Can anything be more frustrating for Tea Partiers than the attempts by conservative and centrist Republicans (e.g. Gingrich, Paul, Romney, Huntsman, Cantor) to play divide and conquer with the Occupy Wall Street people by separating them into ‘the decent, concerned Americans who have a lot in common with the Tea Party’ and ‘a small group of ne’er-do-wells’ who are spoiling the movement for the others?
“I understand how those people feel,” said Mitt Romney as the OWS gained momentum in October. During the Las Vegas debate a week later, Ron Paul criticized Herman Cain’s chastisement of the OWS crowd with the comment, “We can’t blame the victims.”
There is an essential fallacy at the heart of this moderate line on the OWS gang. Let’s call it the Fallacy of Political Action Versus Political Thought. It consists in assuming that those people within a movement who are not physically carrying out the movement’s forward motion are not ideologically aligned with those who are. Newt Gingrich committed this fallacy during a Republican debate, when, for the sake of a catchy line, he distinguished the radical element within the OWS from those supposedly akin to the Tea Party by opposing the former subgroup’s filthiness to the latter subgroup’s willingness to “pick up after themselves.” (To be fair, Gingrich has since shifted to a much less sympathetic line on OWS. And indeed, general Republican rhetoric on this issue has become more unqualifiedly negative, although for some it seemed to take a little finger-in-the-wind time to come around to what should have been obvious from the outset.)
The fallacy these Republicans, to say nothing of the mainstream media, have fallen into is an offshoot of historical myopia, the inability to see anything in the past but the ‘famous bits,’ the isolated moments that grabbed news headlines and have thus remained a part of our collective memory. When we think of the political Left of the 1960s, what normally come to mind are images of hippies, students in tie-dye, violent or drugged-out protesters, and the like. Time and distance have made it all too easy to forget that the people in those mental images are merely the popular face of 1960s radicalism, rather than its heart and soul.
The primary danger—other than for those actually in the vicinity of the Molotov cocktails—was never the thugs in the streets or on campuses. (After all, at the height of such extremism, the overt political result was two Republican presidential victories.) The danger was in the attitude change among those who were a few years older than the thugs, and who, while abhorring the methods of the radicals, nevertheless came to regard them as idealists, and to sympathize with their ‘cause’, understood in fuzzy, ‘they’re-not-really-against-America’ terms.
This changed attitude quickly came to dominate the general culture in all the well-known ways, as the quiet, middle of the road ‘moderate radicals’ became the dominant generation of adults. When I was in junior high and high school, it was common for teachers—and not just in economics class—to comment casually that “Communism is the ideal, although it doesn’t work in practice.” No one ever gave an argument for this, and no argument was regarded as necessary.
By the 1980s, only a nut could defend the historical practice of communism, and only the leftover Molotov cocktail-types still believed in communism as a practical goal. However, normal people with families, nice houses and respectable jobs accepted as a bromide that, if only it were practically possible, communism would of course be better than capitalism. Whether most of the people who said this really believed it, or were just trying ease their guilty consciences regarding their enjoyment of all the luxuries of modern middle class life, is impossible to know. And it really doesn’t matter. They thought they needed to believe it—that they
should believe it—and that is the important point. Communism, or leftism in general, had, as they say, won the moral argument. Even people who, in their rational moments, did not believe in it felt guilty about that fact. Capitalism—working for one’s own sustenance, seeking to improve one’s material condition, and wishing to keep more of one’s hard-earned money—was a practical decision, but one which required a painful psychological game of cutting oneself off from one’s deep-seated feelings about justice and morality.
Of course the majority of OWS protesters do not seek violence, do not wish to break the law, and do not wish to be filthy. It does not follow that they are similar in any essential way to the Tea Party. It is undoubtedly also true that they are embarrassed by the ugly face of their movement. The distinction represented here, however, is not between Tea Party-like citizens who want their constitutional republic back and leftist radicals who are undermining the cause. The real divide in OWS seems to be the living legacy of the 1960s: the two groups are those who, like my old teachers, believe that communism is the ideal, but disagreeable in practice, and a radical minority who actually want to bring about the revolution.
The former group is indeed peaceful and tidy;
they just happen not to believe in property rights, and to presume that the rich are inherently immoral and ought to be forced to ‘share’ their wealth with the rest of us. In other words, they are anti-capitalist at heart. Any attempt to obfuscate on this point by pointing to the pockets of ‘end the Fed’ sentiment in OWS, should ask why anyone who believes in economic liberty would allow himself to be counted among a crowd identifying itself as “the 99 percent,” meaning ‘the non-rich.’
The argument, which quickly became stock among Republicans, that the respectable OWS types should be protesting against Washington rather than Wall Street, is well-intentioned but misguided. It presumes that what OWS is against is crony capitalism, i.e. the marriage of government and corporations. No—that’s a Tea Party concern. OWS is not interested in the government angle at all. They are against corporations as such. It is so-called “greed” that they despise, not political favors. In other words, their beef is with capitalism, not government.
The Tea Party represents the modern incarnation of the Spirit of 1776. Occupy Wall Street represents the modern incarnation of the Spirit of 1967. The divide is clear and fundamental. Attempts to mollify the OWS ‘moderates’ with Tea Party comparisons display a serious loss of historical perspective.
