Occupy Wall Street: The Tea Party for Democrats
The United States is a country that was built on protest, created laws to protect it, and has since seen it at the center of huge and important sociopolitical change. We all grew up hearing the legends of Paul Revere, marveling at Susan B. Anthony coins mixed in with out spare change, and seeing footage from lunch-counter sit-ins and bus boycotts, all the while absorbing the sense of pride and accomplishment for what those protesters did. Unfortunately however, protests like the current “Occupy Wall St.” movement seem to have forgotten the thing that all those famous protesters had to make made their efforts significant—a purpose.
As Twitter buzzed with excitement when this all started, I went to the usual sources of national news to see what Occupy Wall St. was actually about. Based on the tweets, there was a lot of general talk of “greed” and “corporations” and how big banks were hurting the country but not much more. It all sounded like the typical entry-level politics of any Freshman liberal arts student learning what money is for the first time, but I assumed that these blanket statements were just 140-character shorthand for something more specific. As it would turn out, they were not.
Reading through reports coming out of CNN, NPR, The Huffington Post and other seemingly sympathetic news outlets, I struggled to find any actual centralized theme, largely due to the fact that the protest itself has no real organization or leadership (a fact that the protesters themselves seem proud of but has ultimately been to their detriment). Again, many man-on-the-street interviews gave voice to people who took issue with corporate greed, but none seemed to have anything deeper than that.
What corporations specifically were the problems? What actually constitutes “greed” and what did anyone propose to do about it? What exactly did these protesters hope to see happen as a result of their efforts? What impact are those efforts even having that might incite change? Who are they calling on to actually make those changes and how? If anyone knew, they certainly weren’t telling. Of course, these questions can’t easily be answered because they’re all far too broad and situational to really be summed up in a concise manner, but I’m not sure anyone at these protests actually understands that or cares.
Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of reasons to complain about the effects of capitalism on our society, but so-called Evil Corporations don’t exist without someone purchasing their products—we all have our roles in the current financial ecosystem. It simply isn’t possible to remove “corporations” as a concept and still live the way that we’ve all become accustomed to, so if that’s the occupiers’ goal, then they’re wasting their time and everyone else’s by trying to demand a simple solution to a very, very complex problem.
Judging by the number of Nike sneakers, Levi’s jeans and Apple iPods strewn throughout the crowds of protesters, large corporations obviously play some role in these protesters’ lives, so again, which corporations are we talking about here? Those Guy Fawkes masks that people are so fond of clearly aren’t hand made, so they must’ve been purchased somewhere. Do small business owners count? After all, if Nike disappears tomorrow and is replaced by a thousand small companies, one of them will still eventually grow to Nike’s size and the cycle will continue. Does that make Joe Shoemaker greedy? If so, exactly whose fault is that?
What about the issues of corporate personhood that are raised by some of these protesters? On one hand, some complain about the idea that a corporation should have overarching rights and protections similar to individuals, but in the same act, accuse those corporations of having very human emotions like “evil” and “greed.” Which is it? Again, this is an issue that needs some serious discussion, but not one that can be productively encapsulated by anything written on a cardboard sign.
For a protest to be successful, it needs to have a clear, specific purpose that people can form an opinion on: “we will keep doing _____ until _____” happens. More importantly, the consequence of the protest needs to actually affect the people who make decisions. Bus boycotts didn’t work because the stirring protests melted the hearts of racists, they worked because the financial impact of losing that many black customers eventually became too much to ignore. If the protesters’ assertion is that Evil Corporations only care about money, then tampering with that money is the obvious way to get results. Wearing a jester’s hat while shouting at the police about “those fat cats on Wall Street” is not.
The Occupy Wall St. (or LA or wherever) protests are aggravating to local law enforcement and get a lot of media attention but to what end? Many of these people are still tweeting about it on their pricey smartphones over one of The Big Three’s cellular networks an irony that seems to be lost on many despite its seemingly obvious nature. While it’s hard to get a clear picture of which corporations are being branded as evil and which are acceptable, it is clear that neither is losing or making any money over this situation so they don’t really care.
Things do need to change and the American people are ultimately going to have to be the ones to do the changing. That said, Occupy Wall Street won’t change anything because of the disorganized activities and unclear desires of it’s participants. The only thing that seems truly important to a large number of those participants is the false sense of nobility that hash-tagging a tweet with “#OccupyWallSt” seems to afford them. This protest is the physical equivalent to actors wearing red ribbons at award shows to fight AIDS—a nice sentiment, but one that almost instantly outlives its debatable usefulness.
