by Van Jones
Successfully Pivoted from Protest to Politics
Like bees to honey, right-wing candidates began to flock to the Tea Party and adopt the protesters’ platform as their own. As they entered 2010, the Tea Partiers turned their attention from making waves at town hall meetings to making an impact in electoral races. When Ted Kennedy’s seat opened in solidly Democratic Massachusetts, the special election in January went to Republican Scott Brown—with Tea Party support. The movement propelled extreme right-wingers into national office and began taking over governor’s mansions across the country. Rand Paul in Kentucky and Nikki Haley in South Carolina became national figures.
Everyone who had not taken the movement seriously before that point wound up with egg on her or his face. As office holders, the newly elected Tea Party candidates have not been afraid to take risks, nor have they been shy about acting on their extremist ideology. They immediately began an all-out assault on public workers and women’s rights, while doling out tax breaks for millionaires and corporations.
Benefited from Racial Anxiety
The movement actively used Barack Obama as a foil, promoting wild and outlandish fears about his character, origins, and aims. Of course, whenever a mostly white group directs such venom at a black man such as Obama, concerns arise about racist motivations.
The majority of Tea Party members say they oppose racism and deeply resent the tendency of the media to paint them all with the same brush of bigotry.
But serious observers continue to have doubts. In October 2010, the NAACP released a report entitled “Tea Party Nationalism,” which linked six major, national Tea Party networks to racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant hate groups and militias. For example, the direct descendant of the nefarious White Citizens’ Council, known as the Council of Conservative Citizens, used its website and periodical to promote Tea Party events.
The six groups listed were the Tea Party Express; 1776 Tea Party, led by people who were the leaders of the Minuteman vigilante group; ResistNet/Patriot Action Network, home to many of the nativists and anti-immigrant xenophobes; Tea Party Nation; Tea Party Patriots; and FreedomWorks Tea Party, which is the only group without explicit “birthers” among its leaders.
The report cited the explicitly, and covertly, racist signs carried at rallies, as well as the events of March 20, 2010. On that day, as a small group of congressmen walked to the Capitol to vote on healthcare reform, Tea Party protestors verbally assaulted them. They called Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) a “faggot” and civil rights legend John Lewis (D-GA) a “n——r.” At an earlier rally in July 2009, entertainment was provided by Poker Face, whose lead singer has publicly called the Holocaust a hoax.
Another racially tinged issue animates Tea Party members. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, authors of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, wrote in a December 2011 opinion piece for the New York Times,
Immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern expressed by Tea Party activists, usually as a symbol of a broader national decline. Asked why she was a member of the movement, a woman from Virginia asked rhetorically, “What is going on in this country? What is going on with immigration?” A Tea Party leader in Massachusetts expressed her desire to stand on the border “with a gun” while an activist in Arizona jokingly referred to an immigration plan in the form of a “12 million passenger bus” to send unauthorized immigrants out of the United States.
In a survey of Tea Party members in Massachusetts we conducted, immigration was second only to deficits on the list of issues the party should address. Another man, after we interviewed him in the afternoon, took us aside at a meeting that evening to say specifically that he wished he had said more about immigration because that was really his top issue.
For those who worry that antipathy for immigration is fueled by racial animus against Latinos, such obsessions are very disturbing.
“Theirs is an American nationalism,” the NAACP report concluded, “that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans’; including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies’), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit within a ‘Christian nation.’”
The vast majority of Tea Party members reject overt anti-black racism, and they claim to see all Americans as equal. But the movement has never acted forcefully to expel the haters in its midst. So at a minimum, the Tea Party movement has continued to benefit from a bigotry it claims to abhor.
Functioning Horizontally and Collaboratively
Perhaps the greatest source of the Tea Party movement’s strength has been its ability to function horizontally and collaboratively.
The Tea Party is an open-source brand, which means nobody owns it. Nobody can trademark or copyright the term “Tea Party”; after all, it is a part of American history. So there are many groupings and associations, for example, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, and Tea Party Nation. At least 3,528 affiliates have agreed to use “Tea Party Patriots.” But nobody owns the core brand.
The Tea Party movement is not a formal organization with a president and headquarters in Washington, DC. It functions more like a network, marked by a set of principles and values. Because the Tea Party movement operates more like an informal association than a traditional, hierarchical organization, it has great resilience. The Tea Party understood that a smart movement does not have just one charismatic leader but acts as a charismatic network. It does not rise or fall based on the fate of any single individual or personality. Of course, it uses a few well-known, charismatic figures very well, such as Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Glenn Beck, and Michele Bachmann—all people who stand out within the movement. But for the most part, the movement used its values—not individuals—as its bedrock. This has been another aspect of its genius. People make mistakes and disappoint. But principles and values are enduring. Glenn Beck lost his TV show, and Sarah Palin fell down the stairway of public opinion, but these events did not hurt the Tea Party one bit.
