UNIVERZITA KARLOVA V PRAZE FAKULTA SOCIÁLNÍCH VĚD Institut mezinárodních studií
Ádám Hushegyi
The Evolution and Political Impact of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street during Barack Obama’s Presidency
Diplomová práce
Praha 2017
Autor práce: Ádám Hushegyi Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Jana Sehnálková
Rok obhajoby: 2017
Bibliografický záznam
HUSHEGYI, Ádám. The Evolution and Political Impact of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street during Barack Obama’s Presidency. Praha, 2017. 100 s. Diplomová práce (Mgr.) Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd, Institut mezinárodních studií. Katedra severoamerických studií. Vedoucí diplomové práce Mgr. Jana Sehnálková.
Abstrakt
Administrativa Baracka Obamy zdědila jednu z nejzávažnějších hospodářských krizí v dějinách Spojených států, která v očích mnoha občanů podkopala naděje v stabilní ekonomickou a politickou budoucnost země. Klesající důvěra ve federální vládu a v její kroky v reakci na ekonomickou recesi vedly k vzestupu dvou populistických hnutí, Tea Party a Occupy Wall Street. Obě hnutí získala přízeň veřejnosti díky své populistické rétorice, která odsuzovala politickou a finanční elitu společnosti a volala po navrácení osudu země do rukou obyčejných občanů. Diplomová práce přináší analýzu Occupy Wall Street a Tea Party. V práci zkoumám ideologii a cíle těchto hnutí, a zdůrazňuji ty nejzásadnější podobnosti a odlišnosti mezi nimi. V práci se vyjadřuji ve prospěch interpretace Tea Party a Occupy Wall Street jako dvou rozdílných typů populismu, přičemž vyzdvihuji také odlišnou míru podpory, kterou tato hnutí obdržela během jejich formace od různých zájmových skupin. V diplomové práci rovněž usiluji posoudit, jaký politický vliv Occupy Wall Street a Tea Party nabyla v průběhu prezidentství Baracka Obamy, k čemuž slouží analýza jejich integrace do amerického politického establishmentu, včetně zkoumání dopadu tohoto procesu.
Abstract Barack Obama’s administration inherited one of the most severe economic crises in the history of the United States, which severely undermined the American public’s confidence in the country’s political and economic future. Declining trust in the federal government and its handling of the economic recession gave rise to two influential movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which were thoroughly critical of the country’s leadership. Both movements made use of a strong populist rhetoric and mobilized masses by denouncing the political and financial elites, calling for returning control over the country’s fate into the hands of ordinary citizens. My master’s thesis is an analysis of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street that focuses on the ideology and goals that drove these popular movements, as well as highlights the most crucial commonalities and differences between them. I argue in favor of interpreting the ideologies behind the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as two distinct types of populism, in addition to which I emphasize the different degree of outside support the two movements enjoyed during their rise to prominence. To determine how influential the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street became during Barack Obama’s presidency, I also study their relationship with the political establishment and review to what extent these two movements managed to integrate themselves into the United States’ bipartisan political system, as well as the impact of this process.
Klíčová slova volby, americká politická kultura, demokraté, republikáni, lidová hnutí, Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, populismus
Keywords elections, american political culture, Republicans, Democrats, grassroots movements, Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, populism
Rozsah práce: 166 728 znaků s mezerami (včetně seznamu literatury) Length of work: 166 728 characters with spaces (including bibliography)
Prohlášení
1. Prohlašuji, že jsem předkládanou práci zpracoval samostatně a použil jen uvedené prameny a literaturu. 2. Prohlašuji, že práce nebyla využita k získání jiného titulu. 3. Souhlasím s tím, aby práce byla zpřístupněna pro studijní a výzkumné účely.
Declaration of Authorship
1. I hereby certify that the thesis I am submitting is entirely my own original work except where otherwise indicated. 2. I certify that this work was not used to obtain another degree. 3. I consent to my work being used for the purpose of study and research.
V Praze dne 30.7.2017 Ádám Hushegyi
Acknowledgement I would like to thank Mgr. Jana Sehnálková for her prompt and concise feedback, as well as for her aid throughout the process of developing my diploma thesis. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Natalie Cimalová and Kristýna Veitová for proofreading the Czech passages of this work. Last but not least, I also owe thanks to my family and loved ones for their unrelenting support throughout my studies. Köszönöm a türelmet és támogatást!
1
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...... 2
METHODOLOGY AND LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 5
1. THE TEA PARTY: TAKING THE COUNTRY BACK ...... 8
1.1 LIBERTARIAN ORIGINS ...... 8 1.2 SHIFTING FOCUS AND THE EROSION OF INDEPENDENCE ...... 9 1.3 MEDIA AND THE COMMON ENEMY ...... 12 1.4 STATUS ANXIETY AS A DRIVING FORCE ...... 14 2. OCCUPY WALL STREET: THE ANGER OF THE 99 PERCENT ...... 18
2.1 BELATED RAGE ON WALL STREET ...... 18 2.2 GLOBAL ORIGINS ...... 21 2.3 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT’S POPULARITY ...... 23 2.4 A LEADERLESS TWITTER MOVEMENT ...... 26 3. TWO MOVEMENTS: DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SAME COIN? ...... 29
3.1 A TALE OF TWO POPULISMS ...... 29 3.2 SCRAMBLE FOR AUTHENTICITY ...... 34 4. THE DAY AFTER: POLITICAL IMPACT AND INTEGRATION ...... 40
4.1 TOWARDS ESTABLISHMENT POLITICS ...... 40 4.2 THE TEA PARTY AS A CONGRESSIONAL FORCE ...... 46 4.3 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2012: THE LIMITS OF THE TEA PARTY’S APPEAL ...... 52 4.4 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2016: THE YEAR OF POPULISM ...... 55 CONCLUSION ...... 63
SOUHRN ...... 67
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 69
2
Introduction
Following his successful presidential campaign that mobilized record numbers of African Americans and young voters, Barack Obama envisioned a political landscape where he could transcend party lines and conduct his presidency by embracing centrist politics and inspiring bipartisan consensus.1 The new administration, however, inherited a herculean challenge in the form of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which unleashed a wave of discontent among the American public, casting a grim light on the hopes of national unity.2 The Great Recession and the Obama administration’s attempts to mitigate its effects sent ripples across the United States, galvanizing groups both on the left and the right of the political spectrum that began to voice their dissatisfaction with Washington’s policies.
The Obama administration and Democrat-led Congress came under heavy criticism from conservatives for adding to the federal deficit and expanding social welfare benefits with the 2009 stimulus package,3 whereas the government’s limited mortgage relief program was accused of being a straightforward giveaway to financially irresponsible citizens.4 At the same time, progressive and liberal pundits scrutinized Washington’s leadership for not devising a more ambitious recovery bill,5 particularly for Americans who were facing foreclosures as a result of the housing market crash.6 Coupled with a lack of confidence in economic recovery, backlash from across the political spectrum created a climate ripe for public dissent.7
The two most prominent movements that emerged from this discontent were the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, both of which provided an outlet for the rage and
1 Sidney M. Milkis, Jesse H. Rhodes, and Emily J. Charnock, “What Happened to Post-Partisanship? Barack Obama and the New American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (2012), 57-58. 2 Tekla Ali Johnson, Pearl K. Ford Dowe, and Michael K. Fauntroy, “One America? President Obama's Non-Racial State,” Race, Gender & Class 18, no. 3/4 (2011), 141-142. 3 Robert P. Watson et al., The Obama Presidency: A Preliminary Assessment (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012), 94. 4 Gary Dorrien, The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 5. 5 Holly Dolezalek, Global Financial Crisis (North Mankato, MN: ABSO Publishing, 2012), 75. 6 Andrew J. Dowdle et al., The Obama Presidency: Change and Continuity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 194. 7 Theda Skocpol, Obama and America’s Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 87.
3 discontent that many citizens felt in the wake of the Great Recession.8 Taking advantage of traditional populist rhetoric, these grassroots movements sought to mobilize “the people” against the “elites,” who were cast as their greedy and undemocratic opponents responsible for the ongoing crisis.9 The narrative of what led to the United States’ downward spiral, however, differed significantly between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, just as the ideology, supporter base, and political background of these movements.
In my diploma thesis, I examine and contrast the development, ideology, and prospective goals of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, in addition to which I analyze to what extent these movements managed to make an impact on the United States’ political establishment. I claim that despite sharing numerous similarities, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street ultimately arrived at substantially different conclusions who the victims and oppressors were in their populist narratives. I devote a considerable portion of my work to the individual analysis of the movements and to their subsequent comparison, arguing that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street cannot be characterized as equally grassroots in their nature. In the latter part of my diploma thesis, I examine to what degree the movements managed to integrate themselves into the political establishment during Barack Obama’s time in office and what effect they had on the United States’ political scene. I conclude that the Tea Party was highly successful in producing short-term electoral gains due to its alliance with the Republican Party (also referred to as the Grand Old Party, GOP), but the movement also triggered significant internal tension among Republicans. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, established itself as a social rather than political force, one that lacked a concrete agenda, but developed a powerful class warfare rhetoric that could be leveraged in electoral politics.
In the opening chapters, I analyze the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as individual movements and strive to give a comprehensive overview of their origins, ideological driving force, and rise to prominence. Chapter 1 is concerned with the Tea Party’s emergence and details the movement’s evolvement from a small libertarian fundraising network into a major conservative political force. Special attention is paid to
8 George L. Amedee, “Movements Left and Right: Tea Party and Occupied Wall Street in the Obama Era,” Race, Gender & Class 20, no. 3/4 (2013), 34-36. 9 Cas Mudde & Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 25-27.
4 the racial implications of the Tea Party’s fierce opposition to President Barack Obama and his policies, as well as to the role the conservative media played in the movement’s rise to popularity. I also question whether it is appropriate to describe the movement as a grassroots endeavor and call attention to the Tea Party’s connection to various long- established conservative organizations.
Chapter 2 opens with a look at the development of Occupy Wall Street, where I provide a brief timeline detailing the protest movement’s rise to popularity and its eventual dissipation. Just as in the case of the Tea Party, I focus on the ideological driving force behind the movement and pay special attention to what platforms were used to help Occupy Wall Street reach a wider audience. I also emphasize the movement’s international origins and detail how its powerful rhetoric revolving around class warfare resonated with the American public despite Occupy’s inability to voice concrete demands.
Chapter 3 is devoted to the direct comparison of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I acknowledge that there is some validity in drawing parallels between the populist nature of the movements; however, I strongly argue against making a more substantial connection between them. My analysis reaches the conclusion that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were never compatible in terms of their ideology, constituency, or political backing and makes a case for considering Occupy more apt to be described as a grassroots movement than the Tea Party.
In the last chapter of my thesis, I discuss political integration as a way for populist movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to sustain themselves, which necessitates merging with the political mainstream. The congressional and presidential elections between 2010 and 2016 are used as case studies to ascertain to what extent the two movements succeeded at integrating themselves into the American bipartisan system and what benefits and challenges this process brought. I highlight that the conservative movement’s alliance with the Grand Old Party contributed to Republicans regaining control over Congress, but also to growing fissures within the party. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is analyzed as a movement that never coalesced into a political force, but it did manage to develop and popularize a class warfare rhetoric that populist candidates could use to their advantage.
5
Methodology and Literature Review
In my diploma thesis, I am aiming to deliver a comprehensive overview and comparison of two distinct populist movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. In my effort to achieve the most holistic understanding of these movements, I systematically combine and analyze a broad array of sources and data, including academic publications, surveys, press releases, demographic studies, as well as interviews and debate excerpts. As the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are relatively recent phenomena, these movements are still subject to ongoing research and the volume of academic literature on them is somewhat limited. For this reason, I also turn to various news outlets that have published reports and their own analyses of the movements in the past years. I use these sources in piecing together the narratives of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in cases when they provide details missing from academic publications, or in case they are directly referenced by the secondary sources. When the topic merits it, I also turn to the works of such academics as American sociologist Herbert Blumer, historian Michael Kazin, and philosopher Slavoj Žižek for a theoretical framework to analyze the social and ideological components of the two movements.
The Tea Party is most frequently discussed by academics and cultural commentators in the context of its relationship with the Republican Party. In recent years, several insightful publications appeared on the populist movement’s effects on the Grand Old Party, including E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong (2016)10 and The Tea Party Explained (2013) penned by Yuri Maltsev and Roman Skaskiw.11 These publications delve into the far-reaching history of conservatism in U.S. politics and they were exceedingly helpful to my work due to their detailed account of the Tea Party movement’s frequently-overlooked early days. Other works, such as The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2014) by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson,12 proved invaluable in fostering my understanding of the symbiotic
10 E.J. Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 11 Yuri N. Maltsev & Roman Skaskiw, The Tea Party Explained: From Crisis to Crusade (Chicago: Open Court, 2013). 12 Theda Skocpol & Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
6 relationship between the populist movement and conservative media outlets, as well as the Tea Party’s underlying racial bias.
In the case of Occupy Wall Street, the volume of quality publications appears to be more limited, as many well-written accounts of the popular protests, such as Sarah Van Gelder’s This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (2011)13 or Nicholas Smaligo’s The Occupy Movement Explained (2014),14 tend to be exceedingly supportive of the movement. I attempted to use such publications as sources only when framing the movement’s rhetoric and driving force, not in my assessment of Occupy’s accomplishments (or a lack thereof). It is important to note, however, that there are a handful of more balanced and highly informative works available on the movement’s use of social media, most notably Paolo Gerbaudo’s Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (2012),15 which I reference several times in my work.
