Friday, November 4, 2011

Occupy This

There is a fundamental difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Both play to anger and fear. Both target boogie men (big corporations and big government). Both can, and often are, cast by supporters as movements to recapture and/or defend the American Dream. One, however, contains the threat of much more radical change. The Tea Party is really much more conventional. It is a not so unusual combination of an effort to protect wealth and an effort to avoid change. Some Tea Party members have wealth and want to protect it. Some don’t. Those that don’t have a feeling that their chances of having more are worse than ever before, and they trace that situation to the disappearance of traditional ‘American’ values. It is the presence of non-Christians, the rise of minorities to positions of power, the influx of folks who don’t speak English, the increased recognition of ‘alternative’ lifestyles, and restrictions on American ingenuity and entrepreneurship that must be responded to. It’s not that the system is being set up against them, but that it is being overrun by foreigners and foreign ideas. The wealthy should be wealthy. They earned it. We all can too, as long as America stays powerful, Christian, and out of the way of its best and brightest. We’ve been headed in the wrong direction, what with welfare and the Civil Rights Act (and maybe even the Civil War), but that can be reversed. None of the people occupying Wall Street are protecting wealth, and many of them believe that it is the system that is victimizing them. Most of them also believe that their opportunities are dwindling, like less well off Tea party sympathizers, but they believe that they are simply being written out. College is moving further out of reach. Home ownership is more difficult to hold on to. Food is harder to put on the table. Influence on the government is more difficult to imagine. And all of this is because their fellow Americans, mostly Christian and White, are denying it to them. Reducing the role of Government isn’t going to help this. Increasing it might not help either. Electing a particular party might not help. It’s not as if Obama has overseen radical reform of the financial regulatory system or been able to protect rights and benefits that had been fought for and won. When we think of home grown radicals we think of militias and neo Nazis, but the bigger threat may come from the left. Many of these folks may be in the process of deciding that they have no options within the system. They may conclude that the American Political institutions are now only serving to protect increasingly caste like divisions. If they do, and if they do in any number, than the threat is much greater than any threat arising from the Tea Party. The anger of the occupiers is not one being used by holders of wealth to protect privilege and inequality; it is one that is targeting it. This difference may amount to nothing. It may, however, amount to considerably more. Whether that is good, or bad, or ugly is far from clear.

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