Does the Tea Party want its Wall Street back?

By Richard K. Barry

I hadn't thought much about this small piece of the political dynamic around Occupy Wall Street (OWS), but I think it is true that the Tea Party movement is frustrated that their earlier criticism of high finance in America is being taken over by OWS (as different as those critiques are).

As Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post writes:

The Tea Party was founded on a sense that something ephemeral had been stolen by someone and that a movement was needed to "take the country back." Occupy Wall Street is now getting the media attention the Tea Party believes is rightfully theirs, and the perceived slight can only inflame the movement's sense of victimhood. They didn't just lose a country as they knew it. Now they've lost coverage on CNN too.

But the idea that the Tea Party, aligning itself with Republicans and fiercely critical of Democrats and the Obama Administration, could also think that its critique of Wall Street makes sense is bizarre.

How could they fail to understand that creating conditions for Gordon Gekko levels of greed and wealth accumulation is what the Republican Party has always been about? Do they really think that Democrats are the party of privilege?

Conservatism in America is at the best of times confusing, as it combines populist elements with theoretical rationalizations for great concentrations of wealth and power, but Tea Party anger at OWS really forces us to unpack some of this.

As I understand it, there is a perception on the part of the right that the American capitalist system, suffering as little regulation as possible, is a thing of beauty, providing fair and equal access to prosperity, and that its occasional failure is only the result of the nefarious activities of the few as well as the unhelpful interventions of liberal politicians.

I sometimes think, in this context, of the support 18th-century British parliamentarian Edmund Burke gave to the grievances of the American revolutionaries. It was not, he argued, a revolution at all but rather an attempt to bring things back to a previous condition of fairness. The system, he might have said, was fine. Bad actors had interfered with the goodness of the natural flow of things.

But, for the Occupy Wall Street protesters, and those who support their goals, the system is most certainly not fine. Gross inequalities are a built-in feature of the way we currently allocate resources and, for those of us who think it is important that we live in a society where everyone has enough, some pretty big things would have to change.

To put a fine point on it, the Tea Party movement would seem to be saying, "We want our Wall Street back," implying that we need only go back to a time when there were no bad men and women profiting from subprime mortgage crises and government regulation didn't gum up the works. But of course there will always be bad men and women who wish only to line their pockets in spectacular ways, and without government regulation things would only be worse.

Let's face it, whatever the Tea Party movement's critique of Wall Street, it was always incoherent and few paid attention to it. Even if only at an intuitive level, the OWS position seems to make sense to a lot of people. On its face the mere fact that so much of the wealth in our country is controlled by so few is not acceptable. If the reply from the super wealthy is that those are the rules of the game, then the rules should be changed. Why is that so hard to understand?

Note to the Tea Party: Wall Street has always been corrupt and, just as with all those other vaguely articulated notions of an America that once was, the good Wall Street is not real.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)