Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

When the Occupy Boston protest crested last night in front of the Federal Reserve building downtown, they were only a few blocks from where most historians think an earlier generation of hooligans boarded British merchant ships and tossed their cargoes of tea overboard. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find two movements which would instinctively recoil from each other faster than the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. But for the first time in my life, I feel like the populist left and populist right agree–not just on their own anger, and certainly not on the solutions, but on many of the key facts of the problem.

When I Tweeted yesterday to that effect, I wasn’t surprised that the first reply was, “What? #TeaParty thinks economy was ruined by poor brown people, #OccupyWallStreet knows it was destroyed by corporate greed.” Left-wing protest movements complain endlessly about media coverage that consistently (a) low-balls crowd sizes, (b) emphasizes in-party squabbles, and (c) gives minutes of coverage to the literal lunatic fringe, and seconds to the speakers at the main podium. All of which describe exactly how the Tea Party is covered by any media outlet which is not avowedly right of center, and explains how a movement started in 2009 and generally regarded as a milder version of the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers could play a central role in the 2010 elections and still be dismissed as a collection of racists, rednecks, and retards.

The tragedy in this is not that it will cost the Left elections–because few things are more fortuitous than to be misunderestimated by your opponents–but that enmity between the two sides redounds to the benefit of exactly that which Occupy Wall Street and its regional subsidiaries wish to overthrow. While Tea Party adherents, and rally-attendees in particular, are more likely to oppose illegal immigration, abortion, and gay marriage, the movement’s raison d’etre is political-economic, directed first against the permanent Washington establishment, and second against that portion of the GOP that is happy so long as its place at the trough remains secure. Ask a Tea Partier what they thought of the AIG bailout, and the number of expletives used should roughly equal those of any Occupy Wall Streeter. No less a voice of the Tea Party than the pretender queen Sarah Palin called General Electric “the poster child of crony capitalism and corporate welfare,” and has lately made it a centerpiece of her non-campaign.

I’ve been tempted to dismiss and deride the Occupy-Blank movement as little more than cheap entertainment for sullen and unemployed youth, but to the extent that their fundamental premise is that something feels deeply broken and askew in this country, and that the locus of the problem lies somewhere between Wall Street and Washington, DC, I don’t actually disagree. If the left sees the problem as entirely rooted in “corporate greed,” the right thinks that big business malfeasance is often, and especially lately, crucially enabled by big government. If the left pines for harder commissars with the power to break Goldman Sachs, the right asks where in the Constitution one finds justification for the monies transferred to so many investment banks, much of it at the hands of a Democratic congress and liberal President.