To put it bluntly, Occupy Wall St. is The Tea Party for Democrats: a lot of sound and fury from scared, angry people that will never amount to anything because everyone is more focused on pointing out perceived problems than providing solutions. They’re both groups of citizens who call themselves disenfranchised, but really only because it’s a convenient excuse to avoid learning how government actually works. You can replace the gun-wielding rednecks with iPad-wielding hipsters but the impact is the same—nothing. Enjoy your Facebook sit-ins if you like, but do you really remember anything that people were Tweeting about a year ago? Probably not, and at the rate it’s going right now, “Occupy Wall St.” will have the exact same legacy.
-Alex
I hear what this author is saying, and agree with some, but some isn’t accurate. The influence of the Tea Party is quite palpable. We saw it in the last election, with some Republicans running under the Tea Party banner. The Tea Party influence in part also caused many members of congress to almost have us default on our debts.
So why couldn’t the Occupy Wall St movement have a similar, if not greater effect? While they may not have a message quickly summarized in a few bullet points, I think it’s clear to anyone who’s paying attention what some of the goals are: getting the corporate influence out of politics, holding those banks/traders responsible for the financial meltdown accountable, establishing a fair tax code and making sure corporations/the rich even pay taxes at all. These are just a few.
Also, to call this movement the “Tea Party for Democrats” is very shortsighted/inaccurate. There are a lot of socialists, libertarians, and people of other political outlooks involved. Most of the people involved are disgusted with the Democratic Party in general, and how much they’ve helped facilitate/allow the financial meltdown, albeit maybe not as much as the GOP.
I definitely agree, though, that the movement needs to make its demands more clear, and come up with a strategy of specifically how they want to get these demands met, but I don’t think that not having these immediately will diminish the impact the movement has. The world is taking notice.
The Tea Party also claims to be an entity apart from any established political parties and even has a few libertarians in its ranks as well. Nevertheless, well… we’ve seen what happened.
Yes, by virtue of their own existence, they have managed to have some level of impact on American politics, but have any of their own core ideologies really come to pass? Not really. Have they been able to successfully influence anyone with real power in either party in any branch of government? Not in an easily demonstrable way. I’m not sure why anyone would want to use the Tea Party’s “success” as an example of why their own movements are valid, but those successes are highly debatable in the largest contexts either way.
The Tea Party has had more time to grow of course, but OWS is starting out on the same shaky ground: protesters without specific goals, a (perhaps misguided) notion that they’re working for The American People, a decentralized leadership without control over the message, a hell of a lot of pull with cable news and a sure-to-be contentious election just on the horizon. Why would one turn out to be so different than the other considering that they’re born out of such similar circumstances? Yes, one group is mostly conservative and the other is mostly liberal, but more importantly, they’re both composed mainly of human beings. We are not a group that tends to behave well while participating in unfocused mobs, nor are we a group that tends to know “when to stop” while we’re being paid attention to.
To be fair, there’s still time to turn this thing around, but right now, the world “taking notice” is mostly just due to spectacle—we’ve all seen what the world will “take notice” of given the opportunity and getting people’s attention isn’t usually an indication of how invested they really are in what they’re looking at. If these people don’t come up with a real message soon, that attention will fade when the next big story drops. At that point, huge percentages of OWS’s supporters will return to their lives and more or less stop caring, and those who are left will be the usual attention-starved pundits and failed politicians who have always flocked to this sort of thing. Wall St? Unchanged.
It’s not even about politics or about America, it’s about the basic course of events that always happens when a new bandwagon rolls through town, even if the wagon has shoddy wheels. If OWS is something more serious and has real impact, I’ll applaud their efforts. Until then, I’ll believe it when I see it and I’m sure not seeing it now.
Really? Tea Party for Democrats? Wow! Sounds (reads) like you just want to rag on it for whatever reason. It seems incredibly parochial to suggest the “Tea Parry…will never amount to anything” considering the movement has given us, the American people, the most ridiculous group of candidates for the Repugnantcan Party’s nomination for Prez. That’s in addition to the number of knuckleheads the Tea Party put in the House of Misrepresentatives. The Koch brothers aren’t sponsoring the Tea Party to win the Presidency, necessarily, their objective is more likely to push discourse and policy farther and farther to the right, hence, Bachman, Perry…Gingrich, for god’s sake, et al, are legitimized in corp. media. There has to be some push back, and I don’t believe the OWS should be so specific, that would make it easier to contest. We may be seeing some tangible evidence of changes real soon. Personhood for corporations is getting serious attention in some circles. The Occupy Wall Street movement as the “Tea Party for Democrats?” I hope so.
