The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement puts into stark relief the populism of the Tea Party. Or should we call it populism at all? For the Tea Party represents something ahistorical: the first mass uprising against the masses.
The Tea Party began with a rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli. He loudly condemned the government's plan to help people stay in their homes and asked, "(D)o we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages"? He suggested holding a tea party for traders to dump derivatives into the Chicago River.
Santelli's insistence that the millions of people kicked out of their homes are "losers" is a sentiment widely shared among Tea Party Republicans. When asked about the Wall Street protests, Herman Cain, a front-runner in the Republican presidential campaign declared, "Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself."
During a CNN televised Republican presidential debate held in front of a Tea Party audience, the moderator asked Ron Paul what he would do if a healthy 30-year-old man decided not to buy health insurance and then had an injury or disease that required hospitalization and surgery. Ron Paul said the man must be held responsible for his actions. The moderator asked, "Should society just let him die?" Audience members vocally expressed their approval.
This lack of empathy for what Occupy Wall Street would call the 99% is manifest wherever Tea Party Republicans come to power.
In Michigan nearly 2 million people, about 20 percent of the state's population, depend on food stamps. Most of them work but earn too little to make ends meet. This year, even while the state remains mired in the worst recession since the 1930s the new Republican governor and legislature made it far more difficult to qualify. Until last month, eligibility was based on income. Now assets of $5,000 in the bank or a vehicle worth more than $15,000 will make a household ineligible.
For Michigan Republicans it is not enough to be poor and needy to qualify for food assistance. You must be destitute.
Or destitute and pure. In 2011, at the urging of Governor Rick Scott, who rode to office on a wave of Tea Party support, Florida now requires drug testing of welfare applicants. Roughly 113,000 Florida welfare recipients must pay for their own drug test. The Economist magazine's headlines conveyed the elation Tea Party members probably felt with this victory: "Drug testing in Florida: their tea-cup runneth over."
Only two percent of Florida's welfare applicants are failing the test, according to the state's Department of Children and Families. Add up the savings from not paying welfare to this two percent and subtract the cost of testing all applicants and Florida may save "up to $40,800 to $60,000 for a program that state analysts have predicted will cost $178 million this fiscal year" the Tampa Tribune concludes.
But in Florida or Michigan or a dozen other states, it's not about saving money. It's about punishing the "losers" and making clear that we are not our brothers' keeper.
For Occupy Wall Street, taxing billionaires at half the rate their secretaries pay while allowing the top one percent of the population to "earn" as much as the bottom 60 percent is unfair. For Tea Party Republicans, taxes themselves are unfair while inequality is desirable.
All Republican candidates promise to lower taxes on the rich. Herman Cain has captured the conservative imagination with his proposal for a nine percent flat tax on the rich and corporations and a nine percent national sales tax. The Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that under Cain's plan, the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers will pay $2,000 more in taxes while the richest one percent will pay $210,000 less.
The Tea Party's vision of a future America may have been most clearly expressed by the budget introduced last spring by Tea Party darling Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and passed enthusiastically by the new Republican House. "This is not a budget," Ryan declared. "This is a cause."
Indeed it was and is. Ryan's plan would cut about $4.3 trillion from programs that primarily benefit the 99% while reducing taxes by about an equal amount, $4.2 trillion, to the overwhelmingly benefit of the one percent. According to Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities the plan "would produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history, while increasing poverty and inequality more than any measure in recent times and possibly in the nation's history."
The Tea Party hates the very idea of government, embracing with a vengeance Ronald Reagan's famous dictum, "Government is the problem." Occupy Wall Street also sees government as an enemy when democracy has been corrupted by money and government has been captured by corporations. The Declaration of Principles adopted by the general assembly of Occupy Wall Street in its first days makes this clear, "...No true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments."
But the Wall Street protesters also know that government is the only vehicle through which the majority can fashion the rules that increase personal security and restrain unbridled greed and private power. They know that if we give up on governance we give up on our ability to collectively influence our future.
Which is why high on the list of demands by these protesters is to minimize the impact of money on politics and increase the number of people voting.
Tea Partiers again take the opposite position. They defend the right of global corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections and they advocate policies that suppress voter turnout.
"Since Republicans won control of many statehouses last November, more than a dozen states have passed laws requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives," the New York Times reported a few weeks back.
A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law analyzed 19 laws that passed and two executive orders that were issued in 14 states this year. The report concludes that these policy changes "could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012."
Such is the faux populism of the Tea Party.