A number of news outlets, such as The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Politico, and The Washington Post have published detailed reports and editorials on the development and evolution of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street throughout the past years. These writings have been useful to my work in helping to keep track of the growing political influence of the movements (mainly in the Tea Party’s case), particularly in the context of congressional politics and presidential elections, which my diploma thesis also touches on. Last but not least, I have also drawn from more theoretical works, such as John B. Judis’ excellent analysis of modern populism in The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (2016)16 that provided me with a theoretical framework for explaining the fundamental differences between the populist narratives of the Tea Party and Occupy movement. I also refer to Herbert Blumer’s “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position” (1958)17 in my analysis of the Tea Party’s racially-charged rhetoric, and I use
13 Sarah Van Gelder (ed.), This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2011). 14 Nicholas Smaligo, The Occupy Movement Explained: from Corporate Control to Democracy (Chicago: Open Court, 2014). 15 Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 16 John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016), ebook. 17 Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” The Pacific Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. (Spring, 1958).
7
Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Occupy Wall Street when discussing the political integration of the two movements.18
18 Slavoj Žižek, “Occupy Wall Street: What is To Be Done Next?” The Guardian (April 24, 2012)
8
1. The Tea Party: Taking the Country Back
“I believe that Americans are genetically opposed to big government. They won’t accept it and they have been joining with their fellow citizens in the streets to take America back.” Give Us Liberty: The Tea Party Manifesto19
1.1 Libertarian Origins
The Tea Party rose to prominence during Barack Obama’s presidency as a powerful platform of conservative activism; however, the roots of the movement date back to George W. Bush’s administration. The immediate groundwork for the Tea Party was laid by supporters of former Texas Representative Ron Paul as early as in 2007, in an attempt to garner support for the libertarian candidate in the GOP presidential primaries.20 Ron Paul’s non-interventionism and staunch opposition to long-established government programs made him a fringe candidate among conservatives; nevertheless, the former Representative voiced many of the frustrations that voters felt with George W. Bush’s presidency.21
In addition to criticizing the increasingly expensive and seemingly unending military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, Paul pointed out that Bush had failed conservatives with his inability to curtail the expansion of government. The fiscal years 2001 through 2007 saw an average increase of 4 % in government spending and a growing federal budget that reached nearly 3 trillion dollars by the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.22 A large portion of this increase was due to military engagement in the Middle East after 9/11, but Bush also expanded the government by supporting the No Child Left Behind Act that increased federal oversight of standardized school testing across the U.S. and he signed Medicaid Part D, which subsidized the cost of
19 Dick Armey & Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: The Tea Party Manifesto (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 4. 20 Nella Van Dyke & David S. Meyer, Understanding the Tea Party Movement (Brookfield: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 105. 21 Ronald T. Libby, Purging the Republican Party: Tea Party Campaigns and Elections (London: Lexington Books, 2014), 31. 22 Maltsev & Skaskiw, The Tea Party Explained, 41.
9 prescription drugs for the program’s beneficiaries.23 Although most right-leaning outlets defended his administration and Bush enjoyed the support of neoconservatives and religious conservatives throughout his presidency, his “big government” agenda gradually galvanized dissent on the grassroots level.24
During his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Ron Paul inspired numerous conservative activists to form grassroots movements across the United States and establish political networks for fundraising and cultivating the ideology of small government and fiscal conservatism.25 One of the first major grassroots meetings of Ron Paul supporters took place on December 16, 2007, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.26 The gathering inspired a string of similar events calling for the support of the libertarian candidate, frequently without any coordination with Paul’s official campaign. Albeit unsuccessful, the “Ron Paul Revolution” proved that conservatives could mobilize and raise money independent of Washington-based juggernaut organizations such as the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, thus creating a structure and strategy for future grassroots activism.27 The successful initiative soon attracted a broader scope of voters; however, the increasing participation of evangelicals and defense hawks in conservative grassroots movements also meant that the importance of Ron Paul’s libertarian agenda began to fade.28
1.2 Shifting Focus and the Erosion of Independence
The boom in conservative activism after 2008 and its change in tone was fueled by the financial crisis that hit the United States at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. The amount of bankruptcies and foreclosures stemming from the subprime mortgage crisis resulted in the passage of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which granted the Secretary of the Treasury up to $700 billion and the ability
23 Raymond Tatalovich et al., The Presidency and Political Science: Paradigms of Presidential Power from the Founding to the Present (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2014), 200. 24 Maltsev & Skaskiw, The Tea Party Explained, 42-43. 25 George Dance, Ron Paul and His Revolution (Toronto, Canada: Principled Press, 2011), 24. 26 The December 16 grassroots-fundraising event became known as “the moneybomb” moment of Ron Paul’s campaign, raising $6.1 million in one day. The model was frequently revisited in subsequent election periods (by Ron Paul himself during the 2012 campaign), usually tied to historical events that enhanced the fundraisers’ appeal. See William J. Miller, The 2012 Nomination and the Future of the Republican Party: the Internal Battle (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 189. 27 Maltsev & Skaskiw, The Tea Party Explained, 47. 28 Elspeth Reeve, “Why Doesn’t the Tea Party Love Ron Paul?” The Atlantic (Dec 19, 2011)
10 to purchase assets owned by financial institutions.29 Following Barack Obama’s inauguration, Congress also enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus package (ARRA), which allocated $787 billion to be invested into federal programs in hopes of speeding economic recovery,30 and subsequently approved the limited mortgage relief program Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.31 Many conservatives took a hostile stance towards these initiatives, interpreting them as bailouts and subsidies for “losers’ mortgages,” which prompted commentators such as CNBC’s Rick Santelli to call on the “capitalists” of the nation to organize in protest against what they saw as Washington’s endorsement of financial irresponsibility among citizens.32
Some of the initial Tea Party protests were still organized around the conservative criticism of President George W. Bush’s overspending; however, it did not take long for the movement to start focusing on Bush’s successor.33 After the first wave of demonstrations in February 2009, conservative activists increased their efforts on the local level and by April, Tea Party supporters were able to launch nation-wide Tax Day protests,34 which were followed by September’s Taxpayer March on Washington that saw tens of thousands of Tea Party supporters voice their criticism of the ARRA stimulus in front of the Capitol.35 Since the basis for the Tea Party was formed by loosely interrelated networks that assembled at the initiative of local and regional organizers, the movement benefited from an early romantic portrayal of a spontaneous citizens’ protest group, claiming the title of the “official grassroots American movement.”36
29 Baird Webel, “Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP): Implementation and Status,” Congressional Research Service (June 27, 2013)
11
While grassroots activism played a significant role in mobilizing the supporters of the Tea Party, there are several factors that complicate the aforementioned title. The movement’s two main advocacy groups, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots, are closely linked to FreedomWorks, a multi-million dollar conservative non-profit organization that was the primary source of funding for national Tea Party rallies.37 In addition to FreedomWorks, a number of other pro-business groups and think tanks have aided the movement’s rise, including Americans for Prosperity, as well as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, all of which have received funding from a circle of conservative businessmen,38 including the Koch brothers.39 The involvement of these conservative groups complicates the narrative of the Tea Party’s independence, since most of them have been involved in building third-party movements as far back as the 1980s. The goal of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity was, for instance, to create grassroots resistance against excessive taxes on tobacco products from 1984 throughout the early-2000s, and the organization even launched a website titled Tea Party in 2002 that called for a reworking of the United States’ tax system.40
Due to such connections, critics of the Tea Party have frequently described the movement as “Astroturf” rather than grassroots, claiming that it benefited from the resources, direction, and standardized messages of established conservative leaders and organizations.41 Congressional Democrat and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi famously described the Tea Party as being run by “by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class,”42 in addition to accusing the conservative establishment of “hijacking the good
37 Jason Hackworth, Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 5. 38 Williamson et al., “The Tea Party,” 28. 39 Charles and David Koch own one of the largest privately-held companies in the United States, the Koch Industries. With an estimated worth of $44 billion, the brothers have repeatedly been ranked among the 10 richest people in the world and have a long history of supporting organizations advancing socially conservative and free market-oriented principles. Most notably, the Koch brothers co-founded the Washington DC-based Cato Institute, one of the lagerst libertarian think thanks in the U.S. See Michael C. LeMay, The American Political Party System: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO, 2017), 216-218. 40 Amanda Fallin et al. “To Quarterback Behind the Scenes, Third-party Efforts: the Tobacco Industry and the Tea Party.” Tobacco Control (2014)
12 intentions of lots of people [in the Tea Party] who share some of our concerns that we have about the role of special interests.”43 Tea Party organizers such as Ohio-based marketing and advertising specialist John M. O’Hara have opposed claims of “Astroturfing,” but did not deny the involvement of major conservative organizations in the Tea Party. Instead, O’Hara claimed that the goal of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity was “to facilitate genuine grassroots movements” but added that neither organization had “a history of paying people to protest.”44 Denials of “Astroturfing,” however, remain problematic due to reports that have linked FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity to major financial donors already in 2009, as the Tea Party protests against the Affordable Care Act that they helped co-organize were underway.45
1.3 Media and the Common Enemy
The Tea Party may have enjoyed the aid of well-established organizations from its early days, yet it was the U.S. media that proved to be the movement’s greatest ally in the long run. The Tea Party became arguably one of the greatest beneficiaries of the transforming U.S. media landscape, which since the late-1990s had witnessed a skyrocketing popularity of openly-partisan news channels and radio networks.46 The movement was initially boosted by the right-leaning “blogosphere”47 and radio hosts,
13 but it was Fox News that became its greatest community-building platform.48 In addition to providing a disproportionate amount of coverage to the Tea Party, the United States’ most popular cable news network directly linked its brand name to the movement.49 Fox News took to regularly broadcasting Tea Party protests live and some of its top hosts, including Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck, openly encouraged viewers to partake in upcoming Tea Party events that were outlined on the channel's website.50
Through its ardent support and unrelenting coverage, Fox News managed to seamlessly integrate the Tea Party into its narrative critical of the federal government.51 Conservative media generated a feedback loop by giving heightened attention to protests organized by Tea Party activists, which encouraged further dissent and led to even more opportunities for coverage. This cycle not only created echo chambers reaffirming the beliefs of conservative viewers but also cast other media outlets as suspect, since many conservatives came to view the lack of Tea Party coverage in the mainstream media as a sign of bias.52 The extent to which Tea Party followers relied on Fox News was mirrored by a 2010 national poll that found that 63 % of Tea Party backers belonged among the channel’s viewers and only 11 % of the movement’s supporters reported getting their news from other major networks instead (ABC, CBS, NBC).53
The cornerstone of the close relationship between conservative media outlets and the Tea Party was their shared opposition to the Obama administration’s policies and to the president himself. The prevailing narrative of the movement cast them as victims of the Obama administration’s schemes. Tea Party supporters frequently defined themselves as being caught between “undeserving” welfare classes and liberal elites who were attempting to impose their cultural snobbery on the country.54 The Obama such as Breitbart and the Drudge Report have become so popular that they started functioning as regular news aggregation websites, despite lacking the aforementioned standards. See Roger Chapman & James Ciment, “Blogs and Blogosphere,” in Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices (Routledge, 2015), Ebook. 48 Glenn W. Richardson, Social Media and Politics: A New Way to Participate in the Political Process (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 174. 49 Skocpol & Williamson, The Tea Party, 134-135. 50 Ari Rabin-Havt, David Brock, The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network Into a Propaganda Machine (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 108. 51 David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: the Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 136. 52 Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong, 299. 53 Skocpol & Williamson, The Tea Party, Ibid. 54 Robert Britt Horwitz, America's Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), Ebook.
