Stop Yelling and Pay Attention: The grassroots “Left” and “Right” are saying the same thing!

At a time when Americans seem more divided than at any point since the Civil War, two grassroots protest movements, the Tea Parties and Occupy Wall Street protests, signal the possibility of a major realignment in American politics along the lines of massive shared opposition to the domineering financial sector and its corrupt counterparts in government…

Washington Bails Out Wall Street

Since the very beginning in February 2009, I have defended the Tea Party movement against its detractors in the media and government. Just weeks before they spread like wildfire across the nation, while working through my senior year of college, I sat in front of the television in the Fall of 2008, watching with bewilderment as Congress passed a “$700 billion” bill (which has turned out to be more like $3 trillion in addition to another $10 trillion+ privately loaned out by the Federal Reserve) to bail out Wall Street banks.

As a teenage conservative raised on right-wing talk radio, I had always opposed government welfare programs for the poor. Private charity to help those in need, was in my opinion, not only a good thing, but according to the religious values I professed: an absolute moral imperative. But I didn’t believe charity should be legislated any more than any other private moral belief, just like many Democrats would oppose legislating private moral views about drug use, or Pat Robertson’s sexual mores.

But here I was in 2008 watching with horror as the government acted to redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth– not to people in need, not to the poor, the sick, the suffering, the hungry– but to already extravagantly wealthy Wall Street banks. If redistributing wealth to the poor by government decree, however well-intentioned, seemed misguided, inappropriate, and offensive to my sensibilities about the proper role of government, seeing wealth forcibly taken from middle class and working poor Americans and handed to big corporations was positively egregious decadence and corruption of the highest order!

At least the welfare statists who believe in a publicly-funded “safety net” for the poor have the good intentions of helping people in need. What can be said about the intentions of someone who takes hard-earned money from a struggling middle class household and hands it to the CEO of AIG (which turned around and handed out multimillion dollar bonuses to its top executives)? And I wasn’t the only American outraged by what Congress did.

Outraged Americans in both major political parties were melting the switchboards in DC ahead of each bailout vote, expressing their firm opposition to making Middle America pay for Wall Street’s mistakes. Already long disenchanted with the Bush Administration, many pundits in the conservative blogosphere and talk radio were blasting the bailouts as corporate welfare that Congress had no business passing.

The beginning of the Tea Party

By the time the trillion dollar economic stimulus package had passed the following February, anger, confusion, and dissent toward Washington’s radical economic interventions had reached a fever pitch. I was sitting in a computer room on campus, headphones on, stifling laughter as I watched footage from earlier that day: Rick Santelli on CNBC and calling for a modern day Tea Party. I knew instantly that it would be the start of something big.

Whatever its detractors will say, when the Tea Party movement began spreading to cities across America with protests that February, even bigger ones on “Tax Day” in April, and then positively massive demonstrations by July 4th, it was a completely leaderless, spontaneous, grassroots movement driven by the individual initiative of local groups of hardworking Americans opposed to Washington’s bailouts.

I defended them writing:

‘This Tea Party movement arose out of a frustration at an out-of-touch, out-of-control, out-of-solutions, out-of-money Federal government. Unlike the vague hope and change promised by the Obama campaign in 2007-08, the Tea Partiers had some very specific, very practical, very sane policy proposals to reign Washington in: these were 1) an end to corporate bailouts, 2) a balanced budget, 3) term limits, 4) a “read the bills” act, 5) and a full, public audit of the Federal Reserve bank.

… For goodness’ sake, you’d think any honest liberal would have been thrilled that a bunch of white, middle-aged, middle class Christians were standing up and raging against the malfeasance of corporate America, asking for more transparency and accountability, demanding some more regulation and oversight of the world’s most powerful and secretive private corporation [that would be the Fed], and trying to ensure that Congressional seats are more accessible to every day Americans, not just the wealthy, entrenched establishment.’

While many politicians have since tried to capitalize on the Tea Party’s momentum by branding themselves as “Tea Party” while advancing the same old domestic “Moral Majority” and foreign nation-building agendas, the original Tea Party phenomenon was a move away from these narratives and goals, a stricter focus on fiscal policy and true reform to an economic and political system that nearly all Americans agree is broken, unfair, and unjust.

At the February 2009 Tea Party protest in Nashville, one guy I know thought that it would be cool to dress like a Native American just like the participants at the original Boston Tea Party. Lol. What a tool. (Okay– it was me.)

Common Ground between “right” and “left”

Throughout 2010 I would repeat the same line to all my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and an interviewer from The Guardian at Rand Paul’s Senate victory celebration: “The Tea Party started as a movement to protest the bailouts Washington handed to rich Wall Street bankers. People on the ‘left’ should be thrilled that white, middle age, middle class Americans have made the unearned excess and unfair privilege of corporate America one of their primary issues. Listen: Michael Moore, this big ‘lefty’ just released a documentary all about how evil those bailouts were. Then you’ve got all these people on the ‘right’ who agree with him. Both sides are starting to say the same thing. If we’d stop being so suspicious of each other and listen, we might discover that we’re on the same side!”

I just couldn’t believe that people like my grandmother and my best friend’s mom were out in town halls protesting corporate greed while all my hipster friends from school were sitting at home with a Pabst Blue Ribbon fiddling with their iPhones and playing Wii. It made no sense. I was incredulous that the “left” had so quickly dismissed the Tea Parties as racist and fascist instead of joining them on the streets and in the public discourse as one unified voice against the corporate special interests that had secured financial favors from an insulated, out-of-touch Congress.

Yet after several centrally-planned-and-orchestrated false starts, including the reactionary, dead-on-arrival “Coffee Party” and the MoveOn.org-sponsored American Dream Movement, the “left” and those more aligned with the Democratic Party have finally joined the anti-establishment, grassroots fervor sweeping this country (and the entire world it would seem). The Occupy Wall Street movement is definitely the real “leftist” counterpart to the Tea Party movement, just as grassroots, just as leaderless, just as spontaneous, just as earnestly angry about a system that rewards the malfeasance of entrenched special interests by punishing the hard work and innovation of “the little guy” in Middle America.

This is some pretty serious shared common ground between the most vocal and active wings of the two major political factions in America. Both “sides” agree about the problem. Perhaps neither side is entirely sure about the solution, but both sides seem to intuit that the problem revolves around the financial sector. Getting the Republicans to that place was a true ideological revolution on the part of the Tea Party movement and the 2008 presidential aspirations of Congressman Ron Paul, whose obsession with the financial sector’s misdeeds is finally looking less fringe and more reasonable to the average American. Getting the Democrats– with their reflexive suspicion of big corporations– to the same place shouldn’t have been this hard.

But one thing is clear, and that is this: the now-not-so-silent majorities on both sides of the partisan divide are moving in the same direction, toward completely accepting and internalizing their distrust and disdain for the financial sector and its grip on power in this country. The next step is to have a conversation, a real conversation. No screaming. No yelling. No accusations. No preconceived suspicions of the worst in each others’ motives. The next step is a conversation about how deep this problem goes, the exact nature of its causes, and the precise policies that will effectively solve the problem and reform our broken economic and political system.

Are you willing to listen to me? I’m ready to listen to you.

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