Occupational Hazards - Hertzberg/New Yorker - Essay about OWS and the Tea Party

[Mira]

If politics is show business for ugly people (which, by the way, it’s not, not this time, not the ugly-people part anyway, not with a cast of characters as glossy as Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s ghost, and Barack Obama), is Occupy Wall Street the Tea Party for liberal people? Or, at least, for people who generally prefer a Democratic lesser evil to a Republican greater one?

Something Tea Partiers and Occupiers might agree on is that the groups are not like each other. (They certainly don’t look alike.) Yet there’s an irresistible symmetry. Both arose on the political fringe, more or less spontaneously, in response to the financial crisis and its economic consequences. Neither has authoritative leaders or a formal hierarchical structure. Each was originally sparked by a third-tier media outlet, albeit of opposite types—one by a cable business-news reporter’s rant against “losers’ mortgages,” the other by an e-mail blast from an anti-corporate, nonprofit, incongruously slick Canadian magazine. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are both protest movements, not interest groups, and while both are wary, or claim to be, of established political figures and organizations, each welcomes their praise, if not their direction. Both have already earned places in the long, raucous history of ideologically promiscuous American populism. But only one, so far, has earned a place in the history of American government.

From the start, Democratic politicians and their center-left institutional allies watched the Tea Party with, besides fear and loathing, a certain professional envy. After Obama sailed into office on the biggest popular-vote majority in twenty years, Republicans were left treading water. A few months later, the Tea Party came along to pick them up, dry them off, give them a new suit of clothes, and set them on a starboard course to victory in the 2010 midterms. The rescue wasn’t free of charge, of course. The cost, to the country as well as to the sad remnants of moderate Republicanism, has been high. But there’s no denying the potency of whatever it was that the brave new party injected into the scarred veins of the grand old one.


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