The Tea Party movement creates linkages between existing, likeminded groups across the country. Some of these preexisting groups had just six people in them; some had hundreds. The Tea Party offered them all a shared brand to augment, rather than replace, each group’s original name. Affiliates didn’t have to change their name, their logo, their leadership, or their board of directors. The only thing that changed was what they inserted after their name: a comma and the words “Tea Party affiliate.” Having pulled together their affiliates, the Tea Party re-presented these groups—not “represented,” but re-presented them to the public—as something new. In fact, the Tea Party is made up of many old ideas and old organizations.
Even the Tea Party’s doctrine was created collaboratively. The Tea Partiers produced a guiding document called the “Contract from America,” which laid out their three basic principles—individual liberty, limited government, and markets—and ten basic objectives. But no single individual wrote it. Thousands of people coauthored it together, as a wiki document, which allows multiple users to easily add, remove, and edit text. Afterward, anyone who embraced the tenets of the contract could consider himself a member of the Tea Party movement. In other words: the guiding document of the Tea Party was crowd-sourced.
There is an irony here. The Tea Party movement speaks of “rugged individualism.” If you have problem, they insist that you should not look to society to help you; you should just be tough and handle it yourself. Yet these rugged individualists have enacted the most collective, cooperative strategy for taking power in the history of the republic. On the other hand, progressives always talk about solidarity and collective action but tend to adopt the most individualistic approaches imaginable, generating thousands of little groups that fight over grants, each with its own little name and its own little domain. The twin ironies ought to be cause for some reflection.
OCCUPY WALL STREET: THE 99% FIGHT BACK
Less than one
year after the Tea Party movement’s electoral triumph, another force arose on the American scene. This group looked very different from the Tea Party.
Young, creative, and colorful, they called themselves Occupy Wall Street. They claimed to represent 99 percent of Americans, as distinguished from the miniscule 1 percent for whom our political and economic systems are working, and who control more than 40 percent of the financial wealth of the country. They took inspiration from 2011’s popular revolutions around the world—the Arab Spring and the general strikes in Europe.
Tragedy Spurs Global Protests
For more insight into the sources of Occupy Wall Street’s inspiration, it is worth reviewing global events in the months preceding their daring protests. In December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after a policewoman confiscated his cart and humiliated him. His action sparked protests against injustice in Tunisia that continued for weeks despite brutal attempts to subdue them. The Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, finally fled the country in mid-January 2011.
This success inspired the people of Egypt to take to their streets—tens of thousands growing to hundreds of thousands and then surpassing a million people who gathered in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo. By February 11, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was stepping down as well, ending his thirty-year reign. The Arab Spring had sprung.
Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha commented,
Like many Egyptians, until I saw thousands upon thousands of demonstrators gathered in Midan al-Tahrir on 25 January—saw that they were neither Islamists nor negligible—and totally identified with them—I was largely skeptical about Egypt having much capacity for true dissent. . . . In the space of a fortnight the spot at which thousands of younger Egyptians have gathered, contrary to all expectations, will have turned irrevocably into a place of memory, a historical site. Passing the square or hearing about it, people start to wonder whether “this is real”; they are already joining in. Faces and voices are incredulous, but it is true: for once at a political event the number of demonstrators is actually greater than the number of Central Security troops restricting their movement and ready to subdue them by force; for once a political event is taking place in the open, in a central space, lasting all day and well into the night.
When Mubarak stepped down, President Obama responded,
We saw a new generation emerge—a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears; a government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations. One Egyptian put it simply: “Most people have discovered in the last few days . . . that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore, ever.”
This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence—not terrorism, not mindless killing—but nonviolence, moral force, that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.
The populist wave didn’t stop there. It rose again and again in Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Mauritania, Sudan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Kuwait, and Morocco. After enduring decades of injustices and oppression, thousands of people were protesting corruption and greed, rising up against dictatorships that had turned a blind eye to the suffering of their people. Everywhere, they were met with force; in many countries, they were subdued, at least for the moment. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and then killed; the leaders of Sudan, Iraq, and Yemen announced that they would step down.
The region calmed somewhat by the end of the spring of 2011, and much has yet to be resolved. But it is clear that the demands of the protestors, who universally called for justice and dignity, did not go unheard.
