Essay: "We Don't Need a Left-Wing Tea Party"

When the Tea Party movement first started up (at the time, hilariously referring to themselves as "tea baggers") I remember thinking that it wouldn't last too long.  It was just too stupid.  But I think, in the long run, their stupidity has been an asset to them, and I think this has some alarming implications for the new left-wing "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

What makes the Tea Party so stupid?  After all, their basic aim, to make government "smaller" and to lower taxes, is something many, if not most, people can agree with.  Our politics certainly are in a bad way these days.  The bad guys, Washington fat cats and lobbyists, are certainly very bad.  So why is it dumb?

First, it is absurdly vague.  Okay - you want to lower taxes.  Well, what services do you want to cut? What do you want to privatize?  Whose taxes do you want to cut first?  This is actually more important than the goal to make government smaller. As noted, most of us can agree that government should be as small as possible, just not how small and what should get cut.

Second, it is naively optimismtic.  The whole idea of taxes being "wrong" is overly simplistic.  We all benefit from having an army, a police force, public roads.  We all should be able to agree it's best for the state to provide these things.  So the whole "never raise taxes" thing is just a red herring.

(Side note: seriously?  Never raise taxes?  Ever?  The Chinese invade Alaska - no new taxes?)

Third, it scapegoats individuals and institutions that are easy to pick on instead of turning the focus on choices, we, as a society have made.  We are in debt because we spent more than we earn, and our politicians are crooks because we are apathetic and ignorant.  But the Tea Party doesn't blame us for that.  Oh no.  In fact, by engaging in this scapegoating, and failing to provide specific goals or policies, it makes the situation worse.  I don't have to know what the fuck is going on, the tea bagger says.  I'm pissed off and you're evil - so knock it off, and never raise taxes, ever.

Instead of hurting the Tea Party movement, all of these flaws have increased its popularity. It's easy to like something that doesn't force you to make hard choices, that's very idealisitic sounding, and that places the blame for your problems on someone else.  And I think we can agree this has not been helpful to our political situation.  I suppose the movement could be said to have "fired up politics" or increased interest, but it hasn't done so in a productive way.  It doesn't increases people's knowledge, it encourages them to be bitter and to engage in scape-goating.  It has failed to address the root problem of the issues that created the movement.  Hence, the bitter political deadlock we find ourselves in now.

I am afraid a similar fate may await the OWS movement.  Of course, I have more respect for them than the Tea Partiers, but the same basic problem remains.  And once again, they are using their weaknesses as a strength.

The first warning sign is the apparent willingness of the protestors to admit that they have no goals or demands.  Instead, plan to develop them through some kind of democratic, grass-roots process.  I am sorry.  If you are protesting without demands, you are not protesting.  I do not know what you are doing.  Rioting or creating a disturbance, perhaps.  Uncharitably, you could be said to be living out some Che Guevera fantasy born out of a life of privilege.  But you are not protesting.  If you want to protest, your demands have to come first.

If you start with vague goals, you will never get anywhere.  It is not enough to say you will figure it out later.  By then, you will have amassed a huge horde of followers whose aims may be completely irreconcilable, and the movement will be crippled.  The level of debate in this whole fiasco really bears that out.  Check out this link that was put up on Facebook by a close friend of mine.  It involves a debate between two individuals, O'Leary and Hedges. 

The blogger describes the following description by Hedges of the OWS movement's goals as patient and logical:

They know precisely what they want ; they want to reverse the corporate coup that's taken place in the US and rendered the citizenry impotent and they won't stop until that happens and frankly if we don't break the back of corporations, we're all finished anyway since we're rapidly trashing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for survival. This is literally a fight for life - it's that grave, it's that serious. Corporations, unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force - it commodifies everything - human beings, the natural world which it exploits for profit until exhaustion and collapse. The bottom line is we don't have much time left - we are on the cusp of perhaps another major banking crisis in Europe, defaults in Greece, followed by Spain, Portugal. There's been no restrictions, no regulations on Wall Street - they've looted the US Treasury, they've played all the games that they were playing before and we're about to pay for it all over again.


So let's stop right there.  First of all, depsite Hedges' comment that they know "precisely" what they want, his response is muddled and vague.  The author touches on "a corporate coup", "breaking the back of corporations", the environment, Karl Marx (?!?), a banking crisis in Europe, "no restrictions and no regulation" on Wall Street, and accuses "them" (financial institutions, presumably, but it's never made clear) of "looting" the US Treasury.

Look how vague this is.  Look how emotional it is, and technically inaccurate. What corporate coup?  What does it mean to break a corporation's back? Why are financial institutions to blame for the banking crisis in Europe?  Unfettered capitalism in Greece?  Really?  What looting of the treasury?  Is he referring to the bail-outs of the banks in 2008?  Because, you know, the government didn't lose very much money on that program at all (leaving aside the moral hazard it created).

(Side note: Karl Marx? Seriously?  In 2011?  Marx is no more relevant to a modern discussion of politics and economics than Freud is to a modern psychologist.) 

Hedges can show what the OWS protesters are upset about, but not what they propose to do about it.  He can show what the are against, or what they think they are against, but not what they want.

