Bully!
Something is happening in cities across the nation, emanating from New York City and stretching to the West Coast (and perhaps ultimately around the globe). This event--I don't know whether to refer to it as a movement yet--is being called Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and it seems to be tapping into the same amorphous anger at ill-defined evils that briefly stirred popular sympathy for the Tea Party. But where the Tea Party's rage was leveled at the government, and more specifically at taxes, the metonymy in OWS's moniker fingers their nemesis: the modern day speculators and robber barons, imaginary or not, who escaped culpability for the depth and length of our financial crisis-induced economic malaise.
And whereas the Tea Party was largely a conscious re-branding of partisan, socially conservative Republicanism (and, yes, to some degree a manifestation of nativism and racism inspired by the President's background), OWS at present appears to primarily consist of left-leaning folks who may or may not have any great affinity for the center-left mainstream political party that's beginning to jockey cautiously for their support.
Time will tell if these demonstrations become a full-fledged movement or if they fizzle out and are quickly forgotten. But I want to comment on the irony inherent in this movement coming, at least for the time being, to be viewed as a rival of the Tea Party. The Tea Party's actual agenda was betrayed by its partisan roots but the idea of it--always a fiction, but a good one--was that of spontaneous anger at institutions that have failed us.
It's a fool's errand to attempt to boil down a complex historical event to a single oversimplified causative factor, but I dare suggest that a common stream of sentiment ran through a number of key social and political events in American history, including the event from which the Tea Party allegedly drew inspiration: the Boston Tea Party. The stream I speak of--a small component, to be sure, of what became a mighty torrent; one of many ripples that built a current which swept down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance, as RFK might say--manifested itself then as anger at the East India Company's monopoly on the tea trade.
I don't mean simply an anger at a profitable corporation, but a revulsion at the perversion of a collusion between government and an interest, a corporation--a telltale sign of a government that has lost its way. This is a theme that would return, most notably at the end of the Gilded Age and the dawn of the Progressive Era. Folks across the land tired of watching the wealthy and connected interests taking power that didn't belong to them to further themselves and their industries at the expense of the people. And in their weariness and their indignation and their desperation they did something spectacular.
Fueled by the simple notion that government was the mechanism by which they could reclaim the power that rightfully belonged to them, these people formed a movement that changed the country. They dethroned the party bosses and democratized the electoral process, they demanded that the wealthy pay their fair share, they protected the working man and the consumer. The muckrakers and the trust-busters, the municipal reformers and the suffragettes didn't shrink from government (or shrink government, for that matter), they used it for what progressives understood its purpose to be. It wasn't enough, as the Roaring Twenties and Black Tuesday would reveal, but it remained the most impressive string of victories in a struggle that has characterized American (and, perhaps, human) history until a paralyzed New York Governor rose on a Chicago stage, supporting himself by resting his hands firmly on his lectern, and pledged himself to a New Deal for the American people.
I don't know if the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon is bigger than just the bailouts, the bonuses, and the banks. I don't know if it's the manifestation of that creeping suspicion that our government--never inherently evil or adversarial, as the Tea Party seems to believe, but an institution for whose success eternal vigilance truly is the price--has once again slipped from our grasp and serves new masters. I don't know what OWS is and I suspect its participants don't quite know what it is yet. But the possibility that it's motivated by the same righteous discontent that inspired generations past to protest by destroying the private property of a powerful joint-stock company or to seize the levers of political power and take back their government is too exciting a prospect to let pass unnoticed. Will modern day progressives demonstrate that the term isn't just a response to wariness of the "liberal" label but instead truly invokes real turn-of-the-(last)-century Progressive roots?
Maybe it is time to get mad.
