These two movements have nothing in common. One is about something. The other is about nothing. The something is economics. The nothing is existential. The economics concerns the 30-year stagnation or decline of real wages. The existential results from the sense that white superiority is in decline.
Total rubbish. If the members of the Tea Party were about deficits and big government, then they should have gone nuts under Bush. No such thing happened. They only went nuts when the president became black. There is nothing more to them than that.As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads and gains attention, it's tempting for many people to dismiss it as a bunch of lefty kooks in much the same way people tried to dismiss the Tea Party as, well, a bunch of right-wing kooks.
Tempting, but mistaken. Listen to Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford University who studies populist movements like these. He places the current uprisings represented by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street alongside the unrest in the Great Depression and the activism of the 19th-Century Populist movement as the most significant economic protests in U.S. history.
By the way, the mainstream media was not in the habit of calling Tea Party types "kooks." Now all of sudden they are kooks. Why? Because the mainstream media is trying to attach the unpopular Tea Party (kooks) on a popular movement with a real agenda. But what really is kooky about denouncing corruption on Wall Street? Did not 2008 happen? There is, however, something really kooky about comparing Obama to Hitler and claiming universal care will come with death panels.
