By Palash R. Ghosh: Subscribe to Palash's RSS feed
October 27, 2011 2:26 PM EDT
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has been gaining momentum over the past month as its anti-capitalist sentiments have found a wider audience not only in this country, but also in Europe, East Asia and other parts of the world.
Amidst stubbornly high unemployment in the U.S., on the heels of the worst recession in seventy years, OWS protesters have lambasted the government’s bailout of the nation’s big banks and the pervasive influence of big-money corporations in the political system.
OWS seems to have supplanted the Tea Party in terms of media coverage – but it occurred to me that these are very similar movements, despite the perceived differences in political orientation.
However, while some have labeled OWS as a “left-wing” version of the Tea Party, it’s not quite that cut-and-dried.
Tea Party darling Sarah Palin said a few months ago: "As long as these big corporations have a good crony capitalist in the White House, they can rely on DC to bail them out until the whole system goes bankrupt, which, I am afraid, is not very far off."
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Palin’s quote could have just as easily come from someone banging bongo drums at New York’s Zuccotti Park.
A Tea Party official named Mark Williams once told Fox News: "This [movement] feels an awful a lot like the 60s or 70s when I was a kid. I mean, you have the same feeling out here that government and nation have parted paths and the people will bring government back to the nation"
That reference to the hippie movement from four decades ago sounds like a direct appeal from OWS.
Similarly, an OWS demonstrator named John Penley recently told Associated Press: “The middle class is a lot worse [off] than when Obama was elected."
Penley’s comments could just as easily come from a Tea Party member.
But is the Tea Party rhetoric really that similar to OWS.
I spoke with a political expert on this subject – Jamie Chandler, a professor of political science at Hunter College in New York City – to get his views.
He believes that while these two groups may have some similarities, they have some vastly different goals and strategies.
“The Tea Party and OWS movements are driven by an innate desire to reform the political system, that is, return it to its Constitutional roots,” he said. “However, while the Tea Party focuses on winning elections to take control of government, OWS wants a presidential commission tasked with ending the influence money in Washington.”
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