14 administration’s goals to expand the welfare state were, therefore, often decried as the elite’s attempts to aid the undeserving at the expense of hard-working Americans.55 These concerns were, however, more ideologically motivated than reflected by the financial or social standing of Tea Party followers. According to a 2010 CBS/New York Times demographic survey, the majority of Tea Party supporters were better educated, older, and wealthier than average Americans, and reported low levels of economic hardship even in the aftermath of the Great Recession.56
1.4 Status Anxiety as a Driving Force
While the division of the United States into deserving and undeserving segments resonated strongly with the Tea Party’s base of supporters, there were some inherent contradictions in the movement’s opposition towards the American welfare state. A large number of Tea Party supporters were themselves beneficiaries of government-run healthcare programs and when polled, roughly 70% of them ardently opposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, even if it would have led to a decreased federal budget deficit.57 The seeming paradox of benefiting from the welfare state but opposing its expansion suggests that the degree of hostility the Tea Party supporters felt towards the “unworthy” was rooted in more than concerns about deficits and the cost of social welfare programs.58
Most of the Tea Party’s arguments revolving around the deserving and undeserving members of society inherently touch on the issues of race. While Tea Party organizers have been careful not to become associated with right-wing hate groups from the movement’s early days, many of the sentiments that resonated with their supporters still indicated that racial issues played a large, albeit implicit role in the Tea Party ideology.59 The most problematic and racially-charged aspect of dividing society into
55 Anthony DiMaggio, The Rise of the Tea Party: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 154. 56 Kate Zernike & Megan Thee-Brenan, “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated,” New York Times (April 14, 2010)
15 worthy and unworthy segments was in the ethnic background of those who tended to fall into these categories. Racial minorities, illegal immigrants and younger generations were frequently cited as belonging among unproductive members of society who relied on government handouts.60 Unlike these groups, polls have shown that Tea Party members tended to be far less varied, with males comprising 60 % of the group, 80 % of whom identified themselves as white.61 In addition, 61 % of Tea Party supporters also claimed that discrimination against whites was a prevailing phenomenon under Barack Obama’s presidency.62
Fears of being discriminated against underline status anxiety as an intrinsic characteristic of the Tea Party movement. The oft-repeated slogan of “taking the country back” has made a strong case for interpreting the Tea Party’s relationship to race within the framework of Herbert Blumer’s well-established group position theory.63 Blumer locates the source of competition and hostility among ethnic and cultural groups in “collectively developed judgments about the positions in the social order that in-group members believe they should rightfully occupy relative to members of an out-group.”64 This points to a sense of threat in the social standing of white Americans within the country’s racial status hierarchy, which has become increasingly permeated by ethnic minorities. The paradigm of social status anxiety also provides an explanation to why the persona and liberal agenda of Barack Obama, himself of partially Kenyan origins, would amplify the resistance and anger of many Americans who fell into the Tea Party’s demographic.65
The estrangement that many conservative voters felt towards a black president with a liberal agenda was reflected by a series of claims that labeled Obama’s policies as “America-destroying,” while the president himself was frequently accused of championing a Marxist Muslim ideology.66 The most prevailing attack motivated by the president’s perceived “otherness,” however, came in the form of questioning the
60 Raymond J La Raja, New Directions in American Politics (London: Routledge, 2013), 272. 61 Paul Louis Street & Anthony R. DiMaggio. Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publ., 2011), 51. 62 John Blake, “Are Whites Racially Oppressed?” CNN News (March 4, 2011)
16 legitimacy of his Hawaiian birth certificate. Tea Party supporters comprised a significant portion of the “birthers” who regularly questioned Obama’s American citizenship at public gatherings,67 with rising conservative stars such as Sarah Palin bolstering their claims.68 The issue also received a large amount of attention on Fox News, which left the vast majority of dubious claims regarding Barack Obama’s origins go unchallenged and presented the allegations of the birthers with little critical review.69
In addition to issues stemming from social anxiety and perceptions of race, conservative media cemented the Tea Party’s hostility towards Obama’s political goals as well. Already during his first term in office, the vast majority of Obama’s coverage on Fox News was devoted to questioning the constitutionality of the president’s policy proposals and on downplaying any success that his administration may have achieved.70 Obama appeared in three times as many segments addressing the United States’ deficit and debt as George W. Bush did, despite the detrimental effects of Bush’s sweeping tax cuts and war expenses. The all-time high of negative Obama coverage in March 2010 coincided with the Congressional Budget Office’s review of the Obama administration’s healthcare bill, after which most Fox News reports attempted to downplay the CBO’s positive appraisal of the reform.71
With significant aid from the media, the Tea Party succeeded remarkably at proliferating an unfavorable narrative of Barack Obama’s presidency, associating the Great Recession’s aftermath exclusively with George W. Bush’s successor. The extent to which the Obama administration became the centerpiece of all controversies surrounding the financial crisis was perhaps best reflected by the fact that by 2010, only an estimated 34 % of Americans could correctly identify that the TARP bailout bill was passed during George W. Bush’s and not Obama’s presidency.72 Even as the country
66 Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong, 300-303. 67 Rosenthal & Trost, Steep, 156-157. 68 Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin openly expressed her doubts about Obama’s origins already during the 2008 campaign, where she repeatedly suggested voters were not aware of who the “real” Barack Obama was, feeding into the conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s persona. See Mugambi Jouet, Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 64. 69 Matthew W. Hughey & Gregory Parks, The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 58. 70 Morton Keller, Obama's Time: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 170. 71 Street & DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party, 141. 72 Russell Heimlich, “Was TARP Passed Under Bush or Obama?” Pew Research Center (August 10, 2010)
17 was still recovering from the financial crisis, the Tea Party’s meteoric rise successfully shifted the public debate from the financial sector’s collapse and bailouts towards the issues of budget deficits and to ideological debates surrounding the new president’s policies and agenda.73
The Tea Party provided a voice for Americans who not only resented Barack Obama’s policies but also felt daunted by the changes in American society that his election symbolized. The movement found a powerful and willing ally in openly- partisan media outlets that helped the Tea Party become the main platform of popular opposition against the new president and his agenda.74 While the self-proclaimed title of the “official grassroots American movement” is problematized by the Tea Party’s ties to major conservative organizations such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, this did not stop the movement from exerting a powerful influence on the American political discourse.75 With a series of large-scale protests and a strong media presence, the Tea Party established itself as a conservative authority by the end of 2009, enjoying enough support to become an influential voice in electoral politics.76
73 Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong, 324. 74 Skocpol & Williamson, The Tea Party, 123. 75 Heath Brown, The Tea Party Divided: The Hidden Diversity of a Maturing Movement (Denver, CO: Praeger, 2015), 73. 76 Nella Van Dyke & David S. Meyer, Understanding the Tea Party Movement (Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 91.
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2. Occupy Wall Street: The Anger of the 99 Percent
“The current crisis is not a natural accident; it was caused by the greed of those who would bring the world down, with the help of an economics that is no longer about management of the common good, but has become an ideology at the service of financial power.” Manifesto of the International Occupy Assembly77
2.1 Belated Rage on Wall Street
The Tea Party may have coalesced into a major conservative movement in the wake of the Great Recession, but it left the causes of the financial crisis unaddressed. It was not until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street that the misdeeds of the U.S. financial sector became the principal focus of a popular movement. Although relatively short-lived, the Occupy protests that started at New York’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 spread across and beyond the United States, reinvigorating the discussion about the Great Recession and economic injustice.78
The supporters of Occupy Wall Street were highly critical of the federal government’s bailout of financial institutions in 2008,79 which saved the United States’ banking sector from disintegration but also resulted in numerous bankrupted firms paying enormous bonuses to their employees.80 The movement’s sympathizers condemned the fact that Wall Street bankers reaped the benefits of the bailout, in
77 “The GlobalMay Manifesto’ of the International Occupy Assembly,” The Guardian (May 11, 2012)
19 addition to which only a handful of them faced legal ramifications for their actions.81 Despite the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform of 2010 and the 2009 stimulus package, many Americans felt that Washington was not going far enough in curtailing the influence of banks82 and in alleviating the crisis caused by their misconduct.83 Occupy Wall Street connected these concerns to a larger narrative, in which the Great Recession was a symptom of the ruinous crony-capitalism that had been driving the United States for decades,84 leading to growing debt, wealth inequality, and a decrease in social mobility.85 During its relatively brief existence as a protest movement, Occupy Wall Street embraced the rhetoric of class warfare, but sidestepped the terms “middle class” and “working class,” opting for a more universal slogan instead: “We are the 99 percent.”86
Occupy Wall Street tackled the Great Recession head on; nevertheless, the time that elapsed between the bailouts of financial institutions in 2008 and the occupation of
81 The government brought charges only against 47 bank employees, a significant portion of whom held only junior and mid-level positions. The general lack of legal proceedings against bank employees was attributed to the fact that much of the banks’ conduct during and after the crisis was not deemed illegal, and when illegal activities were proven, they could rarely be traced to upper management. See Jean Eaglesham & Anupreeta Das, “Wall Street Crime: 7 Years, 156 Cases and Few Convictions,” The Wall Street Journal (May 27, 2016)
20 lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 begs the question why a popular uproar against the American financial sector came with such delay. The belated reaction can be at least partially attributed to the weakness of the American Left in general. Since Ronald Regan’s presidency in the 1980s, the tradition of neoliberalism, which merged free-market conservatism with the notion of American exceptionalism, gained enormous momentum and became the dominant political philosophy in Washington.87 Coupled with the long-term decline of trade unions and labor movements in the United States since the end of World War II,88 the growing popularity of free-market conservatism fostered a less tolerant attitude towards such forms of protests as sit-ins, which require “democratic urban spaces” to flourish.89
The prevalence of neoliberalism also appears to be a feasible explanation to why it was the Tea Party that seized the culture of public protest first, since the movement was advancing a free-market ideology coupled with social conservatism.90 Despite the grave consequences of the financial sector’s gamble with subprime mortgages and the subsequent financial meltdown, the Tea Party essentially perpetuated the notion of market fundamentalism and blamed the economic recession on the federal government’s incompetence instead.91 With neoliberalism deeply entrenched in the American political and public discourse, activists seeking to rally against growing wealth inequality in the United States needed an external impetus to join the discussion.
86 Todd A. Comer (ed.), What Comes After Occupy?: The Regional Politics of Resistance (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 174. 87 Rachel S. Turner, Neo-Liberal Ideology: History, Concepts, and Policies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 107 88 Union membership peaked in 1945 but started declining after the passage of such laws as the Taft- Hartley Act of 1947, which began constraining the rights of unions in favor of the employees. Mansel G. Blackford, The Rise of Modern Business: Great Britain, The United States, Germany, Japan, and China (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 196 89 Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets, 105. 90 Richard J. Meagher, “Neoliberal Language Lessons: How Right-wing Power - Along with Free-market Ideas - Shifted from Conservative Christians to the Tea Party,” Political Research Associates (October 30, 2014)
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2.2 Global Origins
Whereas the Tea Party evoked some of the most symbolic events of American history in the movement’s early days, the origins of Occupy Wall Street are decisively ‘un-American’ in many ways. The initial call for citizens to mobilize in protest against the financial sector’s irresponsibility came from Adbusters, a Canadian nonprofit organization and publisher founded in 1989. Spearheaded by editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn, Adbusters had already been involved in several small-scale international campaigns prior to Occupy Wall Street, such as the Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week that were both conceived as a critique of consumerism.92 Inspired by the social- media fuelled uprisings that led to the Arab Spring and the Spanish anti-austerity Indignados,93 Lasn and his colleagues felt that the anger towards Wall Street made “a Tahrir moment in America […] eminently possible.”94
On July 13, 2011 Adbusters put out a rallying call online, addressing “90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there” to rise up on September 17 against “the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”95 The post went on to outline an ambitious protest that would “see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months” and promoted the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallStreet accompanied by the tagline “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?”96
In addition to launching the rallying call online, Adbusters also created the first promotional materials for the movement, the most prominent one being a poster of a ballerina dancing on Wall Street’s Charging Bull statue with rioting crowds in the
92 Jeff Sommer, “The War Against Too Much of Everything,” The New York Times (December 22, 2012)
22 background.97 Lasn later claimed that he considered aesthetics to be one of the most important aspects in launching the movement, envisioning the iconography Occupy Wall Street as a “meme”98 that would transforming into a powerful social message through spreading and replicating in and outside the online space.99 As visually impressive as the material prepared by Adbusters was, Lesn and his colleagues focused all their efforts on communication rather than the actual organization of the event.
