by Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker
November 7, 2011
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.
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