servers that keep AT&T and Verizon’s broadband service running, working at the bank that finds ways to finance student loans for degrees in Transgender Studies, maintaining the local town or city’s water works that ensure that toilets will flush and that water will come out of a spigot when a knob is turned, or stocking the shelves at the local Target with items like blankets and tents. For their efforts doing these mundane activities the Tea Partiers are given incentive to come back and do it again each day by being rewarded with something far greater than that inner glow that can only be gained by spending days on end in public places and chanting and banging on drums while eschewing personal hygiene and living off the generosity of others – the Tea Partiers get paychecks.
The OWS crowd enjoys donated items such as water bottles, power bars, blankets and tents. They feel that the local shops should allow them in to charge their iPads so they can upload their blog posts and pictures of the evil policemen up to their web sites hosted by Verizon or AT&T, and those same shops should allow them to use their restrooms to bathe in their sinks. And the evil banks should forgive their student loans since they can’t seem to find a job that pays well enough to repay the loan needed to get a degree in a marketable skill such as Transgender Studies.
In an amazing twist of irony it doesn’t seem to register that none of the goods needed to sustain these protests would be possible without the very system they seek to overthrow. To steal a comparison made by Mark Steyn, like the Eloi from Jules Verne’s The Time Machine the OWS just expect food to appear each morning and never give a thought as to what effort was needed to bring it there. It is lost on them that the very system they seek to overthrow might actually be the very one that gives them access to all of these products that they enjoy. Note to any aspiring Morlocks: do not try to eat any protesters. They probably taste even worse than they smell.
I also have one curious observation about how the left and right views the two movements. For all of the angry, ignorant and hateful attacks that the left has launched at the Tea Party they are only too eager to put them on par with the OWS to give their own movement credibility. On the other side nobody even remotely tied to the Tea Party wants to be associated with the OWS in any way, shape or form for obvious reasons.
After looking at all of these factors how can one possibly conclude that these groups are alike and that the OWS is what lefties are desperately trying to label “The Tea party of the Left”? When one steps back and looks at all of the factors there is one unifying theme that both movements share. The OWS movement is just as perfect a representation of the liberal ideology as the Tea Party is of Conservatism.
If one positive development is coming from this, every dollar used to fund these professional agitators’ camp outs is one less dollar going into the Obama reelection fund.
Cross Posted at Brother Bob’s Blog
