What Occupy Wall Street learned from the tea party

The Occupy Wall Street movement, three weeks strong and gaining momentum, reminds us that tea partyers aren’t the only people unhappy with the state of the nation.

The two groups are angry about some of the same things, too, especially the government bailouts for big banks — a similarity that Vice President Biden observed in remarks on Thursday. They’ve taken different tacks for expressing their anger. The Occupiers are camping out in New York’s Financial District, while tea partyers have elected people to fight against government spending and deficits — and against regulations or oversight of businesses, small and big.

It’s not something they’re likely to claim credit for, but members of the tea party cleared the way for protesters on the other side of the political spectrum. The tea party demonstrated that protest works, even when government doesn’t.

Most people take to protest only when they believe it is their best hope for getting what they want. It doesn’t have to be extremely promising, just more likely to work than anything else. Nearly three years into President Obama’s term, the Occupiers have little reason to believe that their government is going to respond to their concerns. Washington seems stalemated, and the protesters’ priorities — addressing economic insecurity and political inequality — aren’t high on the agenda. So they’ve gone to Zuccotti Parkin Lower Manhattan, camped out in front of Los Angeles City Hall and marched in Washington’s Freedom Plaza.

Not very long ago, this is essentially what the tea party was doing. Supporters started to appear at town meetings and rallies in 2009, demanding a more responsive government. Our political institutions, they said, no longer worked the way they were supposed to, and the concerns of regular people were being ignored. The Occupiers agree, although the regular people they represent look a little different.

The tea partyers’ success at the polls, ironically, made it even harder for the government to get anything done, as clearly demonstrated by last summer’s debt-ceiling debacle. The Occupiers watched, and learned.

One lesson was the virtue of audacity. The tea partyers who shouted down members of Congress at town hall meetings during the health-care debate in the summer of 2009 got massive media attention and built a national movement. The Occupiers went after the capital of capitalism, Wall Street, promising a long-term encampment and, more generally, to create a movement that would speak for the “99 percent” of Americans whose interests neither Wall Street nor the government is taking seriously.

Less than two months ago in these pages, I wondered where the movement on behalf of those suffering most in this stagnant economy was. I argued that for a powerful protest movement to emerge, large, established progressive organizations and labor unions had to invest heavily in organizing one. The Occupiers have so far shown otherwise.

The call to occupy Wall Street didn’t come from any of those well-funded and experienced groups, but from Adbusters, an activist magazine in Canada, and it was endorsed quickly by the hacktivist collective Anonymous. At first, the turnout in Lower Manhattan was small, far less than the 20,000 that the organizers predicted. Coverage from mainstream media was slight. Yet news spread online through many activist networks, and the protest continued, with dozens of demonstrators sleeping out on rainy nights, holding open a space for broader participation.