New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s attempt to liken Occupy Wall Street protesters to Tea Party activists demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of both movements.
In a video from a town hall meeting, which my colleague Charlie Spiering posted below, Christie responds to a question on the Wall Street protests by arguing that, “I think if you look at the Occupy Wall Street folks and the Tea Party folks, that they come from the same perspective, they just have different solutions. ”
But in reality, the two movements offer different solutions precisely because they come from different philosophical perspectives.
The general thrust of the Tea Party movement is a belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility. Tea Partiers want government to take as little of their money as possible and provide as few handouts and subsidies as possible.
By contrast, Wall Street protesters are more focused on income inequality, and they believe that government should play an active role alleviating this problem by imposing a bigger burden on wealthier Americans and offering more services to the poor.
Christie insisted that both groups are the same in that, “What they are saying is, ‘The Government is not working for me anymore. The government is not being fair and the government is not helping me the way it should.'”
But this suggests a fundamental ignorance of the Tea Party movement. Tea Partiers don’t want government to help them, they want government to leave them alone.
There might be superficial overlap between the two groups. For instance, you may find signs at either rally opposing the Wall Street bailout. But the Wall Street protesters who oppose the bailout do so because they think the government should have bailed out other Americans, such as homeowners, instead. Tea Partiers are opposed to the whole idea of using taxpayer money to reward people for their reckless behavior, regardless of their wealth.
To suggest that the two groups have the same perspectives is to say that conservatives and libertarians who supported market-based health care and liberals who advocated a fully socialized health care system came from the “same perspective” when they both opposed Obamacare.
