One Way Forward (2 page)

Whether a revolution or not, the Tea Party is certainly a powerful new force in American politics today. In their new book
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson estimate that there are “about 200,000 U.S. adults who are on the rolls of active local Tea Parties.”
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That large number reflects the party’s strong national support: “From late 2009 on, about 30% of American adults reported having a generally favorable impression of the Tea Party. Reported support bounced around that same level into 2011.”
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In the 2010 election, the Tea Party accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of the votes cast.
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And that energy continued through the following spring, when the Tea Party Patriots, the Tea Partiers with the strongest grassroots ties,
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gathered in Arizona.

The Phoenix Convention Center is big. That Saturday morning, its main hall was packed. Close to seventeen hundred souls had crossed the country to be there that weekend. The crowd looked just like the demographics the political scientists had described: almost exclusively white, slightly mostly male, and mainly older (than me).
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But there was something in that room that demographers can’t quite quantify: a passion—genuine, powerful, and widespread. And that passion made it impossible to believe that this was something ordinary. It wasn’t. It was an expression of both frustration and hope, by Americans who genuinely feared that something terrible had happened to their country.

No doubt, the Tea Party’s success has come in large part from an endless stream of financial support from billionaires on the Right and a practically endless stream of media support from networks on the Right.
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But those two sources hadn’t engineered the passion that was in that room. As Skocpol and Williamson put it,

Likewise, Glenn Reynolds writes:

The billionaires and media may have fueled it—they may even have made it make sense to try to act upon it—but what I met and watched and came to admire in that Arizona weekend lived far from Glenn Beck’s brain, and was certainly quite independent of the Koch brothers’ checkbooks. I met a passion that might appear every generation or so in America. A passion that demands the attention of its government.

This passion, of course, comes from the Right. Its focus that weekend was fiscal, not social. There were no tirades about gay rights or abortion. The attention was instead upon the budget, the deficit, and “strategies” for “regaining control” of government. There were scores of teach-ins, with experts and not-quite-experts lecturing small groups on everything from free trade (the lecturer I saw was against it) to constitutional history (when that lecturer admitted he didn’t know who Ayn Rand was, I feared violence). The assembled thousands wanted to learn what they needed to know to do something—for the view of everyone in attendance was that this government was out of control and that it would take dramatic action to draw it back.

The issue of the day that day, both in Arizona and across the nation, was the debt ceiling, in particular the pledge of congressmen supported by the Tea Party to vote against raising it. Some of those congressmen were there to defend their view (call that preaching to the choir), and some were there trying to moderate or leaven the view (not terribly successfully) with a recognition of the real costs of brinksmanship. But what became clear, even to this liberal, was that these Tea Partiers were not idiots. They understood the danger in this fiscal flirtation. And like a parent who kicks her drug-addicted child out of the house or the wife who abandons an alcoholic husband, taking just the kids, the car, and her clothes, these Partiers believed these risks were necessary. They believed that a certain insanity was the only way to restore some form of fiscal sanity. This wasn’t my view. I thought (and think) that such brinksmanship is fiscal suicide. But I could see that for the Tea Partiers, this was a tactic, a way to shake the government out of its craziness. Uncle Sam was a drunk and they wanted to take his keys away—even if it meant he’d have to walk home. At night. In the dark, in subzero weather, without a coat. Maybe that, they thought, would teach him to put the bottle away. Because so far nothing else had.

But put aside their particular objective. Look away from what they wanted to do. Look instead at them. Here were almost two thousand citizens. But unlike most citizens, these were citizens the way the Framers imagined citizens to be. They were volunteers, working for the nation. They were not paid by anyone to be there or to do the work they did. They instead had made a personal sacrifice—for some, a very significant personal sacrifice—to travel across the country to work to make this country better. And in that work, they summoned into being the only spirit that has ever changed anything real in this nation. A spirit that has real power, at least if it speaks for all of us, and regardless of whether it speaks for the government.

Eight months after my weekend in Phoenix, I was in New York. My book
Republic, Lost
had been released, and I had just returned to the States from an overseas trip. More than slightly jet-lagged, I climbed on a subway to Zuccotti Park to watch and listen and then participate as the people in that park, with the movement it represented—Occupy Wall Street—mobilized fifteen thousand people to march to City Hall.

The Occupy movement had begun two and a half weeks before, on September 17, 2011 (a.k.a. Constitution Day). Initially proposed in July by the Canadian group Adbusters, the movement was reported on two days later in a YouTube video on a Facebook page. Three days after that, the protest reached critical mass. Wikipedia reports that “by mid-October, Facebook listed 125 Occupy-related pages” and that “roughly one in every 500 hashtags used on Twitter, all around the world, was the movement’s own #OWS.”
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On October 15, “tens of thousands of demonstrators staged rallies in 900 cities around the world, including Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, São Paulo, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, and many more.”