The mantle of organizing the protests was taken up by New York activists instead, many of whom considered Adbusters’ goals naïve but saw a potential in their idea. David Graeber, an American anthropologist who was involved in the Occupy movement from its earliest days, later recounted that the deadline set by Adbusters left little time for their New York-based supporters to hammer out the logistics needed to make Occupy Wall Street a reality.100 Adbusters’ call did manage to shake up the largely fragmented activist community in New York; nevertheless, a common goal and the open support of such groups as Anonymous was not enough to make Occupy Wall Street a mass phenomenon from its outset.101 Of the 20,000 attendees that Adbusters called for, only an estimated 1,000 people showed up on the protest’s first day.102
97 Elizabeth Flock, “U.S. Day of Rage Planned for Saturday – an Arab Spring in America?” Washington Post (September 15, 2011)
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Moreover, Occupy Wall Street also failed to generate significant media attention in its initial phase, giving the impression that the movement could dissipate with little to no impact.103
2.3 The Rise and Fall of the Occupy Movement’s Popularity
On the first day of the protests, Occupy Wall Street already found itself at odds with the New York Police Department, who blocked off Chase Plaza, the site of the Charging Bull statue. This prompted protesters to move to Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space, from which they could be evicted only after the city conducted negotiations with the owners as well as occupants.104 The Occupy movement caught the attention of the media when the conflicts between the protesters and law enforcement began to escalate. Mainstream outlets began to cast their spotlight on the movement after September 24, which saw a particularly intensive confrontation that resulted in 80 arrests and viral videos showing policemen pepper-spraying occupiers in their faces.105 An even stronger symbolic moment occurred on October 1, when the NYPD interrupted the protesters’ march across the Brooklyn Bridge and arrested approximately 700 people.106 The law enforcement’s aggressive handling of Occupy Wall Street proved to be playing into the hands of the protesters, whose ranks grew to an estimated 15,000 by October 5, in addition to gaining the support of several large union groups that joined their gatherings.107
The degree to which Occupy Wall Street caught on was mirrored not only by the growing participation in New York, but also by protests that sprang up across the U.S., with smaller marches and rallies taking place in several cities, including Boston, Los
103 Erica Randall, “Media Non-Coverage of Occupy Wall Street Gets Lots of Media Coverage,” The Atlantic (September 28, 2011)
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Angeles, New Orleans, Seattle, and Tampa.108 The events at Zuccotti Park have also prompted several prominent figures to speak out in support of the movement, with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and public intellectuals Cornel West109 and Slavoj Žižek making appearances at the rallies.110 At the height of the movement’s popularity, Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99 percent” and its call for the accountability of the financial sector and the elites were strong enough to move beyond the United States altogether and inspire a series of global protests. The movement arguably reached its zenith on October 15, when over 900 cities worldwide held rallies of varying sizes using Occupy imagery and rhetoric, aiming to “let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future.”111 On October 18, President Barack Obama publicly voiced his support of Occupy Wall Street as well, assuring protesters that his administration was “on their side.”112 Due to the growing symbolic significance of the movement, even New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg was forced to take a somewhat benevolent stance, conceding that protesters were allowed to express themselves as long as they obeyed the law.113
Despite Bloomberg’s seemingly sympathetic statement, police crackdowns at Zuccotti Park intensified, and within a few weeks, Occupy Wall Street began to erode. By mid-November, the Occupy movements across the country were facing dwindling participation and growing safety concerns regarding their encampments. On November 10, a man was killed at the venue of Oakland’s Occupy gathering and another man was found to have committed suicide on the site of Occupy Burlington. While the movement’s supporters argued that these cases involved outsiders who were merely on
108 Alan Taylor, “Occupy Wall Street Spreads Beyond NYC,” The Atlantic (October 7, 2011)
25 the premises of the Occupy sit-ins, the deaths led to the protests being branded increasingly dangerous and to city officials issuing deadlines for disbanding the encampments.114 New York’s Zuccotti Park itself was cleared on November 15, after hundreds of policemen raided the premises before dawn, evicting protesters and demolishing their encampment.115 In the subsequent months, there were several initiatives around the United States that attempted to “re-occupy” public spaces, including gatherings in New York commemorating the movement’s launch.116 Due to a significantly lower turnout and new regulations barring protesters from using sleeping bags or erecting tents at the venues; however, these gatherings were short-lived.117
While Occupy Wall Street became a well-known phenomenon, no event organized under its banner managed to catch the attention of the public and the media to the degree of the original Zuccotti Park sit-in. Even the May Day protests of 2012, which drew thousands of Occupy Wall Street supporters into the streets across the United States, did not resonate strongly enough to give a second wind to the movement.118 The decreasing popularity of Occupy events proved that the bravado of the original protests could not be repeated, which eventually splintered the movement. As Occupy dissipated, numerous smaller activist groups were formed that shifted their focus to local and state efforts, such as launching campaigns against student debt or initiatives calling for the end of tax breaks for fossil fuel corporations.119
114 Nancy Dillon, “Occupy Protests Claim 3 Deaths in 2 Days,” Daily News (November 12, 2011)
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2.4 A Leaderless Twitter Movement
Just as in the case of other “squares’ movements” across the world, the role of social media was central to the development of Occupy Wall Street.120 Adbusters may have pitched the original idea, but they failed to create a truly captivating social media presence for the movement before September 17. Initially, #OccupyWallStreet had a slow-build up in popularity on Twitter, and Facebook was almost entirely ignored as a platform by the organizers.121 Nevertheless, after the occupation of Zuccotti Park began and the first clashes with the NYPD occurred, interest for the movement increased exponentially, as supporters successfully leveraged events occurring on the ground to popularize Occupy online and eventually in the mainstream media.122
The widespread utilization of social media also played well with the concept of Occupy Wall Street being a leaderless, bottom-up grassroots movement that lacked any hierarchy. For the most part, Occupy Wall Street substituted leadership for general assemblies of varying sizes, where decisions were reached based on consensus between participants.123 The movement also spawned several so-called working groups that addressed its specific needs, such as public relations, coordination, direct action, or medical and legal matters.124 This mode of decision-making was employed for most of the Zuccotti Park protests and while there was a small circle of highly-involved activists at the core of Occupy with full access to the movement’s media channels, their leadership was mostly restricted to coordination in crisis situations, such as police raids.125
The attempt at building an egalitarian protest platform gave Occupy Wall Street a certain romantic allure; however, it also proved to be one of the movement’s greatest weaknesses. Due to its loose organizational structure and a lack of clear leadership, Occupy Wall Street ultimately struggled to come up with a central message. Much of
120 Daniel Trottier & Christian Fuchs (ed.), Social Media, Politics, and the State (New York: Routledge, 2015), 75. 121 Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets, 113. 122 Ben Berkowitz, “From a Single Hashtag, a Protests Circled the World,” Reuters (October 18, 2011)
27 this uncertainty can be traced back to the original Adbusters campaign, which initially planned to issue the rallying call for Occupy Wall Street around the specific demand for the creation of a presidential commission that was to investigate the crimes of the financial system.126 The discussion that followed, nevertheless, convinced Kalle Lasn and his team to leave the demand unaddressed and up to the movement to decide.127
Throughout its relatively brief existence, Occupy Wall Street never managed to coalesce around a specific demand that could have been translated into direct political action. What the movement did succeed at was translating the discontent it symbolized into a rhetoric typified by the slogan “We are the 99 percent.” The power of this catchphrase stem from the rich narrative it was able to express with a few words, pointing out that the vast majority of the country had suffered for the benefit of a select few, who have hijacked democracy’s policymaking process and reaped most of its benefits.128 The slogan also carried a sense of solidarity, as some of the most powerful stories and imagery that Occupy Wall Street used in their viral campaign came from a website titled “We are the 99 percent,” where people could share their own stories of encountering economic injustice.129
While Occupy failed to produce a set of demands that could have served as a basis for political action, it was successful at creating a rhetoric and a set of images targeting economic injustice that became deeply embedded in popular culture.130 Occupy’s emphasis on aesthetics merged with democratic sentiments attracted many platforms that were receptive to the movement’s message, including the art world, which was particularly fast at embracing Occupy Wall Street’s imagery. By November 2011, Occupy-themed artworks were featured at exhibitions in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and purchased by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.131 In addition to that, numerous prominent figures, such as Britain’s elusive
126 Justin Elliott, “The Origins of Occupy Wall Street Explained: Salon Talks to the Editor of Adbusters,” Salon (October 5, 2011)
28 street artists Banksy, have created works paying homage to the protests taking place around the world.132
Following the example of popular movements responsible for the Arab Spring and anti-austerity protests around Europe, Occupy Wall Street utilized social media to build a movement whose main purpose was to make economic inequality a centerpiece of the public debate in the United States.133 The three-month long occupation of Zuccotti Park that marked the movement’s most visible stage was beset by numerous clashes with the authorities; these conflicts, however, ultimately only grew the appeal of Occupy. Throughout its existence, supporters of the movement did not unify around any political goals; nevertheless, they managed to create a powerful rhetoric revolving around the struggle of the “99 percent” that became irreversibly ingrained into the American public and political discourse.134
132 Helen Morgan, “Banksy’s Giant Monopoly Set Joins Occupy London Movement,” Inhabitat (November 7, 2011)
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3. Two Movements: Different Sides of the Same Coin?
“I understand the frustrations being expressed in those [Occupy Wall Street] protests. In some ways, they're not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.” President Barack Obama on ABC’s Nightline (October 18, 2011)135
3.1 A Tale of Two Populisms
Comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street abound. Parallels have been drawn not only by Barack Obama, but by conservative activists as well. FreedomWorks campaign organizer John Eboch highlighted the commonalities between the movements, claiming that “the most important similarities [are] that we’re all against corporatism.”136 To consider Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party as different sides of the same coin is valid to an extent, since both movements proliferated a narrative revolving around the conflict between the powerful and powerless, and claimed that the democratic institutions of the United States had been severely undermined by special interest groups at the expense of the majority.137
By pitting the perceived ordinary and privileged against each other, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street conform perfectly to the definition of traditional populism as presented by historian Michael Kazin in his study of the phenomenon, The Populist Persuasion, which describes populist rhetoric as:
135 Transcript available at < http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/transcript-abc-news-jake-tappers-exclusive- interview-president/story?id=14764446> Accessed June 9, 2017. 136 “Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party Movements Both Born of Bank Bailouts,”Fox Business (October 20, 2011)
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a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.138 The aforementioned components are present in the rhetoric of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, both of which have created a narrative that unifies their supporters into homogenous assemblages fighting to reclaim their democratic rights against a narrow group of opponents. This sentiment is clearly underlined by such slogans as “I want my country back!” and “We are the 99 percent.”
Their rhetoric tied not only the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street together, it also connected these movements to the grander tradition of American populism. While the early American populist movements did not necessarily built on each other directly and they advocated a wide array of policies, they played a pivotal role in constructing the narrative of financial and political elites undermining the economic status and political efficacy of common people.139 The first major populist movement, the People’s Party of the 1890s, was established by American farmers fearing impoverishment, who sought to challenge the federal government’s lenient stance towards monopolies in the Gilded Age.140 The People’s Party aimed to “dethrone the machine and the plutocracy that now control the Democratic and Republican parties” and enable hardworking Americans to “earn an honest and decent living.”141 Several decades later, the Great Depression’s catastrophic consequences led to the mass support of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long’s “Share Our Wealth Plan,” which promised a radical redistribution of wealth among citizens.142 Echoing the People’s Party’s sentiment, Long famously rallied citizens to stand up “to all the Morgans and the Rockefellers” and create a society where “every man [was] a king.”143 While the People’s Party and Share Our Wealth movement existed in a wildly different political and economic climate than the
138 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1. 139 Gina Misiroglu (ed.), American Countercultures (New York: Routledge, 2009), 572. 140 Alexandra Kindell & Elizabeth S. Demers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Populism in America: Volume 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 38. 141 James M. Beeby, Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement 1890 – 1901 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 69-70. 142 Cynthia L. Clark (ed.), The American Economy: A Historic Encyclopedia – Volume 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 395. 143 Transcript of Huey P. Long, “Every Man a King” (delivered February 23, 1934)
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Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, their anti-establishment rhetoric remains a centerpiece of contemporary populism.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street echoed their forerunners not only by subscribing to the traditional populist mantra, but also by highlighting a growing lack of trust in the United States’ political institutions. Just as the People’s Party and Huey P. Long’s movement rose to prominence in eras when Washington’s elites were considered isolated from the American public, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street appeared in a climate unfavorable to the political establishment. While public trust in the federal government has in general been on the decline since the 1970s, the financial crisis and its aftermath marked the beginning of historically low approval ratings for Washington D.C. In 2008, only an estimated 19 % of Republican voters and 12 % of Democratic voters trusted the government to have an appropriate reaction to the crisis,144 while Barack Obama’s initially high approval rating also sank below 50 % by late-2009.145 In contrast to the federal government’s historically low favorability, both Occupy146 and the Tea Party have enjoyed an estimated 40 % support when they emerged, highlighting the crisis of trust in establishment politics.147
The aforementioned similarities based on a shared political climate and the utilization of traditional populist rhetoric should, however, not be overestimated. A closer look at who the oppressors and oppressed are in the narratives of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street reveals profound differences between the two movements. To get a thorough understanding of the discrepancy, it is appropriate to turn to an overarching theory on populism. In his 2016 work The Populist Explosion, journalist and author John B. Judis identifies the key difference between contemporary forms of left-wing and right-wing populism in the actors that their narratives are structured around. According to Judis, left-wing populism is vertical politics that arrays the people
144 “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government,” Pew Research Center (November 23, 2015)
32 at the bottom and the middle against the top. Right-wing populism, however, champions the majority against an elite that is accused of coddling a third group, who are viewed as a subversive force. The fundamental difference is, therefore, that left-wing populism’s narrative is dyadic, while right-wing populism is triadic, looking not only upward to the elite but also down upon an “out group.”148
The discrepancy described by Judis can be easily observed on the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. From Adbusters’ call to action to the protests taking place across the United States, the Occupy movements were driven by rallying the loosely-defined “99 percent” against the “1 percent” in a vertical narrative that “broke through the different ideologies of fragmentation and identity-politics” and operated with binary groups.149 The Tea Party, on the other hand, had a more complex narrative in many ways. While the movement’s supporters frequently denounced special interest groups in Washington, the Tea Party’s criticism of the elites was predominantly restricted to blaming the federal government for redistributing the money of hardworking Americans to a third group, the “underserving.”150 This translated into a narrative in which illegal immigrants and the entitled poor151 were actively being favored by the federal government, which was, in turn, driven by a nefarious “black president’s agenda.”152 Even though this theory was plagued by inherent contradictions, such as the fact that working-class whites were some the biggest beneficiaries of federal welfare programs,153 the Tea Party’s association of “dependence” with racial minorities made it possible to overlook such inconsistencies.154 These stark differences underline that despite some shared characteristic, the Tea Party and Occupy were never compatible in their worldviews.
147 Susan Davis, “WSJ/NBC News Poll: Tea Party Tops Democrats and Republicans,” Wall Street Journal (December 16, 2009)
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The different nature of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party is also reinforced by the antipathy and suspicion that many of the movements’ supporters fostered towards each other, especially in the Tea Party. With a few exceptions, such as John Eboch’s sympathetic take on Occupy, the majority of official statements coming from organizations affiliated with the Tea Party cast occupiers as members of the undeserving segment of society that the conservative movement profiled itself against. Mark Meckel, the cofounder of Tea Party Patriots, claimed that the protesters at Zuccotti Park were expecting the government to “forgive their loans, give them free services, guarantee their living wages, and pay for the park they have overtaken,” which he viewed as yet another attempt to shift the United States towards “failed socialist schemes.”155 Numerous other high-ranking figures of the conservative movement echoed Meckel’s sentiment, including Tea Party Express co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, who emphasized that their movement was highly organized and attempting “to work within the system,” while Occupy Wall Street represented anarchy and “an utter lack of respect for our form of government.”156
Occupy Wall Street supporters were not as vocal about distancing themselves from the comparisons. This may be explained by the fact that the movement was never as unified as the Tea Party, nor did it have major organizations speaking at its behest. Occupy Wall Street was also known for rejected traditional models of strategic communication, which meant that its supporters seldom issued joint statements.157 Despite a lack of clear messaging, some of the movement’s organizers did express a degree of sympathy towards the Tea Party. Activist Harrison Schultz, who became known for his fiery and uneven debate with Fox News host Sean Hannity about the movement, highlighted that Occupy Wall Street was a social rather than political assemblage, but emphasized that there was “a lot of Tea Party interest in what we’re doing.”158 Schultz also blamed conservative news outlets for trying to position Occupy
155 Mark Meckler & Jenny Beth Martin, “Tea Party Leaders: Why ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Doesn’t Compare,” U.S. News (December 5, 2011)
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“as the Tea Party of the Democrats, in order to keep conservatives from crossing over and joining our movement.”159
Schultz’s assessment of the conservative media’s bias towards Occupy Wall Street may be apt; however, it is important to note that most outlets sympathetic to the protesters at Zuccotti Park were similarly opposed to the comparisons. From Slate Magazine160 and the Atlantic161 to former secretary of labor Robert Reich162 and famed linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, numerous left-leaning outlets and commentators repeatedly highlighted the profound ideological differences between Occupy and the Tea Party, voicing skepticism about any possibility of their convergence.163 Anti-establishment rhetoric notwithstanding, the fundamental ideological differences ultimately outweighed the commonalities in the discourse of the two movements. For better or worse, the most fitting assessment of this disagreement was provided by New Jersey governor and 2016 presidential candidate Chris Christie who bluntly stated: “If you told the Occupy Wall Street people and the Tea Party people that they are the same, they would hit you.”164
3.2 Scramble for Authenticity
Beyond the discrepancies in ideology, differences can be observed between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in several other areas as well. Both movements have claimed to be representative of the American public and put heavy emphasis on their independence from the political mainstream. The organizational background of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, however, reveal a different degree of established institutional and media backing behind the two movements.