Meanwhile, Europe was sparking, too. In Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Spain, people united against government austerity measures, were saying, “We will not pay for your crisis.” The newly elected conservative government in Britain—which faces many of the same crises as the United States—responded to financial challenges by cutting public services, asking students to pay higher university fees, closing libraries, and evicting people from their homes. While some of the defining images of 2011 were from the riots that gripped London and parts of the English Midlands, less well known was the inspiring work of organization UK Uncut. Created by a dozen frustrated British citizens, UK Uncut proposed alternatives to the government’s spending cuts by organizing peaceful protests around the country and leading an initiative against the mobile phone giant Vodafone, which owed the government £6 billion in unpaid taxes. These decentralized demonstrations spread like wildfire social networks. They foreshadowed a new pattern of protest: fast-multiplying, leaderless eruptions united by shared grievances, rather than shared leadership structures. It was only a matter of time before such protests leaped “across the pond” and landed in the United States.
BIRTH OF OCCUPY WALL STREET
On September 17, 2011, hundreds of mostly young people decided to occupy a public space where they would enact genuine, direct democracy. Some had responded to a call for action from the Canadian magazine Adbusters; the “tweet that started it all” read, “Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent.” They set up camp in Zuccotti Park, which sits between the New York Stock Exchange and the site of the World Trade Center. Perhaps in honor of the site’s original name, Liberty Plaza Park, they renamed the place Liberty Plaza. And from there, they cried foul at the elite’s rigged economic and political systems. Occupy Wall Street was born. Within a month, the protesters had sparked occupations in solidarity in thousands of cities around the country and the globe.
The core group consisted of mostly activists in their twenties, many of whom had organized sleep-ins outside of New York’s City Hall earlier in the summer, called Bloombergville. The actions were to protest Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed layoffs and city budget cuts. A few of my colleagues from the global justice movement, and from the protests in Seattle in 1999, were also in the mix—so were organizers who had been involved the actions in Tunisia, Greece, and Spain.
In choosing Wall Street as their target, the core group went to the scene of the crimes committed against their future. They announced to the banksters on Wall Street: You got bailed out, I got left out, and now you’re holding back the recovery. You won’t forgive my student loans; you won’t take the debt blanket off my parents with their underwater mortgages; you won’t lend to the small business or the small farmers in my community; you won’t lend a dime to the green businesses. You destroyed my future, so I’m here. I may not have the answers, but I can tell you I’m mad as hell about it, and something’s got to be done.
In the heart of the financial district, these young people camped out in the rain and the cold, at risk of arrest, harassed by the police, and taunted by the mainstream media. Their peaceful persistence inspired more and more people to emerge from the shadows, out of apathy, and into the bright light of the public square.
The encampments grew larger and more diverse every day. In the weeks and months that followed September 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to eighty countries around the world. Young people, the majority of whom were under twenty-five and never before engaged in activism, managed arduous tasks. They did everything by consensus, meaning that everyone present had to agree with every proposal. They conducted their meetings without the benefits of a sound system. The nightly general assemblies attracted crowds in the thousands to gather with their peers and debate the path forward. Many were the same young people who had been inspired by Obama’s candidacy and then disappointed by his presidency. Perhaps because their first experience of political engagement was successful—electing the nation’s first black president—they believed that they could make more change.
By mid-December, the major encampments across the country had been shut down. But the tiny protest
that began in Liberty Park had triggered a major shift in the national dialogue on inequality, our economy, and our democracy. Anyone who thinks the United States has seen the end of the 99% movement is mistaken—as we shall see.
PROSPECTS FOR CONTINUED IMPACT
If this is the first sign of a generation coming to voice, the world might want to buy some earplugs. Occupy Wall Street is composed of people of all ages, but it is powered by younger people. The youth demographics in the United States, alone, are staggering. The Millennial generation is one of the biggest generations of Americans ever.
For a possible preview of things to come, consider the impact of the last big generation of Americans that came barreling through our society: the 76 million baby boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964. When they reached their teens and early twenties, they changed the whole country—positively and permanently.
The Americas had suffered through more than 270 years of enslavement, followed by 100 years of Jim Crow racial terror—almost 400 years of horror. On February 1, 1960, four black baby boomers participated in a sit-in—in which they “occupied” a lunch counter in North Carolina. Within a decade, that generation had helped to break the back of apartheid in the United States. In 1959, the United States was a fairly quiet and quaint country. By 1969, it had exploded into rebellion and color. Why? Because there was a huge generation of young people, with all their energy and idealism, whose energy was set loose. They changed America forever.