Our political Quote of the Day comes from The Daily Beast’s John Avlon who addresses the prevailing question about whether Occupy Wall Street is the left’s version of the Tea Party movement. His answer, based on original reporting as well as analysis is: it is not a mirror image of the Tea Party movement at all.
Here are some key quotes from his piece, which needs to be read in full. He begins:
We are living in a time of decentralized populist political movements, fueled by economic anxiety and magnified by social media.
As Occupy Wall Street spread into satellite protests this past week, there was an understandable impulse to impose an established narrative, asking whether this was the mirror image of the Tea Party protests.
Most of the protestors I spoke to dismissed the comparisons quickly. “The Tea Party is the opposite of Occupy Wall Street. The only thing we have in common is our homemade signs,” Eric Seligson of Brooklyn told me, as he folded anarchist pamphlets by the light of a headlamp in Zuccotti Square on Friday night.
Avlon also notes something that has become increasingly tiresome: the way our politics is now about as enlightening and spontaneous as professional wrestling.
Actually, the big difference between professional wrestling and 21st century American politics is that professional wrestlers in their scripted contests tend to stick to ONE persona. One side. One character.
American politicians — and partisans — will quickly discard what once sparked outrage (with many partisans principles are relative) if it applies to their side and act as de facto political defense lawyers or go on the attack against the other side for what they once did, condoned or enabled:
One of the ironies of the coverage of the Wall Street protests to date is that the right is condemning them in almost the same terms as the left condemned the Tea Party movement, and the left is likewise angrily arguing that media bias is behind anything less than uncritical coverage.
For example, here’s Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Friday. “I’m increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and other cities around the country … Believe it or not, some in this town [Washington, D.C.] have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against other Americans.”
And here’s Eric Cantor rallying the crowd at 2009’s Values Voters Summit: “Right now, millions of Americans are waking up, realizing that they don’t recognize their country anymore.” Down the hall, his conservative compatriots were hosting seminars with unifying titles like “Thugocracy: Fighting the Vast-Left Wing Conspiracy” and “ObamaCare: Rationing Your Life Away.” Double standards and situational ethics are the way the hyperpartisan game is played.
John, may I use the word I don’t usually use?
Ditto.
But it is a two-way street. Liberals loved the telling snapshots of the more unhinged signs at Tea Party rallies—among those I saw were: “Don’t make the U.S.A. a Third World Country—Go Back to Kenya,” “King George Didn’t Listen Either,” “Obama Lied, Granny Died,” and “Don’t Touch My Medicare.” But now they are claiming that similar snapshots of the messages penned at the Occupy Wall Street protests are taken out of context and unrepresentative. Among the signs I’ve seen across the street from Ground Zero are: “How Long Can the Corporate-Military Occupation of Earth Go On?” “Corporatism is Fascism,” “9/11 Truth,” “We are Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Palestine, Spain, Yemen, Chile, Bahrain, Syria, Bolivia and Libya.” That’s a lot of context.
It’s an old trick: populist rallies gain intensity by encouraging a loss of perspective, fueling anger with apocalyptic urgency. In the case of the Tea Party, conservative activists seemed to believe that losing the 2008 election was like living under tyranny. And today, too many in the Occupy Wall Street crowd toss around comparisons to Arab Spring uprisings, where state-police dictatorships are still murdering peaceful protesters everyday.
John Avlon should be ready to hear one of the most tiresome and trite phrases now thrown around these days by partisans who hate to hear the truth about their side:
He’ll be accused of a “false equivalency.” Probably by the right and left.
Just as the Tea Party initially pushed the idea that they were an independent movement angry at both Republicans and Democrats, there is a drive to try and describe the Wall Street protests as being beyond partisanship. They are decidedly left wing, as opposed to simply liberal or even Democrats. Among the pamphlets I’ve been handed while walking through the crowd include primers on “Public Anarchism,” a brief autobiography of Emma Goldman, and “Women in the Spanish Revolution.”
After he does some more analysis and offers some more from the interviews he conducted, Avlon concludes:
Just as the excesses of the Tea Party obscured the real issue of dealing with the deficit and the debt, making common ground more difficult to achieve, in these early weeks of the Occupy Wall Street protests, we are seeing a rush to the ramparts. This threatens to obscure the very real reasons people should be angry at our screwed-up financial system that led to corruption and collusion and economic malpractice. We should have a fact-based debate about growing gaps between the super-rich and middle class in America, reinstating Glass-Stiegel or whether Harry Reid’s millionaire’s tax is the best way to pay for the Jobs Bill while beginning to pay down the debt. It’s not insensitive to say that comparing the U.S.A. to dictatorships while banging away in a drum circle isn’t the best way to get taken seriously.
But the problem now in America is that an increasing number of Americans don’t want or care about fact based discussions. Politics is now all about defining the other side as the enemy, and going after those (news people, websites, even other writers in comments sections) who dare to see things differently and trying to discredit them.
What gets lost in the pendulum swing of populist protests is a sense of citizen responsibility to actually solve problems in a democratic republic—defining the common ground that exists and then building on it. In the current polarized political environment, that just might be the most revolutionary idea of all.
“Solve problems”? What does that mean??
Read his column from beginning to end.
OF RELATED INTEREST:
—“Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations could spread — and spark backlash
—Occupy Wall Street’s Drumbeat Grows Louder
—Old Man Bloomberg Tired Of Occupy Wall Street’s Attempts To “Destroy Jobs”
—Everybody has an opinion about the Occupy Wall Street movement
—The ‘agent provocateur’ who infiltrated Occupy Wall Street
—One of the Many Things Pundits Don’t Get About Occupy Wall Street
—Occupy Wall Street protests have a spiritual side
—Political party paying Occupy Wall Street protesters?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.