159 Robin Bravender & Kenneth P. Vogel, “Tea Party Goes After Occupy,” Politico (October 13, 2011)
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When it comes to political independence, the conservative movement is cast in an unfavorable light compared to Occupy Wall Street, since the Tea Party enjoyed significantly more outside support than the protesters at Zuccotti Park did. Although regional Tea Party groups and individual activists were not necessarily affiliated with the major conservative organizations or donors supporting the movement, there were several instances of Tea Party organizers benefiting from their aid, financial and otherwise. Notable examples included conservative nonprofit organizations American Majority165 and FreedomWorks offering training sessions to local Tea Party organizers prior to 2009’s Tax Day protests166 and the Atlanta-based Tea Party Patriots advocacy group receiving a $1 million donation from an anonymous single contributor for the purpose of mobilizing voters in the congressional elections of 2010.167 In subsequent years, major donation to the Tea Party’s cause became even more abundant. Some of the largest contributions included $12 million that the movement received in 2012 from Richard Stephenson,168 a millionaire banker who had been supporting conservative organizations since the 1980s, including the Koch brothers-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy.169
When Occupy Wall Street’s popularity began to rise, numerous critics of the movement strove to use the “Astroturf” argument raised by Tea Party detractors to question Occupy’s independence. Several news outlets and pundits, including popular radio host and conspiracy theorist Rush Limbaugh, attempted to connect Adbusters to George Soros, claiming that the Hungarian-American hedge fund billionaire made significant contributions to the Canadian publisher through various organizations.170 Nevertheless, it was revealed that Adbusters did not receive donations from any Soros-
165 Van Dyke & Meyer, Understanding the Tea Party Movement, 59. 166 Ronald P. Formisano, The Tea Party: A Brief History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) ebook. 167 Amy Gardner, “Tea Party Picking Up Steam Nationwide,” The Washington Post (September 21, 2010)
36 affiliated organizations and that 95 % of the group’s funds came from subscribers paying for their magazine.171 Occupy Wall Street did ultimately manage to raise more than $300,000;172 however, the majority of this sum was collected from small individual donations through crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and through the progressive group Alliance For Global Justice that received donations in the movement’s name.173 Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the Tea Party enjoyed significantly larger organizational and financial assistance than Occupy Wall Street, while the latter movement maintained itself mainly through grassroots support, frequently relying on individuals not only for financial aid but also for basic resources, such as food donations.174
In comparison to the Tea Party, Occupy also had a different relationship with the media, especially at the movement’s outset. According to a Pew Research Center poll, both movements filled approximately 7-10 % of the news coverage at the height of their popularity.175 Although many Occupy supporters complained about a media bias towards them, with the exception of a handful of outlets such as Fox News,176 The Washington Times177 and Wall Street Journal,178 approximately 57 % of the coverage of Occupy Wall Street was positive.179 Nevertheless, occupiers lacked significant support from traditional media outlets during the movement’s initial phase, as the early protests
37 at Zuccotti Park were largely ignored by them.180 In contrast, the Tea Party already enjoyed the patronage of partisan media channels before its first major protests took place. Fox News served not only as a promotional platform for the movements’ events, but also actively helped to build and shape the Tea Party’s identity and message.181 Due to this, Occupy Wall Street can claim not only greater institutional but also media independence when brought into direct comparison with the Tea Party.
Since both movements claimed to speak for the American majority, demographics play an important role in determining which movement represented a greater portion of the United States’ public. Occupy Wall Street boasted a somewhat more varied constituency compared to the Tea Party; nevertheless, neither movement was an accurate representation of the United States’ ethnic, educational and social composition. While a comprehensive survey of Occupy Wall Street’s May Day protest shows that most of the movements supporter were younger (60 % aged less than 30) and better educated than those of the Tea Party (almost 80 % possessing at least a bachelor’s degree), the majority of the movement was still made up of affluent, white activists. Crucially, however, the survey also revealed that despite their relative wealth, at least half of the Occupy supporters under 30 carried a student debt over $1,000 and over a third of them had been laid off or lost a job five years prior to the survey.182 The supporters of Occupy Wall Street therefore appear to have had come into greater contact with the core issues of their movement than their Tea Party counterparts, most of whose financial situation did not deteriorate significantly under the Great Recession, nor as a result of Barack Obama’s policies that the conservative movement profiled itself against.183
Although the supporters of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were predominantly white, the comparison ultimately tips to Occupy’s favor when it comes to diversity. The protests at Wall Street involved considerably higher numbers of
180 Jesse Drew, A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media (New York: Routledge, 2013), 177. 181 Beyond its multitude of coverage, Fox News also placed particularly strong emphasis on depicting the Tea Party as “genuine” and “organic.” See Skocpol & Williamson, The Tea Party, 136. 182 Ruth Milkman et al. “Changing the Subject: A Bottom-up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City,”
38 nonwhite participants (over 30 %)184 than the Tea Party did (around 20 %).185 In contrast to the conservative movement’s problematic narrative revolving around productive and undeserving members of American society, Occupy attempted to sidestep the theme of race altogether by merging all its supporters into the “99 percent.” It would be exaggerated, however, to claim that this symbolic effort was enough to prevent the emergence of racial issues.
Numerous African American and Latino participants of the movement stated that Occupy Wall Street’s decision-making assemblies were dominated by highly- educated white males, concluding that the protests were ultimately a “white middle- class thing.”186 Black academics and activists have also pointed out that Occupy did not make a strong enough effort to reach out to minority communities and organizations for cooperation, in addition to noting that the lesser involvement of Latinos and African Americans in the movement may have also been caused by their greater fears of repercussion from clashes with the police.187 While Occupy’s lack of outreach to minorities may be explained by its loose organizational structure and relatively short lifespan, the movement also drew fire for occasionally advancing slogans offensive to minorities, such as “Debt=Slavery.” A number of black supporters of the movement felt that this catchphrase resembled the way in which conservatives tended to appropriate the word “slavery” to entice white fears of economic and political subjugation. Notable examples of such misuse included conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, one of the Tea Party’s earliest media proponents, making parallels between slavery and the 2009 Affordable Care Act.188 Allegations that some of the movement’s slogans were racially insensitive shows that despite aiming to create an all-encompassing community in the “99 percent,” not even Occupy Wall Street managed to avoid internal tensions, albeit race was not meant to play a central role in the movement’s ideology.
184 “Occupy Wall Street Survey Results October 2011,” Fordham University (October 2011)
39
Upon taking a closer look at the movements, both the Tea Party’s and Occupy Wall Street’s claims of representing “the people” are problematic, due to the largely white middle class constituency that drove these endeavors. As the comparative approach has shown, however, it is possible to argue that one of the two movements was more in line with their projected grassroots image. In terms of organizational structure and degree of independence, it was Occupy Wall Street that was characterized by a greater reliance on grassroots activism and a lack of clear leadership, in addition to enjoying little to no help from traditional media outlets and political organizations. The Tea Party’s activities were, on the other hand, considerably boosted from the movements’ initial days by major conservative organizations such as FreedomWorks, as well as partisan media outlets such as Fox News.
The degree to which Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party differed in their relationship with established power structures (or a lack thereof) had a large effect on the subsequent development of the movements and on the degree to which they managed to integrate themselves into the political mainstream. In the short run, the affiliation with major conservative news outlets and organizations enabled the Tea Party to become a strong force at the voting booths. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, lacked concrete political goals as well as allies, yet its short-lived success managed to turn the debate from government deficits towards the plight of the “99 percent,” which would play a central role in the public and political discourse for the rest of Barack Obama’s presidency.189
189 Ralph Young, Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 519.
40
4. The Day After: Political Impact and Integration
“One of the great dangers the protesters are facing [is] the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the ‘occupied’ places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed.”
Slavoj Žižek on the future of Occupy Wall Street190
4.1 Towards Establishment Politics
As Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek noted in his analysis of Occupy Wall Street, the real test of any popular movement is whether it manages to evolve into something more substantial than an outlet for grievances and present a viable way forward. For most populist movements in the United States’ history, this way forward tended to rest in their interaction with the political establishment. The Republican and Democratic parties have been prone to at least partially absorb the rhetoric and policy goals of populists if they resonated with a significant portion of the American public. In such cases, these movements either dissipated or became integrated into the established bipartisan structure of the U.S. political system.191
The aforementioned process can be observed on the fate of the People’s Party as well Huey P. Long’s Share Our Wealth movement. After achieving limited success as a third party, The People’s Party decided to endorse Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896, who adopted the populists’ call for silver currency as one of the central promises of his campaign.192 Bryan’s subsequent loss as well as the fact that the People’s Party decided not to nominate its own candidate led to the movement’s disintegration; however, the disappearance of the People’s Party did not
190 Žižek, “Occupy Wall Street: What is To Be Done Next?”
41 bury its agenda. Many of the populist movement’s goals, such as the direct election of senators into Congress and the nationalization of the United States’ railways, were successfully taken up by progressive forces in the early 20th century.193 Huey P. Long’s Share Our Wealth movement had even more immediate impact on establishment politics, as it is credited with creating an impetus for launching the Second New Deal in 1935. Although Long was assassinated in the same year, fears of the populist candidate stealing a large amount of votes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 election prompted the administration to push for a series of social welfare-oriented policies, including the Social Security Act,194 in no small part to “steal Long’s thunder.”195 While neither the People’s Party nor Huey P. Long’s movement prevailed as separate political entities, their legacies in the progressive and New Deal eras underscore the importance of the interaction between populist movements and establishment politics.
This interaction (or the lack of it) played a crucial role in the case of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as well. The movements differed markedly from each other in their relationship with established power structures. The Tea Party had an advantage over Occupy Wall Street in influencing Washington D.C. and it did remarkably well in transforming into a political force. This was not only because of being closely connected to the GOP and conservative organizations, but also due to the Tea Party developing a political plan of its own. In April 2010, the Tea Party unveiled its 10-point “Contract From America,” which laid out the legislative agenda conservative activists wanted elected officials to follow.196 The document included such goals as a balanced budget, repeal of government-run healthcare and a reform of the tax system, clearly echoing the “Contract with America” developed by conservative Republicans spearheaded by New Gingrich after the GOP historically won control over both chambers of the U.S. Congress in 1994.197 The plan unveiled by the Tea Party therefore not only solidified the political identity of the movement, but also linked it to
193 Sergiu Gherhina et al., Contemporary Populism: A Controversial Concept and Its Diverse Forms (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 108-110. 194 The Social Security Act of 1935 is widely considered one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal era, as it established the modern welfare system that began to aid such segments of American society as the elderly, unemployed, and children. See Aaron D. Purcell, The New Deal and the Great Depression (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014), 103-104. 195 Greg M. Shaw, The Welfare Debate (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 49-50. 196 Bernie Becker, “A Revised Contract for America, Minus ‘With’ and Newt,” The New York Times (April 14, 2010) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15contract.html
42 the Republican Party’s more conservative wing,198 which suffered a notable setback after its clashes with the Democratic Party and Bill Clinton during the 1990s.199
Initially, right-wing strategists, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, argued that the Tea Party could succeed as a third party; however, by the 2010 midterm elections, it became clear that the movement’s strength lay with conservative voters. As the Tea Party began to actively recruit candidates meeting its political preferences, it became a force aiming to remake as well as boost the Republican Party.200 The Tea Party’s endorsement meant heightened media attention and a significant advantage in fundraising for both newcomers as well as experienced candidates who subscribed to the fundamentals of its ideology. Political engagement bore its fruit in the 2010 midterms, as 32 % of the Tea Party-supported candidates won congressional seats, while Democrats were shellshocked by a historical loss of 63 seats in the House and narrowly clung to their Senate majority.201 A total of 43 out of these House seats were won by candidates who were either backed by the Tea Party or identified themselves as its supporters, in addition to which 10 candidates running under the movement’s banner won seats in the U.S. Senate.202
Despite this impressive showing, a number of pundits and academics questioned the true extent of the conservative movement’s appeal to the voting public.203 Skeptics argued that the Tea Party was a “tempest in a very small teapot” whose influence was
198 The 2010 and 1994 Contracts contain a very similar agenda built around fiscal conservatism and small government. Unlike the 1994 document, however, the 2010 conservative manifesto left out social issues and defense spending from its program, to avoid the potential alienation of libertarians from the Tea Party. See Teddy Davis, “Tea Party Activists Craft ‘Contract From America,’” ABC News (February 9, 2010)
43 exaggerated by the media,204 citing a small turnout among Democratic voters as the main reason behind the sweeping Republican victory.205 This low participation was arguably caused by a growing skepticism among voters towards Barack Obama, whose approval rating sunk below 45 % in the weeks preceding the 2010 midterms.206 With an unemployment rate around 9 %, Democrats struggled to tie the Obama administration’s policy initiatives to job creation, which made it difficult for them to deflect the blame for the weak economy. Since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 yielded limited results in the first two years of the Obama presidency, conservative critics were particularly successful at framing the $787 billion stimulus as the Democrat’s wasteful spending rather than a long-term plan for creating jobs.207
While the extent of the Tea Party’s unique voter appeal and the reasons behind the Democrats’ major losses in 2010 are debatable, the conservative movement clearly succeeded in its transition to establishment politics with the midterm elections. Despite running as a de facto extended arm of the GOP, the Tea Party also managed to maintain some of its independent ethos and revealed itself as a formidable political force not only to Democrats but Republicans as well. Numerous Tea Party favorites, including senators Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, launched their careers in 2010 by defeating establishment Republicans who were mostly denounced by the Tea Party as too moderate or compromised by their business ties.208 The conservative movement’s ability to maintain its “insurgent” image even as it was actively merging with the GOP is remarkable, since research indicated that the majority of Tea Party candidates received an equal amount of support from special interest groups as their fellow Republicans.209 In addition to that, nearly half of the members who joined the newly-
204 E.J. Dionne Jr., “The Tea Party: Tempest in a Very Small Teapot,” Washington Post (September 23, 2010)
44 formed Tea Party Caucus210 in 2010 had already served in Congress for at least a decade.211 This indicated that some congressmen held views matching the Tea Party’s already prior to the movement’s appearance, while others may have affiliated themselves with the movement more opportunistically. Despite the high number of Tea Party Caucus members who did not qualify as political newcomers, the conservative movement successfully positioned itself as an authentic grassroots presence not only fighting against the Democrats’ liberal agenda, but also vying for the heart of the Republican Party.212
Even though the Tea Party’s alliance with the GOP in the 2010 elections thoroughly problematized the movement’s self-proclaimed independence, it allowed the conservative protest group to evolve into a political force with the ability to influence policymaking; a crucial step that Occupy Wall Street did not follow.213 Unlike the Tea Party that began to develop its political agenda early on, Occupy activists made no such concise effort. In 2012, Occupy Wall Street did produce an official list of political demands for its May Day protests; however, the Global May Manifesto also made it clear that the movement saw itself as existing outside the confines of traditional politics, proclaiming: We do not make demands [to] governments, corporations or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt. We speak to the people of the world, both inside and outside our movements.214 While this statement was in line with Occupy Wall Street’s radically nonpartisan, grassroots image, it also signaled a degree of resignation and an unwillingness to acknowledge the possible advantages of political participation.
