Marcy,
I wish I could've been there with Sally and her friends at Occupy
Oakland that afternoon to serve as a kind of cultural/political
mediator. Her highly negative take on the experience suggests that a
major opportunity to help build a working relationship between the
Occupy and Tea Party movements was missed. I am very curious about
whether any serious attempts at finding common ground were made.
The real tragedy is that the extent that the leading populist
movements in the United States see each other as the enemy, it will be
the State that benefits. Government officials will be able to count on
the support of one in suppressing or cracking down on the other,
playing them off against each other whenever one or the other starts
to pose too much of a threat to some facet of the status quo.
At least we have a growing freedom movement, even if the Libertarian
Party is floundering. But we face the challenge of building a truly
popular mass movement to match Occupy and the Tea Party. The
grassroots support for Ron Paul is clearly the genesis of such a
movement, but to be sustainable it needs to be based more broadly on
libertarianism and not so tied to appreciation for a single leader.
Thankfully in Dr. Paul we have a leader who gets this and has
consistently tried to make it "not about me", but we can still expect
a struggle to keep his supporters committed to his across-the-board
libertarianism, rather than fracturing along the lines of the
conventional left-right divide, once he has departed from the scene or
is elected president and starts to be seen by much of the public as
bearing primary responsibility for the massive accumulated problems of
decades of statism.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))