O'Leary's response is to accuse Hedges of being a "left wing nutbar" and to accuse him of wanting "to shut down every corporation."  A straw man argument if I ever heard one, although Hedges left himself open to it with the "break the back of the corporations" remark.  Neither Hedges nor O'Leary bothers to make reference to a country like, say, Sweden, who's on track to meet their Kyoto targets, provides a decent social safety network, and has a nicely growing economy.  Neither party bothers to make any specific policy suggestions (although Hedges comes close, below).  Instead, Hedges references Marx and O'Leary jokingly asks Hedges whether he's driving a car to the protest.  Nice work boys.

Although O'Leary comes across as the much bigger dickhead, I think the terrible debate is equally Hedges' fault.  He had his moment to say what OWS is all about, and he failed.  That was his responsibility, not O'Leary's.  It's a left wing movement and he should be able to say what it's about. Instead, he left himself open for O'Leary's bad faith cracks and the debate degenerated, with Hedges saying it would be "the last time" he would appear on the show.  Both left wing and right wing online echo-chambers presumably got their sound bites, and nothing of value was accomplished.

It is the OWS movement's responsibility, and no one else's, to articulate clear and concise goals.  If they make vague demands like "breaking the backs of corporations", they should not expect the mainstream media, let alone right-wing pundits, to translate that message to the public.  Martin Luther had 95 theses.  Anna Hazare has draft anti-corruption legislation.  OWS needs to do the same.

Our economy and our government are in a mess right now and there's a wide perception that it's somehow the banks' fault.  So Hedges says:

If, instead of handing massive sums of money to CitiBank, Wells Fargo - which are basically zombie banks that still hold tremendous toxic assets - we had created ten regional banks with $10 billion each and leveraged them 10 to 1, people could have been saved. Six million people have been pushed out of their homes because of foreclosures and mortgages.

To give Hedges credit here, this is actually a constructive suggestion.  Maybe he should have opened with this instead of Marx.  Maybe this should be one of the goals of the OWS movement, when they get around to it.

But let's please remember the bail-out was not actually all that expensive, and that letting the banks go bankrupt would have been fucking armageddon.  A radical reconstruction, while interesting, would have been very risky.

Also, let's also remember that the financial crisis did not cause foreclosures; it's the other way around.  There was a massive housing bubble, caused in no small party by shady loans (loans which were not actually made by Goldman Sachs), and it popped.   A number of banks were overly exposed to the risk of that happening and they almost started to fall like dominoes.

Remember, ordinary people were more than happy to borrow lots of money to buy a house when the market was rising, and the banks were more than happy to loan it to them.  Everyone was being stupid.  I suppose you can say there was a greater responsibility on the banks to have known better, and certainly, individual institutions and actors behaved negligently and fraudulently.  But it was just a bubble.  They happen every fifteen years.  It wasn't some devious scheme.  No one involved was clever enough to pull something like that off.  Furthermore, no one really had anything to gain. The banks took an enormous reputational hit and lost a whack of money (although they are still rich and had a soft landing).  Given the opportunity, I am sure they would not do the same thing over again.

All of this is to say that our situation is complicated.  For me, the number one thing (as mentioned by Mr. Hedges) is to separate commercial and investment banking and to put strict limits on leverage.  That's why there was no banking crisis in Canada (although we may have a housing bubble).  There is actually some consensus on this and legislation might be forthcoming (if the US government can still pass laws).

But the deeper problems in our society are much more complicated.  As fun as it is to hate on Wall Street, the real issue is the "hollowing out" of our economy.  Manufacturing has shifted overseas.  As they said on The Wire, we used to build shit in this country, but now we just put our hand in the other guy's pocket.  That is the story of the past thirty years of North America.  That's why we needed bubbles (dot-com, real estate, government stimulus) to fuel our economic growth.  But what's the answer?  Stop trading with India and China?  Hundreds of millions (probably more than the population of America and Canada combined) have been lifted out of poverty through trade.  The price of goods here in North America would skyrocket.  Plus, our economies are now so intertwined, that trying to separate them would be hideously traumatic.  It may not even be possible.

As long as we keep trading with China, and it's much cheaper for them to manufacture things than for us, we are going to have some problems that are not easy to solve.  And that's why we're facing the depressing situation where the middle and lower classes are getting squeezed, while the rich are getting ever richer.

The growing gap between rich and poor is a huge issue, huge.  And it's the basic issue that is driving the OWS movement.  The problem is, no one in the movement knows what to do about it.  Boiled down to its essence, the OWS basic message is "somebody do something!"  But who? And what?

I think the OWS movement is generally favorably perceived by the left.  The people are finally rising up!  Now we'll see real change!  But no, we won't.  Not unless we know what the problem is and how to fix it.  If our problems, political and economic, are caused by apathy and ignorance, then this movement only addresses the former concern, and not the second.  But the second problem, ignorance, is by far the more intractable.  Because even the most intelligent people, facing our problems, aren't sure what to do.

To some, this doesn't matter.  We'll figure it out the solution after we get the people fired up about the problem.  Well, okay.  But that hasn't worked for the Tea Party.  They've found that it's easier, more comfortable, to pick on scapegoats and stick to impractical ideals than to actually think about tough choices, which necessarily means alienating part of your support.  I honestly believe that the same thing will happen with the OWS movement unless people on the left start demanding that it doesn't.  As satisfying it is to have "our team" in the headlines for once, we do not need another Tea Party.