210 Not all successful candidates close to the conservative movement ended up joining the congressional Tea Party Caucus, which had 52 members in 2010, consisting of both newly-elected and incumbent congressmen. Senator Marco Rubio was one of the notable absentees, going as far as to dismiss the caucus as a “little club” run by Washington politicians. See Alex Seitz-Wald, “Marco Rubio Dismisses Rand Paul’s Tea Party Caucus as A ‘Little Club’ Run by Washington Politicians,” ThinkProgress (February 7, 2011)
45
Philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek, himself an Occupy supporter, criticized the movement’s lack of ambition to push for political reforms as succumbing to “the narcissism of the lost cause,” lamenting that Occupy expressed “an authentic rage,” which it did not manage to transform into “a minimal positive program of socio- political change.”215 Reveling in anti-establishment protest without creating a solid political agenda also meant that Occupy Wall Street remained a passive recipient of praise and criticism from the establishment. When a number of Democrats voiced their support of the movement, Occupy did not have the means to work towards an alliance with individuals holding political leverage in Washington, nor did it have an effective way to repudiate their sympathy in case they were merely paying lip service to Occupy’s cause.216
Unlike the Tea Party that developed a political plan and transformed into a congressional force with the aid of well-established organizations, Occupy Wall Street’s decentralized leadership was ill-suited for translating the movement’s momentum into political power. Instead of attempts to become engaged in electoral politics, the various groups that Occupy Wall Street splintered into after the Zuccotti Park protests pursued goals such as reducing student debt, fighting home evictions, and providing aid for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.217 Although such initiatives proved that Occupy did not fade away completely, some of the movement’s own organizers have been critical of it in hindsight. Micah White, one of the movement’s co-creators, identified Occupy’s lack of political agenda as its most crucial shortcoming, claiming that occupiers failed to realize that public spectacles would not force elected officials to take action. Micah concluded that Occupy Wall Street was no more than a “constructive failure,” as such
215 Žižek, “Occupy Wall Street: What is To Be Done Next?” Ibid. 216 Perhaps due to the movement’s own vagueness of purpose and goals, the endorsements from congressional Democrats frequently sounded uninspiring and unconvincing. House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson, for instance, applauded the movement for “standing up for what they believe in,” but stated that he did not condone the actions of the occupiers, which highlights how Occupy Wall Street’s lack of goals, political or otherwise, made it easy to stand behind the movement without pledging oneself to any concrete agenda. See Seung Min Kim, “Top Dems Endorse Occupy Wall St.,” Politico (October 5, 2011)
46 movements should strive not only to spread an inspirational message, but also to win elections.218
Although its integration into the Republican establishment undermined any lingering notions of the Tea Party’s independence, it proved to be beneficial for the conservative movement. Candidates running under the banner of the Tea Party enjoyed significant success in the 2010 midterm elections, defeating not only Democratic opponents but also establishment Republicans in several states. Whereas the Tea Party was able to mobilize into a political force within a year of its existence, Occupy Wall Street explicitly rejected the notion of aligning itself with any political platform. This was consistent with the grassroots movement’s radically independent and nonpartisan image; however, it also meant that Occupy Wall Street would remain a fading “emotional outcry” with little to no impact on Washington D.C., while the Tea Party thrived as a congressional force.219
4.2 The Tea Party as a Congressional Force
The Tea Party continued to flex its muscles after 2010, albeit the movement’s electoral successes became more modest. In the 2012 congressional elections, most Tea Party-backed candidates for the House of Representatives were re-elected, but only 4 out of the 16 candidates endorsed by the conservative movement won Senate seats.220 Nevertheless, the Tea Party did enjoy a notable success story in the Seante with newcomer Ted Cruz, who defeated David Dewhurst, a conventional business-class Republican whom Cruz repeatedly accused of being hesitant to fight for conservative principles.221 While the GOP retained its edge over the Democrats in Congress, 2012 made it abundantly clear that the Republican Party was plagued by internal tensions, as its increasingly strong conservative wing began putting pressure on more moderate members to adhere to the Tea Party’s doctrine. Matt Kibbe, the president of
218 Rudyard Griffiths, “Micah White: ‘Occupy Wall Street Was a Constructive Failure,’” The Globe and Mail (March 18, 2016)
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FreedomWorks, defined this as a deliberate internal challenge, claiming that 2012 marked a “continuation of the fight between the old guard and all of the new blood that has come in since 2010.”222
There were issues the Tea Party and GOP could easily agree on, such as lowering government spending and the need to repeal the Affordable Care Act;223 however, by relying on the Tea Party’s vicious rhetoric on such issues, Republicans allowed themselves be rebranded as an increasingly conservative party.224 The growing influence of the party’s conservative wing was especially apparent in the GOP’s inability to work out business-as-usual compromises on federal spending with the Democrats.225 The Republican Party’s conservative wing dissented numerous times by not supporting legislation advocated by Speaker of the House John Boehner, who was accused by Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips of “selling out” already in 2011, after congressional Republicans made a compromise on the federal budget with Democrats.226 The stern opposition of the conservative movement to such deals reached its crescendo in 2013, when a group of 32 hardline Republicans, including prominent Tea Party figure Michele Bachmann, refused to support any resolution that did not defund the Affordable Care Act and forced a government shutdown.227 The symbolic significance of the Tea Party’s unrelenting fight against big government was also underlined by Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s speech against “Obamacare” on the Senate
222 Carl Hulse, “Republicans Face Struggle Over Party’s Direction,” The New York Times (November 7, 2012)
48 floor which preceded the unsuccessful budget negotiations and lasted over 21-hours, qualifying as the 4th longest speech ever delivered in the Senate.228
The Tea Party and Republicans ended up taking the majority of the blame for the 2013 government shutdown;229 nevertheless, a diminished public approval did not stop the GOP from succeeding in the subsequent midterm elections.230 The year of 2014 brought another triumph for the Republican Party, since the GOP took control of both chambers of Congress, not only expanding its hold of over the House, but also picking up a 54-seat majority in the Senate.231 Despite the historic defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor by Tea Party-backed Dave Brat during the primaries, the 2014 elections initially signaled a victory for establishment Republicans.232 Several Tea Party favorites, most notably those attempting to unseat GOP senators, failed to win the races,233 which seemed to have fulfilled Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s pre- election promise that Republicans would “crush” intraparty insurgents in the 2014 races.234 Ultraconservative members of the House, however, did not back down and founded the House Freedom Caucus in 2015, which adapted rhetoric akin to the Tea Party’s, “advanc[ing] an agenda of limited constitutional government” and giving “a voice to countless Americans who feel that Washington does not represent them.”235
228 Aaron Blake, “Where Ted Cruz’s Marathon Speech Stands in History,” The Washington Post (September 25, 2013)
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The House Freedom Caucus proved to be a potent pressure group when its estimated 37 members successfully forced John Boehner to resign as Speaker of the House in September 2015,236 after expressing their willingness to initiate another government shutdown if Boehner did not make an uncompromising push to defund237 the Planned Parenthood program.238
The House Freedom Caucus’ ousting of Boehner proved that the tension between the GOP’s hardline conservatives and relatively moderate members remained a decisive issue, one that significantly impacted Congress’ efficiency. Gridlocks and fierce partisanship made the 112th and 113th Congresses rank among the historically least productive ones,239 which was largely blamed on the Tea Party and its influence on the GOP.240 Identifying the conservative movement as the culprit behind the Republican Party’s rejection of political compromise is, however, somewhat unfair, considering that fierce partisanship ruled Congress even before the Tea Party became an electoral force. Almost immediately after Barack Obama’s inauguration, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell241 and House Republican Eric Cantor made a deliberate push to turn the GOP into “the Party of No” that urged congressional Republicans to oppose all of
236 The caucus did not publish an official list of its members in 2015-2016; however, reports had repeatedly identified 37 members based on the number of meeting attendees. See Carl Bialik & Aaron Bycoffe, “The Hard-Line Republicans Who Pushed John Boehner Out,” FiveThirtyEight (September 25, 2015)
50
Barack Obama’s proposals, in order to deny the president any bipartisan success.242 Even though the economy was in a free fall in 2009, virtually every Republican in the House voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,243 after which the GOP launched an all-out attack on Democrats for the massive increase in spending and debt.244 The Tea Party was, therefore, not the sole cause of growing Washington partisanship and gridlock,245 but a force that initially fit the Republican Party’s politics of obstruction perfectly, until its growing influence rattled the GOP itself.246
While the House Freedom Caucus’ members represented just over 8 % of the House of Representatives in 2015-2016, they enjoyed a disproportionate influence in the political and public sphere, not unlike the Tea Party did after it became a lauded grassroots force of conservative activism.247 One of the reasons for the group’s importance was purely political, since the House Freedom Caucus had enough members to paralyze Republican proposals with their votes; however, the caucus also held a considerable ideological appeal. Members of the group primarily profiled themselves as unyielding ideological purists standing up to establishment Republicans who were not necessarily less conservative than caucus members, but they were more willing to compromise with Democrats to avoid such political storms as a second government shutdown.248 The House Freedom Caucus also capitalized on the U.S. media’s continuing fascination with strong ideological rhetoric and the defiance of establishment politics; key features that made the Tea Party popular several years earlier, especially
242 Michael Grunwald, “The Victory of ‘No,’” Politico (December 4, 2016)
51 with heavily partisan outlets.249 While the conservative media’s “chorus of skepticism” towards political compromises initially helped the GOP to present its rejection of bipartisanship as a virtue in the first years of Barack Obama’s presidency, these outlets gradually also turned on Republicans who were seen as too moderate, with pundits inviting challengers to run against them in upcoming elections.250
In conclusion, the Tea Party became an integral part of the GOP following the 2010 midterm elections. Congressmen affiliated with the conservative movement agreed with the Republican Party’s core on opposing Barack Obama’s policies; however, the Tea Party made a name for itself in congressional politics primarily with causing visible intra-party tension. While the movement arguably helped the Republicans to expand their control over Congress through 2012 and 2014, the growing influence of hardline conservatives made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to reach business-as-usual deals with Democrats, which resulted in gridlocks and a government shutdown in 2013. Following the 2014 elections, a number of Tea Party hardliners banded together to form the House Freedom Caucus and reaffirmed their congressional influence by forcing John Boehner to step down as Speaker of the House in the middle of his tenure. Due to unleashing an apparent “civil war” within the Republican Party, representatives affiliated with the Tea Party and House Freedom Caucus were repeatedly blamed for Congress’ inefficiency.251 These conservative hardliners were, however, merely taking the post-2008 obstructionist politics devised by Senator Mitch McConnell to the extreme, usurping the GOP’s leadership of the power to maintain party discipline.
