October 25, 2011--Herding Cats

I admit to being euphoric when it looked as if the Occupy Wall Street "movement" might turn into an actual movement much as the early teabaggers skillfully morphed into the Tea Party. I was hoping that they would form a progressive version, say, the 99 Percent Party, that would push the Democrats to the left.

Yes, there were the tea-crazies in hats festooned with tea bags and decked out in revolutionary garb. And obscenely there were those who represented Obama with a Hitler mustache. But in spite of the liberal media attempting to portray them mockingly as illiterate extremists who would disappear in a few weeks they got their act together, formed a political party--one that in effect took the Republican Party hostage--and had a great deal of success at the polls. In the last congressional election they helped the Republicans storm back into power, electing 80 freshman GOP members to the House and four or five to the Senate.

Moderates such as John McCain and now Orin Hatch cravenly disavowed their own personal histories so they could sell themselves to the Republican-Tea Party base as one of their own. Recall McCain and Hatch spent their careers in the Senate making deals with Ted Kennedy. You would never know that from what they are saying these days about immigration, education, and health care.

What the tea-folks had going for them after their initial success at shouting down Democratic congressmen at their back-home town meetings was a well financed campaign to turn their initially inchoate anger into a well disciplined movement. With the lifting capacity of Fox News' propaganda efforts, the ultra right wing billionaire Koch brothers underwrote Dick Armey and others to create a political party with a simple, chantable agenda that calls for--

A balanced federal budget
Dramatic cuts in government at all levels
A simplified tax system
Reduced taxes
The repeal of "Obamacare"
The end of regulations on the environment and business

All of this, in fact, could be reduced to one slogan--Get Government Off Our Backs.

They Occupy folks, on the other hand, though they have been at it for more than a month, have not coalesced around an agenda. Any agenda. Even one that would not be as simple as the Tea Party's.

If you read the signs they are carrying, if you follow interviews with participants, if you keep track of organized groups who have attempted to join them, and perhaps want to co-opt them, what they are calling for is all over the map.

For as many who are demanding a redistribution of wealth from the top 1 percent to the bottom 99, there are participants who are agitating for the legalization of medical marijuana. For those recent college grads who are there to make it known that there are few jobs for them, there are others pushing for an expansion of animal rights. To match those calling for holding Wall Street criminally responsible for the economic collapse there are some marching in support of more government support for housing for the poor.

A reason why the Tea Party has been so successfully organized is not just that there is big corporate money supporting them. Even if George Soros were to write a check for $100 million to catalyze an Occupy agenda it wouldn't work.

Progressives, Democrats are not susceptible to being organized. Look at the history of the Democratic Party. Someone once said that it's easier to herd cats than to get Democrats to agree on anything.

Conservatives, Republicans, on the other hand, are very disciplined. Get them the talking points and they stay on message. Even if it means making things up or not telling the truth. They are ultimately fundamentalists--many in a religious sense, others around secular issues. And when the religious and secular can be brought together, it is powerful--there can be, will not be any deviation.

Abortion is a case in point of course but so are other cultural and political issues where the secular and religious can be conflated. Much of the "debate" about global warming is as much religious as scientific. The "creation" of the earth and its ultimate disposition are in God's hands. Not man's. So the scientific evidence is disavowed, ruled non-discussable. It is all subsumed by belief, not thought.

Down on Wall Street, on the other hand, everything is up for grabs. Each person's idea and issue (often it is a single idea or issue), though it too can be belief-based, is as important as any other and emerges from personal feelings as opposed to a mandate.

At a time when the most powerful political ideas must be reducible to bumper stickers, the Tea Party wins.