I had a comment on here, and was curious as to your take. I see, now, that my comment has been eliminated. Wha’sup?
The comment definitely wasn’t deleted: WordPress holds all comments in a queue that I have to approve and, having been wrapped up in other things, I simply forgot to check. We at the FNGTAC enjoy having a variance of opinions and on this very issue, there’s one of us who is a vocal supporter of OWS (Kamau), one who definitely is not (me) and a third who seems to have taken more of a “wait and see” approach (Vernon). We enjoy debate, not censoring people who we disagree with, so in the future, please don’t feel like you’re being ignored if I’m a little slow on the “approve” trigger. It’s not personal.
As to the comment itself, I’ve generally stopped commenting on OWS since I wrote the original piece but suffice to say, I haven’t been converted by anything I’ve seen since. I’m a little unclear about your overall perspective, but if I’m to understand, you basically contend that The Tea Party has in fact made an impact and my comparison is therefore invalid. That being the case, I suppose the problem is deciding what impact or “amounting to something’ actually means.
I of course agree that the Tea Party has caused quite the stir in the media and politics and therefore has made an impact in the larger sense, but the net effect of that attention still hasn’t resulted in the country changing in the ways they’d like it to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I want them to succeed, but the point is that if we were to go over a “Tea Party Checklist” of things that group would like to see changed, very few of those things have ultimately come to pass. They’ve gotten attention, but haven’t really managed to do anything hugely productive with it. Instead, they’ve mostly (as you pointed out) gotten a few politicians into lower office in areas that were already heavily conservative and cultivated candidates for higher office that no one takes seriously (including their fellow Republicans).
That was my concern for OWS: that they would do a good job getting attention but fail to actually capitalize on it. It’s still too early to say whether I’m “right” or not, but the point is that if you want OWS to be as “successful” as The Tea Party has, then you may want to reconsider your measuring stick for success. If four years go by and all OWS has managed to do is nominate joke candidates for national offices and win elections in areas that were never in danger for Democrats to begin with, I assume that its members will not be pleased. I certainly can’t speak for the average OWS supporter, but my guess is that they wouldn’t like your defense against my points any more than they’d like the points themselves…
Meanwhile, I’d also take some issue with the claim that “corporate personhood is getting serious attention in some circles” (or at least the implication that those “circles” are of any consequence), but that’s mostly because I don’t think most people still even really know what that is. By definition, one can’t anthropomorphize a corporation by calling it “evil,” “greedy,” or “corrupt” (uniquely human emotions) then still claim to be against treating companies like people, but that’s exactly what I see and hear from many Americans. You can’t have it both ways. Again, I agree with the idea that corporate personhood is a problem in the world (not just the country) that needs to be solved, but at the risk of sounding a bit elitist, the implications of the concept might be a little too advanced for most of the people who have learned the term this year. A start? Maybe. An accomplishment? Definitely not.
Thanks, young man, for replying, and for your well written, and revealing prose. I write this thinking you view yourself as a progressive/liberal/etc. Your article and subsequent replies suggest I could be wrong, but that is from where I write this. You acknowledged you’re “definitely not…a vocal supporter” of the OWS. An admission suggesting rigidity in your position, and unless there is an explicit expression by those institutions, or persons the OWS protesters are targeting, you are likely to hold your position, and marginalize positive incremental and necessary changes. For instance, within the last week, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation challenging ‘personhood’ for corporations. I’d say that’s progress. For those individuals referring to corporations as “evil,” “greedy,” or “corrupt,” is this more a question of semantics, and not, as you say, “having it both ways.” I’m inclined to believe that truth, the ultimate currency, is less likely to breed “joke candidates;” a bifurcated idea. I suggest ‘Democracy Now’, FAIR’s ‘Counterspin’, and other progressive, non advertising motivated newsies, in addition to the CNN’s (Criminal News Network), NPR’s (Nuclear Powered Radio); see NPR’s underwriters, and whatever CORPORATE media outlet you use. Though, I have many problems with your, seemingly rigid position, I enjoy, very much, your writing, and the work of the 3 of you cats. Keep it up.
Hey Alex. I happen to agree with your central premise, that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have strong parallels. However, I see those parallels in a more positive light. Because there is no way I could say it better than Harvard Law professor and civil rights intellectual Lawrence Lessig, here is a link to him talking to Occupiers about this topic. I highly recommend it:
Um, I tried to leave a link that would point you at second 50. Anyway, he starts talking around then.