OWS and the TEA Party ar probably closer cousins than either side would really care to admit. Talk of “crony capitalism” is, after all, not that far off from decrying the Wall St. oligarchy. Too much power does indeed rest in the hands of a relative few, and massive wealth generally determines who that few are.
Where the two groups diverge is on how to address the problem. OWS wants more government in an effort to control and punish “the 1%” and to redistribute their wealth. (Two fundamental flaws in this approach, by the way: 1) it ignores the fact the the government is intertwined with the wealthy interests, and by no means is interested in harming its buddies, and 2) even if they were able to do as they wish, they become more dependent on “the 1%” than they already claim to be, as a parasite depends on its host.)
The TEA Party, on the other hand, recognizes that the government making policy to specifically affect their friends and allies is a major part of the problem. They want a smaller government that gets out of the business of picking winners and losers.
Thoughtful post, kevkrom. May I add that I think the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the tea party is the fact that there is no central leader or organization that determines the platform? It’s a huge strength because the leftists have never been able to target and destroy s central leader. However, all these tea party groups that formed in 2009-2010 have diverged in their goals, and at least here in my state, groups have fractured because of internal disagreements and personality conflicts. One friend likens running a tea party group to “herding cats”, because tea party activists tend to all be leaders. Several of the original tea party folks I trained with in DC have just called it quits.
Another poster had a negative comment about the Tea Party Patriots, so there is disagreement even here on who lives up to the ideal tea party model.
My original point was that I had received some blowback on a tea party FB page for planning a conservative event. The administrator told me she was shocked by the comments, and even deleted some as being too crazy. She assured me that these people had followed her site for years. The general tone of the negative comments (which were a small, but vocal minority) seemed to center around the notion that an event like this was only for the “rich” and therefore not anything a decent tea partier would have anything to do with. Considering the fact that I got the cruise idea from some tea party leaders, I can only conclude that there are people out there who have been active in tea parties, but harbor some sympathy to class warfare. They felt perfectly comfortable making remarks designed to make conservatives ashamed of having the audacity to combine a vacation with a conference.
I strongly support the tea party ideal, and part of that is I don’t say things like, Good luck with that expensive CPAC where all those rich people and Conservative leaders could be taken out with a drone! or, People like you are just trying to get rich off the poor with this event.
For Heaven’s sake, no matter what event I volunteer to help with, there’s always someone who gripes about the cost, and it’s usually because they don’t know the financial details.
At our state CPAC 2 years ago, we charged $50 for a great daylong event-but some people complained bitterly, thinking that because it took place in a church, the organizers must have profited. Well, like most tea party events, it actually lost money, but the bills were picked up by a generous benefactor.
I guess my point his that you’re always going to get people who disagree, or who don’t have all the facts, or who make wild assumptions, but we need to all agree to be careful about shooting down each other’s events and ideas. We should not support class warfare rhetoric. Our biggest challenge is creating a unified front so the lefties can’t divide us further.
If we could only learn to say, I don’t agree with everyone on the details, but we all agree that #1 Government is too big, Freedom is too small, and we need to balance the budget. And refuse to engage in political conversations about abortion, gay marriage or any other issues by referring back to #1