249 DiMaggio, The Rise of the Tea Party, 103-106. 250 In her study of the media’s influence on the Republican Party, New York Times national correspondent Jackie Calmes identified social media, radio shows and online news portals such as Breitbart, The Blaze and Drudge Report as the most willing to accept and champion hardline conservative views, which, in turn, influenced the broader conservative media consensus, pushing it further to the right. See Jackie Calmes, “‘They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing’: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center (July 27, 2015)
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4.3 Presidential Elections 2012: The Limits of the Tea Party’s Appeal
Following the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Party repeatedly showed its claws in Congress through the actions of a powerful minority of representatives and senators. The movement, however, did not enjoy the same level of success during the presidential primaries of 2012, in which Tea Party supporters had to settle for heavy compromises when it came to the Republican Party’s final nominee. The presidential races also showcased that the issue of wealth inequality brought to the forefront by Occupy Wall Street did not fade into obscurity with the protest movement’s dissipation, as class warfare became a decisive theme in the presidential debates.
The 2012 elections initially appeared to confirm the Tea Party’s overwhelming influence over the GOP, as the Republican Party’s primaries saw a “mad scramble to the right”252 with a high number of candidates who touted deeply conservative fiscal and social views.253 Many of these personalities, however, had a questionable appeal to the broader electorate and their heavy exposure to the media did little to improve their image, which prompted criticism from across the political spectrum regarding the “goofy” quality of the 2012 primaries.254 Conservative hardliners were particularly prone to public blunders during the primaries and the title of Tea Party-favorite shifted frequently between prospective nominees, most notably Texas Governor Rick Perry, businessman Herman Cain, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose campaigns were all eventually undermined by various scandals, public missteps, and dwindling support.255 The strongest Tea Party candidate arose in the person of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who was particularly popular among evangelicals
252 Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong, 341. 253 The Tea Party’s success in the 2010 midterms encouraged a strong top-to-bottom conservatism among Republican presidential candidates, most of whom pledged to roll back the Affordable Care Act, cut taxes, crack down on illegal immigration, outlaw abortion, and prevent additional domestic spending. See Michael Nelson (ed.), The Elections of 2012 (Sage Publications, 2013), 22. 254 Jonathan Alter, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013), 178. 255 While the 2012 proved to be particularly rich in missteps and scandals that plagued candidates, some of the most notable examples included Rick Perry’s failure to name the three cabinet-level departments he would eliminate as president, allegations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich’s racially-charged discourse coupled with his inability to raise enough money to continue campaigning. See Hughey & Parks, The Wrongs of the Right, 99-104.
53 for his extremely conservative views on gay marriage and abortion; nevertheless, even Santorum could not defeat the GOP’s frontrunner, Mitt Romney.256
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won the primaries with a strong 10 million votes, well ahead of Santorum who came in second with 3.9 million supporters.257 Nevertheless, by the time Romney became the Republican presidential nominee, his image was strongly damaged. According to a detailed survey of the GOP primary debates by the University of Montana, Romney was the second most-criticized person after President Barack Obama during the Republican debates.258 Perceived as a clear establishment pick, Romney outspent his rivals 20-to-1 in key states and repeatedly attempted to fend of accusations about his career as a pragmatic and moderate Republican governor in one of the nation’s most liberal states.259 Mocked as “Moderate Mitt,” Romney was denounced by his opponents260 as well as Tea Party- affiliated organizations such as FreedomWorks for being a weak candidate who was merely pandering to the Republican voter base.261
Romney found himself targeted by hardline conservatives especially for the Massachusetts healthcare reform that he championed as governor in 2006, as it later served as a blueprint for the Affordable Care Act.262 Since the former governor could not convincingly denounce the state law he once advocated, Romney attempted take a tough stance on other issues, such as immigration, in hopes of pleasing the conservative
256 Paul Harris, “Rick Santorum Profile: The Great Right Hope Running Against Romney,” The Guardian (Jamuary 4, 2012)
54 electorate.263 This resulted in the Republican frontrunner advocating tough measures against illegal immigrants that would result in their “self-deportation,” an ill-chosen expression that later came back to haunt Romney in his debates with the incumbent Barack Obama, who used the phrase to paint his opponent as unrealistically tough on immigration.264 Although Romney initially capitalized on his image of a successful businessman, his past with the private equity firm Bain Capital was also successfully exploited by his opponents after reports surfaced about the company’s history of buying and terminating smaller businesses, which led Texas Governor Rick Perry to compare Bain and Romney to “vultures [...] who pick the carcass clean and then fly away.”265
Romney’s attempts to appease the Tea Party and the attacks he sustained in the primaries for his business dealings gave incumbent Barack Obama ample room to question the soundness of Romney’s economic and social views. In his attacks on Romney, the incumbent president arguably capitalized on the newfound popularity of class warfare rhetoric that reemerged with Occupy Wall Street, portraying his opponent as a ruthless businessman who “ship[s] jobs overseas and get[s] tax breaks for it.”266 Ultimately, however, it was Romney’s own words that ended up positioning him as a candidate of the financial elites. Holding a speech to a group of wealthy donors that was made public by the magazine Mother Jones, Romney declared that “47 percent” of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what, as they were “dependent upon government” and believed that it had “a responsibility to care for them” by providing them with services such as health care.267 Even though Romney’s speech was in line with the Tea Party’s discourse about the deserving and undeserving members of society, its recording was released precisely on the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which helped cast the Republican nominee as a champion of the elite
263 Sunil Ahuja & Robert Dewhirst, Government at Work: Policymaking in the Twenty-First-Century Congress, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 64-65. 264 James W. Caesar et al., After the Hope and Change: The 2012 Elections and American Politics, Post- 2014 Election Update (Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015), 77. 265 Quoted in Alter, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, 187. 266 Presidential Debate (October 16, 2012), transcript available at
55 rather than the broad American public.268 In the end, the lack of enthusiasm among conservative voters for Romney and the Republican nominees’ alienation of key groups in his attempts to please them, such as minorities,269 resulted in Barack Obama’s victory with more than 51 % of the popular vote, while Romney came in second with a somewhat symbolic 47 %.270
The 2012 elections reaffirmed the growing friction that the Tea Party caused within the GOP. Resembling the surging influence of conservative hardliners in Congress, the Republican presidential primaries were initially abundant in candidates who touted an uncompromising social and economic agenda. This forced GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney to adapt to their rhetoric to fend off attacks of moderation. Romney’s career as the governor of Massachusetts and as a businessman, however, put him too close to the establishment for Tea Party supporters. At the same time, his attempts to please this conservative base ended up hurting Romney’s appeal with the broader electoral public, paving the way for Barack Obama’s a clear victory over his Republican challenger. Unlike the congressional elections, where many hardline conservatives won by appealing to largely homogenous electorates, the presidential races of 2012 suggested that the Tea Party’s appeal was severely limited on a national level. The elections also did little to ease the distrust between Tea Party conservatives and moderate Republicans, as both blamed the other for Barack Obama’s victory.271
4.4 Presidential Elections 2016: The Year of Populism
The 2016 presidential races initially echoed the 2012 election season, as a number of Tea Party affiliated candidates faced off against moderate and establishment Republicans in the GOP primaries, while Hillary Clinton’s road to the Democratic nomination appeared virtually uncontested. The primaries were, however, dramatically
268 Molly Ball, “Mitt Romney’s Class Warfare,” The Atlantic (September 17, 2012)
56 shaken up by two unlikely candidates, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and real estate mogul Donald Trump, both of whose campaigns were characterized by an unapologetically anti-establishment tone. Albeit ultimately losing to Clinton, Sanders recaptured the rhetoric and sentiment that popularized Occupy Wall Street, while Donald Trump delivered a blow to the Republican Party, achieving victory over both establishment and Tea Party candidates.
The relatively unknown Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders rose to popularity in the Democratic primaries with a campaign strongly echoing Occupy Wall Street, as the 74-year-old self-styled democratic socialist declared that his bid for the presidency was a “revolution” against wealth inequality and the influence of financial and corporate elites on Washington.272 Sanders staked out a clear populist position for himself, calling for breaking up Wall Street’s biggest banks, making public colleges free, as well as increasing taxes on the rich and introducing a $ 15 minimum wage.273 The Vermont senator’s audacious vision resonated with many progressive activists, which led to several former Occupy Wall Street organizers rallying behind Sanders and organizing the New York “March for Bernie.”274 Sanders’ campaign also attracted attention for its successful grassroots funding, as the Vermont senator collected nearly $ 210 million in small donations during the Democratic primaries, out-raising Hillary Clinton for several months.275 While Clinton enjoyed a steady lead over her opponent, Sanders came close enough to challenging her by cultivating the image of an underdog, who was clearly less favored by the Democratic Party. This led to numerous allegations that the primaries were rigged,276 despite Clinton’s overwhelming support among such key demographics as African Americans throughout the entire race.277 The strong appeal of Sanders to
272 Joseph A. Palermo, “The Movement Has Found Its Leader: Bernie Sanders,” Huffington Post (February 12, 2016)
57 young voters, particularly college-educated whites, however, kept the Vermont senator’s campaign energized even after Clinton’s victory became imminent.278
Bernie Sanders may have enjoyed the support of many former Occupy activists and his campaign did touch on most of the popular movement’s central themes; however, it would be erroneous to consider the Vermont senator’s bid for the presidency a direct continuation of Occupy Wall Street. While Sanders was the first member of the U.S. Senate to voice his support for the movement in 2011,279 the Vermont senator had been drawing attention to income inequality and criticizing the influence of lobbyists on Washington D.C. decades before Occupy Wall Street emerged.280 Nevertheless, the fact that Sanders managed to pose a challenge to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries despite describing himself as a democratic socialist proved that the years of the Great Recession transformed American political culture to an extent,281 considering the overwhelmingly negative connotation the word “socialism” had in the United States.282 In 2016, the youngest and oldest age groups reported increasingly favorable views of socialism,283 particularly when the term was used to refer to social democracies such as Denmark that were characterized by a high rate of social mobility, universal healthcare, and free higher education.284 Both Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ relative success could therefore be interpreted as the results of a growing support for a
278 In fact, this was the only demographic group that consistently preferred Sanders over Clinton. See “The Great Divide: Clinton, Sanders, and the Future of the Democratic Party,” The New Yorker (March 21, 2016)
58 more expansive welfare state among a particular demographic after the 2007-2008 economic crisis.
Despite failing to secure the nomination, Sanders’ strong campaign reaffirmed the continuing relevance of the discourse started by Occupy Wall Street and proved that its populist rhetoric could be leveraged in electoral politics.285 This was reflected by the fact that the Sanders’ campaign successfully pressured Hillary Clinton into making concessions on several issues, most notably on supporting the minimum wage,286 increasing the estate tax,287 and agreeing to a multi-year plan that was to significantly lower the cost of public colleges.288 Sanders’ bid, however, also highlighted that popular movements propelled by social media and youthful activism need goals, robust organization and tenacious follow-through to have a chance at making an impact, something that Occupy Wall Street crucially lacked.289 Liberal pundits also noted the limits that populists such as Sanders could achieve, highlighting that even if he had become president, voting for political outsiders such as the Vermont senator would remain “a protest vote for a career protest voter,” as long as long as Sanders’ and the Occupy movement’s supporters did not start participating more actively in congressional and local elections, which were key to transforming the Democratic and Republican parties from the bottom up.290
Whereas the ethos of Occupy Wall Street marked an unexpected return in the 2016 presidential races, the Tea Party appeared to enter into its twilight. The GOP primaries initially seemed promising to Republican hardliners and were celebrated by the Tea Party Express advocacy group as a “coming-of-age for the Tea Party
More than Government Managed Economy,” Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets (February 12, 2015)
59 movement” due to the candidacy of senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.291 While Paul dropped out early,292 hardline conservatives appeared to have frontrunners in Rubio and Cruz, both of whom pledged to reduce government spending, repeal the 2010 healthcare law, and crack down on immigration.293 Cruz and Rubio fared well against establishment Republicans such as Jeb Bush and John Kasich; however, they hit an insurmountable obstacle in the persona of real estate mogul and media celebrity Donald Trump. Initially considered a mere joke by numerous pundits,294 Trump quickly became the star of the GOP primaries, employing an unorthodox and vicious campaign rhetoric that relied on bashing Washington D.C.295 and advocating extreme policies such as the mass deportation of illegal immigrants and building a wall between the United States and Mexico.296
Donald Trump’s frequent misogyny and xenophobia was, however, also coupled with a willingness to split with party doctrine.297 While Trump frequently changed his stance on issues,298 at the outset of his campaign he embraced tax increases on the
Liberal Millennial Revolution,” The Atlantic (February 29, 2016)
60 wealthiest and expressed his sympathy for a single-payer healthcare system.299 Crucially, Trump also opposed international trade deals, claiming that agreements such as NAFTA and the planned TPP were depriving the American working-class of jobs.300 Trump’s economic protectionism positioned the real estate mogul close to such political outsiders as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot who ran for president during the 1990s with a similar message.301 Economic nationalism boosted the billionaire’s appeal among the white working class,302 and also made Trump appealing to many Tea Party supporters skeptical about international trade deals.303 As Trump rode the wave of anger against Washington elites and surged to the top of the GOP primaries, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio found themselves in a peculiar position where they were no longer battling the establishment; they were the establishment.304
After Trump’s victory in the primaries became certain and his last opponent, conservative hardliner Ted Cruz conceded defeat, the Tea Party’s position as the leading populist force in Washington became jeopardized.305 The Texas senator’s loss revealed that the Tea Party’s brand of activism no longer controlled the rebellious anti- establishment energy of the GOP base; instead, it was Donald Trump who was profiting
299 Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong, 434-435. 300 T.J. Coles, President Trump, Inc.: How Big Business and Neoliberalism Empower Populism and the Far-Right (Sussex, UK: Clairview Books, 2017), 126-128. 301 During the 1990s, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan repeatedly ran for the presidency with campaigns built around economic nationalism. Perot ran as an independent and subsequently as the candidate of the Reform Party he founded. Buchanan initially ran as a Republican and later under the banner of the Reform Party. Neither of the candidates succeeded; however, their strong opposition to international trade did resonate with voters, particularly with the white working class. In 1992, Perot received nearly 19% of the popular vote, which was the highest percentage for a third-party candidate since 1912. See James W. Caesar et al. Defying the Odds: The 2016 Elections and American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 8-10. 302 The white working class would prove to be Trump’s most solid supporter base, especially in the GOP nominee’s runoff against Hillary Clinton “Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites,” The New York Times (November 9, 2016)
61 from it.306 Many conservative voters on whom Ted Cruz counted gradually flocked to the New York billionaire, whose anti-establishment rhetoric and radical views on immigration enjoyed growing support among the Tea Party’s demographic.307 Trump established himself as the true maverick among the Republican candidates, robbing Cruz of the appeal he once held for the Tea Party as an outsider. In many ways, this shift mirrored how a few years earlier the Tea Party usurped the Republican establishment’s “Politics of No” in order to carve out influence for itself in Congress. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, Republican hardliners such as Ted Cruz, who thrived on their vicious rhetoric, steadily cultivated a political environment where populist demagoguery could flourish, falsely assuming that ardent anti-establishment crowds would remain their loyal supporters indefinitely.308 The Tea Party’s uncompromising congressional politics also contributed to the shrinking trust in political institutions among the electorate, which reached record lows following 2010, making the political landscape ripe for Trump’s campaign.309 In this sense, Donald Trump’s triumph was a product of the Tea Party’s confrontational politics just as much as the conservative movement was a product of the GOP’s obstructionism and partisanship. While the Tea Party did not disappear with the billionaire’s election, Donald Trump usurped the very energy that gave rise to the movement in 2008, casting hardline conservatives who posed as outsiders a few years earlier as the accomplices of the establishment they once fought against.
The 2016 presidential campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump confirmed the growing influence of populism on American politics, as both candidates owed much of their rhetoric to the populist forces that rose to prominence during Barack Obama’s presidency. Even though Occupy Wall Street never coalesced into a political movement, Sanders’ campaign can be interpreted as a political iteration of the sentiment that drove the 2011 lower Manhattan protests, signaling that wealth inequality would
306 Molly Ball, “The Day the Republican Party Died,” The Atlantic (May 4, 2016)
62 continue to play an increasingly dominant role in American politics in the future.310 Donald Trump’s successful bid for the Republican nomination and later the presidency, on the other hand, proved that the Tea Party did not have a monopoly on conservative anti-establishment rhetoric. The billionaire’s successful campaign against Tea Party favorites Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz also demonstrated that the anger driving populism is a fickle and elusive political ally that can easily render its champions of yesteryear the foes of tomorrow.
310 Thomas Piketty, “Thomas Piketty on the Rise of Bernie Sanders: The US Enters a New Political Era,” The Guardian (February 16, 2016)
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Conclusion
In my diploma thesis, I strove to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evolution and political impact of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, two popular movements that rose to prominence in the wake of the Great Recession. First, I analyzed the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as individual movements, focusing on their development, ideology, and organizational structure. This was followed by a comparison aiming to determine whether the two populist movements could be considered each other’s counterparts on different sides of the political spectrum. After elaborating on their commonalities and differences, I reviewed the political impact of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, determining to what extent they managed to integrate themselves into the political establishment. The congressional and presidential elections between 2010 and 2016 were used as case studies to illustrate this process, highlighting the influence of the movements as well as the limits of their appeal.
The Tea Party presented itself as a top-down conservative grassroots initiative, whose goal was to curtail the federal government’s expansion and wasteful spending, which was typified by the 2008 bailouts, 2009 stimulus package, and later the Obama administration’s healthcare reform. While the beginnings of the movement can be traced back to a network of loosely-related libertarian fundraising groups, my analysis concluded that the Tea Party’s self-ascribed title of the “official grassroots American movement” was problematic. This was due to the involvement of major conservative organizations such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity in the movement’s early activities, in addition to which the Tea Party also benefited from the arduous support of partisan media outlets such as Fox News.
Surveys of the economic and social background of Tea Party supporters helped to establish that the movement’s criticism of President Barack Obama and his policies was motivated by more than just concerns about the scope of government and its spending. By applying sociologist Herbert Blumer’s theory of racial prejudice to the Tea Party’s discourse about the “productive” and “unproductive” members of American society, I discerned that status anxiety was central to the movement’s rhetoric and identity. The Tea Party’s criticism of big government was driven by claims that immigrants, ethnic minorities, as well as younger generations were receiving welfare
64 benefits at the expense of the conservative movement’s older, largely white demographic of “hardworking taxpayers.” The movement’s racial bias was further underlined by its supporters’ frequent allegations that Barack Obama was an “un- American” president, which included questioning his American citizenship.
Unlike the Tea Party that increasingly profiled itself against Barack Obama’s persona and legislative agenda, Occupy Wall Street emerged in 2011 as a criticism of widespread economic injustice in the United States. The Occupy movement’s narrative located the causes of the Great Recession in a flawed economic and political system that gave disproportionate power to political and financial elites, while “the 99 percent” faced growing wealth inequality and shrinking prospects of social mobility. In my analysis, I examined Occupy Wall Street’s international roots, decentralized structure, and the movement’s successful utilization of social media, which allowed the iconic takeover of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to inspire a short-lived, but global protest movement.
Occupy Wall Street created a powerful rhetoric and set of images revolving around class warfare; however, the movement’s decentralized nature and its inability to coalesce around a set of demands made its popularity fleeting. By the end of 2011, Occupy encampments across the United States saw diminishing participation and they were facing imminent closure by the authorities. Ultimately, Occupy Wall Street made its mark as a social rather than political movement, as its most laudable achievement was raising public awareness about wealth inequality.
Due to sharing a populist rhetoric that pitted the “elites” against “ordinary people,” the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were frequently referred to as counterparts. While their anti-elite rhetoric did connect these movements to each other, as well as to the broader history of populism in the United States, I argued that these commonalities should not be overestimated. By using John B. Judis’ study of contemporary populism, I established that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party represented two different strains of populist rhetoric, since the former movement profiled itself against the “elites” as well the “undeserving” segments of American society, while Occupy identified the “1 percent” as its sole target for criticism.
In addition to highlighting their distinct populist narratives, I also emphasized the differences between the two movements’ demographics and their relationship to
65 special interest groups. I established that Occupy Wall Street was more fitting to be described as a grassroots movement than the Tea Party, as it did not enjoy the aid of major organizations or media outlets during its formation, in addition to which Occupy also had a more diverse supporter base than the conservative movement. At the same time, however, I stressed that the Tea Party’s close relationship with conservative organizations and the Republican Party enabled it to successfully transform into a political force, whereas Occupy rejected the establishment completely and became a “frenzy that fizzled.”311
Starting with the 2010 congressional elections, Republican candidates who ran under the banner of the Tea Party frequently succeeded at winning seats in the House and Senate, strengthening the GOP’s conservative wing. Although the movement contributed to the Republican Party’s expanding control over Congress throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, Tea Party hardliners also caused internal tension in the GOP with their fervent opposition to political compromise. This led to a decrease in Congress’ productivity and to political showdowns such as the 2013 government shutdown and the 2015 resignation of John Boehner as Speaker of the House. Although Tea Party conservatives became denounced as the chief cause of congressional gridlocks and partisanship, my analysis drew attention to the fact that in many cases the Republican hardliners were merely taking the GOP’s self-declared policy of rejecting bipartisanship to the extreme, even at the expense of party discipline.
After reviewing the Tea Party’s influence in congressional politics, I assessed why the movement was less successful in presidential elections. The 2012 and 2016 races included several Tea Party favorites; however, these candidates had a limited appeal to the broader public, while the Republican frontrunners did not conform to the movements’ archconservative agenda. In 2012, Mitt Romney made limited attempts to appease the Tea Party block, but ultimately rendered himself as a lukewarm candidate for both conservatives and moderates. Moreover, Barack Obama used the zeitgeist of Occupy Wall Street against his Republican challenger, portraying Romney as a candidate of the elite who was indifferent to the economic plight of Americans.
311 Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Occupy Wall Street: A Frenzy that Fizzled,” The New York Times (September 17, 2012)
66
The 2016 elections saw an even more prominent resurgence of class warfare rhetoric with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Although ultimately beaten by Hillary Clinton, Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nomination attracted a formidable base of supporters with its populist discourse that made economic injustice its central theme. I argued that Hillary Clinton’s willingness to adapt a series of progressive reform proposals in reaction to Bernie Sanders’ popularity among young voters was proof that leftwing populist rhetoric such as that of Occupy Wall Street could be leveraged in electoral politics, when coupled with a solid political agenda and leadership.
Among the 2016 Republican candidates, my diploma thesis focused predominantly on Donald Trump, the New York billionaire who delivered a blow to both establishment Republicans and the Tea Party. Relying on a ruthless rhetoric and economic populism, Trump not only managed to beat moderate Republicans, he also successfully won over many conservatives who initially supported Tea Party favorites Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. I came to the conclusion that Trump’s success was not coincidental, but the product of a climate favoring vicious political discourse that hardline conservatives such as Cruz helped to create. For this reason, I attributed Donald Trump’s triumph in the GOP primaries to the real-estate mogul’s ability to successfully exploit the anti-establishment rhetoric popularized by the Tea Party and use it against the movement’s own candidates, proving that populism was a fleeting political ally.
While the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were in many ways a reaction to the economic and social climate of Barack Obama’s presidency, the story of these two movements is unlikely to be complete at this point. Occupy Wall Street had largely fallen apart following the iconic protest at Zuccotti Park, however, the 2016 presidential elections showed that its brand of populism still holds considerable appeal and it is likely to be adopted by various political actors and factions in the future. Similarly, while the Tea Party’s reverence of ideological purity was not rewarded in 2016, future conservative newcomers and firebrands are still likely to benefit from either the movement’s direct support or from adopting the uncompromising rhetoric it cultivated. Even though the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street may never again enjoy the same significance they did during Barack Obama’s years in office, the rhetoric and ethos that drove these movements is likely to stay with us for many elections to come.
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Souhrn
Diplomová práce se zabývala rozborem hnutí Occupy Wall Street a Tea Party, která vznikla v důsledku ekonomické krize roku 2007-2008. Práce nejprve zkoumala tato hnutí individuálně, se zaměřením na jejich rozvoj, ideologii, a organizační strukturu. Následně byla hnutí Tea Party a Occupy Wall Street porovnávána za účelem zjistit, zda je na místě považovat je za tzv. „dvě strany jedné mince.” Po prozkoumání nejzásadnějších podobností a odlišností se práce zaměřila na politický dopad těchto hnutí, k čemuž sloužila analýza jejich integrace do amerického politického establishmentu.
První kapitola analyzovala vývoj Tea Party. Práce problematizovala status Tea Party jako autentického lidového hnutí, jelikož se na jeho vzestupu intenzivně podílela jak konzervativní média, tak i organizace, které Tea Party poskytovaly značné finanční prostředky. Analýza také zkoumala problematické rasové podtóny, kterými se ideologie Tea Party vyznačovala. Následně se diplomová práce zabývala Occupy Wall Street, hnutím, které se profilovalo jako vzpoura občanů proti zkorumpovanému politickému systému, který sloužil finančním a politickým elitám, nikoliv lidu. Středobodem analýzy byly zejména zrod a mezinárodní kořeny hnutí, tak jako i průběh ikonických protestů ve finanční čtvrti Manhattnu. Individuální analýzu Occupy Wall Street a Tea Party následovalo jejich porovnání, na jehož základě práce dospěla k závěru, že hnutí představují dvě rozličné větvě populismu. Bylo také podotknuto, že Occupy Wall Street vykazovalo více znaků autentického lidového hnutí než Tea Party, a to díky větší míře nezávislosti na etablovaných organizacích a médiích.
Poslední kapitola práce se zaměřila na politický dopad a integraci Tea Party a Occupy Wall Street. Zde bylo zdůrazňováno, že konzervativní hnutí bylo na politické scéně neporovnatelně úspěšnější než Occupy Wall Street, jelikož z Tea Party se po volbách do kongresu roku 2010 stala vlivná frakce Republikánské strany. Nicméně, hnutí také způsobilo vnitřní rozpor mezi republikány, což vedlo k několika politickým krizím a k častým bojům mezi středoproudovými a konzervativními členy strany. Rozbor se zaměřil na ty nejzásadnější konflikty v kongresu, a také zkoumal neúspěch Tea Party v prezidentských primárkách roku 2012 a 2016. Během obou volebních cyklů
68 se ukázalo, že kandidáti podporovaní Tea Party měli značně omezenou popularitu mezi voliči, a nedokázali úspěšně čelit silnějším republikánským kandidátům jako Mitt Romney a následně Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street bylo zmíněno v kontextu demokratických primárek 2016, během kterých vermontský senátor Bernie Sanders svou kampaní navázal na ideje hnutí a zdůraznil přetrvávající relevanci její populistické rétoriky. Závěr práce podotkl, že ačkoliv byla hnutí Tea Party a Occupy Wall Street výsledkem éry Baracka Obamy, vliv jejich rétoriky a étosu na americkou politiku bude s největší pravděpodobností spatřitelný i v následujících několika letech.
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