The march that I saw took place ten days before that world march. And its character, of course, differed from that of my weekend in Phoenix. But there was also much that was the same. The people were different—in the main, younger, though there were marchers of every age, from kids through seniors; much more diverse (in race, gender, sexual orientation); with a purpose that was not yet focused.

But like the citizens in Phoenix, many, many of them were there because they too were angry and anxious about where their nation was going. They too were deeply frustrated. They too had come together to express that frustration. And given their views, there was no better place in the world to launch their march than Wall Street.

For thirty-six months after the collapse on Wall Street—a collapse that in turn had triggered an economic collapse across the country and then around the world—these Americans were not happy with how things had been sorted out. Wall Street, along with some of corporate America, had received massive government bailouts—from Congress (more than $700 billion) and from the Fed (more than $9 trillion). Main Street, by comparison, had received pennies. With much of their bailout money, Wall Street had paid itself massive bonuses—literally the largest bonuses paid by any public companies anywhere in the history of capitalism—while continuing to hoard the cash the government had given it and pushing homeowners across the country into foreclosure. Put most simply: We as a nation suffered a massive economic crisis; the government intervened in a massive way; that intervention no doubt helped the economy generally, but it also helped a tiny slice of America most. The 1 percent, as the Occupiers would brilliantly frame the meme, had been saved. The 99 percent continued to suffer.

And when you think about it like that, the movement had a point. Whether intentional or not, whether planned or accidental, there is something outrageous about a safety net for the rich only. This is not the social justice of John Stuart Mill, or even Ronald Reagan. It is the social justice of the
Titanic
: Our economy had hit an iceberg. The first class had their lifeboats made ready by the crew; the rest of us were told to swim.

This recognition has fueled its own passion. The majority of that passion has come from the Left. Some from the Far Left. Some even from the anarchist Left (or Right, depending on how you classify anarchists). But most of the Occupiers call themselves not Democrats (27.3 percent), but independents (70 percent). Their form of protest is different from that of the Tea Partiers. They engage in more civil disobedience, and in mass action. And even though arguably there may have been more crime linked to the Occupiers than to the Tea Partiers (though, as it turned out, nothing as terrifying as the violent threats made on Congressman Tom Perriello’s brother and family, threats made real when someone cut a gas line to the family’s house),
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the public’s support for the Occupiers continues to be just a bit higher than the public’s support for the Tea Partiers. According to a study by the Pew Research Center released December 15, 2011, 44 percent of Americans “support the Occupy Wall Street movement.” They overwhelmingly agree with the concerns raised by the movement, but more disapprove than approve of the tactics used.
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But again, as with the Tea Party, put aside the Occupiers’ particular demands (to the extent that they have any). Look away from what they wanted to do. Look instead at them. For here, again, were thousands of citizens. These, too, were citizens the way the Framers imagined citizens. They, too, were volunteers. They may be younger (average age, thirty-three); they may do less of the stuff that older people do (convene and vote) and more of the stuff that younger people do (march, protest, sleep in tents in parks). But like the Tea Partiers, Occupiers have made a personal sacrifice—for some, a very significant personal sacrifice—to sleep in a park and to work with a wide range of others to demand that this country be better.

Matt Patterson is one of those protesters. Twenty-seven, a native of California who studied political science at UCLA, he moved to Washington in 2011, passed the Foreign Service exam, and now works for a commercial real estate company. Patterson was among the first to show up to the Occupy K Street protests in early October 2011. After work each day, he goes to the camp and stays until 9 or 10
P.M.
Sometimes he sleeps at the camp. When I interviewed him in December 2011, he still had a camp set up.

Patterson became an Occupier as a disillusioned Obama supporter. As he told me, “The mechanisms that we have in place to resolve the problems of society are not functioning.” And as he became part of the Occupy movement, he began to recognize the many “around the country [who were] feeling the same sort of frustration.”

Occupy K Street is different from Occupy Wall Street.
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As Patterson described, we “adopted what they did in some ways, but we also built upon [it] and did things differently.” For example, like Occupy Wall Street, Occupy K Street uses no technical sound amplification when speakers speak, although no D.C. regulation forbids it. It instead uses the “people’s mic,” in which each phrase gets repeated by the audience as a speaker speaks, everyone thus participating in the lecture of one.

But unlike Occupy Wall Street, Occupy K Street didn’t issue a long list of demands. Instead, “we’ve got our declaration,” Patterson explained to me over the phone, and so they plan to “look at our principles and try to start with step one, which is money and politics. … Wall Street is the crux of a lot of problems that we have financially and in society,” and “we just thought it was a really good complement and the next logical step” to make “that logical link to K Street.”

The Occupiers, however, are not an argument. The movement is not a set of demands. At this stage, it is not even really a plan for changing government.

Instead the Occupiers are focused on the project of reviving a democracy. Meckler and Martin said of the Tea Party, “the sleeping giant woke up.”
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The Occupiers are still focused on the waking part of that project—on reminding people, the outsiders, of the power they could still have. It is about the ten million points of lived experience, when a soul has the epiphany that she is also a citizen. Patterson recalled for me one such moment: