The difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Miami and everywhere else? Fear ... by gimleteye

The Occupy Wall Street'ers around the nation and the world have presented an awkward situation for the Tea Party, now primarily institutionalized as a wing of the GOP. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University Law professor, made an interesting comment on the NPR Diane Rehm show yesterday (carried locally on WLRN): that the Tea Party had started out as a movement to end business as usual and to demand improvement in the operation of government but had quickly dissolved to represent the extremist wing of the GOP that wants to eliminate government, regulations, enforcement altogether.

The Tea Party has not made the leap, at least on the institutional level, to question the role of corporate power and authority. That is the bedrock of the OWS'ers protests. Where the OWS'ers tie politics and elections to the abuse of corporate wealth and authority, the Tea Party is silent. Indeed, billionaires like the Koch Brothers (whose profits depend on lax regulatory authority regarding clean air and clean water) are substantially funding the Tea Party, elected officials and its candidates.

Why? Because they are afraid. "Tea Party voters are more likely to fear change and harbor negative attitudes toward immigrants," reads an August AP report of a 4,500 telephone poll conducted with registered voters in North Carolina and Tennessee and presented to the annual conference of the American Sociological Conference. "Tea Party supporters also overwhelmingly viewed President Obama as "not at all" like them and 66 percent of conservatives who support the tea party movement say he is not a Christian.

While there are plenty of OWS'ers who are protesting the policies of President Obama, there are none to observe hating Obama or fearing him. Fear is a great fault line of any economic upheaval. It is proven time and again throughout history. It has also been one of the great achievements of the radical right that now dominate the GOP: the messages of fear have been carefully cultivated through Fox News and its commentators, as well as the entire panoply of paranoid talk show hosts on radio and TV. Fear pulls ratings and voters.

Occupy Wall Street, Miami and elsewhere grasp that "the only thing to fear is fear itself", the words of FDR during the depth of the Depression. It took the Second World War to ignite the US economy, but we are far past that now: our economy is already exhausted by the costs of wars on multiple fronts. We should not be afraid to confront the costs of Reconstruction.