Artur Davis: Occupy Wall Street Has Sound & Fury of Tea Party

This time, the fire is rising on the left. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has the sound and the fury, and is matching the size, of the 2009 tea party rallies. OWS is the hard left version of the animus toward elites that is fervent in every sector of the country and there is every reason to think it, or something like it, is about to transform liberalism as much as the tea party has remade conservatism. If you value a politics that can foster consensus and overcome gridlock, this is one more thing that should make you very afraid.

Arguably, the “occupiers” and the tea partiers are the latest flavor of a populism that runs deep in our history. While misunderstood as a conservative phenomenon, populism is actually the ultimate big tent, and has been owned and abused by bullhorns on both sides of the spectrum. In the last hundred years, the populist label has been worn both by southern segregationists who wanted to force a “sharing of the wealth” and garment district leftists who thought industrial unions were too tame. 
To date, populism has tended to peak at a loud but marginal level before it gets co-opted and main-lined. The tea party, however, has broken the trend. Rather than being content with making noise, and owning street blocks, tea partiers have meticulously organized, recruited candidates, cultivated the media, and they are unmistakably bending the curve more than they are being bent: without them, John Boehner might still have his majority, but Barack Obama would also have had his “Grand Bargain”.

Success breeds imitation, and the “occupiers’” presumably have the same out-sized ambitions. The internet and the raised temperature in American life give them all the tools they need to do on the left what the tea partiers have done to politics on the right. If the “occupiers” get their act together, it is not hard to imagine Democratic congressional primaries in 2012 and 2014 that extract pledges to raise taxes and to keep hands entirely off entitlements. The “occupiers” will be aiming to block their share of “grand bargains” too and they will grade politicians with the same moral simplicity and antagonism for compromise favored on the right.

Herein lies the irony. Right-wing populists have demonized Washington as wasteful, bloated, and too dominated by elites to function; left-wing populists routinely demonize Washington as isolated from Main Street, corrupt, and too friendly with private interests to be credible. The result is a government so battered with distrust it can barely serve any public interest. A discredited government can fix neither entitlements nor bridges, and big lifts like reforming immigration or our sub-standard schools are altogether off the table.

The tea partiers don’t mind: to steal a line from Rick Perry, they prefer to make Washington as inconsequential as they possibly can. Their liberal counterparts in revolution, however, have a different outcome in mind. Their ideal is federal power strong enough to restrain markets and redress a grab-bag of grievances from class inequality to bank fees: their agenda is really not occupying Wall Street, it’s energizing government. The problem: they’ve helped beat government up too much for it to be the savior they are waiting for.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena)