When the Tea Party rallies were at their height it was common to see protest signs against government-funded abortion next to signs against gun control. That was in addition to a cacophony of messages about creeping socialism, creeping fascism, creeping Nazism, godlessness, the president’s birth certificate, the president’s religion, the Truth About 9/11, czars, taxes, spending, revolution, tort reform, obscure textual theories of the Constitution, and Obama’s plan to kill seniors with death panels.
Despite it all, the established media took it for granted that 10 pounds of bullshit fit neatly into a 5-pound bag labelled “Less Government.”
It seemed natural to the pundits that an ostensibly leaderless movement like the Tea Party would attract a multifaceted coalition of groups and individuals with their own agendas. It was nevertheless clear that these protesters were pointing to different pieces of a broadly shared right-wing critique of the country and its problems.**
Whatever they may have thought about the Tea Party’s overarching vision of a deregulated winner-take-all society and a shredded social safety net, reporters and pundits didn’t use the heterogenous messaging as an excuse to dismiss the protesters.
Yet, when it became clear that the Occupy Wall Street protesters weren’t going anywhere and Occupy actions were spreading across the country, the media professed bafflement as to what the protesters wanted. Banking regulation? An end to the capitalist system? The resurrection of Troy Davis? Early on, Gina Belafonte of the New York Times sneered that the protesters were operating in an “intellectual vaccuum.”
If you read the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, a consensus-based distillation of the agenda of the protesters occupying Zuccotti Park, released after Belafonte’s dismissive story appeared, it’s easy to see the shared agenda behind the seemingly disparate goals.
If the Tea Party stands for “Less Government,” the Occupy movement stands for “More Equality.”
The slogan “We are the 99%” has become the catchphrase of the Occupy movement. So, what does that mean?
Protesters are objecting to the overwhelming concentration of American wealth in the hands of the richest 1%. Wall Street represents not only the deregulated financial sector run amuck, but the power of entrenched wealth itself. The protesters stress that the vast riches of top 1% come at the expense of the bottom 99%. That’s where unemployment, student debt, and the mortgage crisis come into play as Occupy issues. As one popular chant has it, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”
The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals and giant corporations has corrupted democracy itself, according to this critique. There is a shared conviction that ballot box democracy is no longer the great equalizer. In theory, it’s one person, one vote. But in practice, campaign contributions and lobbyists tip the scales. This explains why the protesters think it’s important for ordinary people to turn out and occupy public space. If elections no longer measure the will of the people, the only way to make our leaders see is to literally be seen in the public square.
That’s why you see so many Occupy signs advocating for campaign finance reform. This is also the catchall part of the critique that folds in most of the “single-issue” protesters. Whatever your liberal issue is, you can argue that it’s not getting a fair hearing because of our broken political process. Often, you’ll be right.
The third component of the critique is a desire to protect and strengthen the social safety net. The Tea Party rails against the redistribution of wealth, but the Occupy movement sees redistribution – through publicly funded services as well as progressive taxes – as non-negotiable. The occupiers think it’s self-evident that millionaires and billionaires should pay more to fund schools, health care, and a dignified retirement for all Americans.
There’s a spectrum of opinion about how much more the rich should pay. That spectrum runs from “everything they own, come the revolution” to “about as much as they paid under Clinton.”
I’m not arguing that the Occupy movement is monolithic. Clearly, there’s a lot of ideological diversity. Anarchists are marching beside campaign finance nerds and blue collar workers. Reformists and revolutionaries are making common cause. That’s how dire the situation is.
In fairness to the media, decades of conservative messaging had primed them to accept “Less Government” as a natural catchall for the shambling coalition of the old and new right. The “More Equality” story hasn’t been told out as explicitly or as often.
That said, it’s simply lazy to look at the occupiers and refuse to acknowledge the broadly shared conceptual framework that unites their various messages into a coherent whole.
**The Tea Party was never actually leaderless and eventually the fiction was quietly abandoned. The naked power plays by Republican politicians to represent the Tea Party didn’t help further the illusion. The movers and shakers of the Tea Party were established well-funded, top-down organizations like Americans for Prosperity and Fox News. The Tea Party has always been fractious and chaotic, but that’s because it has too many aspiring leaders, not because it is leaderless.
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