American politics is like a seesaw: one movement starts punching the established political wisdom, coming from nowhere, like the Tea Party. The more successful it is, it will engender a counter-punch hitting in the opposite direction.
The Tea Party has been an astonishing success. Eighty seven new congressmen strangled Washington during the past year, seeming to enjoy its success in paralyzing the traditional compromise politics in the city. But the continued defense of ‘the rich’ and all their privileges, like ever-declining tax brackets and ever-higher incomes, brought the sudden emergence of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, leaderless and focused but snowballing through America and now building momentum in Europe.
This is not a new phenomenon. Every successful movement in American history has started with a grievance, and if it gained traction it became organized, led, and focused. The biggest example is the random opposition to slavery in the early 19th century; it led to the Civil War, the biggest war of history to that date, counting battlefield casualties.
The Tea Party was financed by the same bankers and financiers whose sleazy standards this past decade netted them billions, even payoffs from the US government in the bailout of 2009 that saved the banking system from collapse. There was a brief movement to force the government to prevent huge bonuses to those same financiers, but it was contractually committed, and Barrack Obama finessed that one, as self- defeating at the time. We do notice little changes, though: sliding a debit card abroad no longer costs me $14 at my American bank: it’s down to an almost reasonable few dollars.
Now some of the 9% of the unemployed, the slowest to recover of the victims of the 2008 housing bubble collapse, helped along by long-established left-leaning organizations, have sprung up in New York virtually to occupy Wall Street and now areas near the centers of power in Washington itself.
It’s all too easy to understand. One of us just returned from a seven-city book launch in America, and one could drive for dozens of kilometers along well-groomed highways and roads, past super malls stretching out for several kilometers (one drives between stores!), and houses of the affluent with several expensive cars in each driveway. But it was hard to avoid the stretches of what counts for slums there (not bad by poor-country standards) and see in one’s own eyes the vast gap between those enriched by last decade’s tax cuts for the rich and the declining incomes for everyone else.
‘Occupy Wall Street’ may just convince the neophyte congressmen of the Tea Party that there’s a better objective than paralyzing government and preventing any solutions to the nation’s huge problems, in getting a workable health system going, cutting the deficit, and saving the dollar as a world currency. They won’t look good in history if they succeed in ruining all three. If ‘OWS’ counter-punches hard enough the Tea Party might rethink its objectives and start working constructively with the administration. If they don’t, OWS will just grow and flourish. They have much bigger numbers to draw on and it could get nasty. It will be a few more months before we can tell. But let’s watch it closely.