Sneer though many of them did, liberals envied the success of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Desperate to embrace an authentic populist movement of their own, they have been buoyed by the results of a Time magazine poll this week, purporting to demonstrate that the nascent Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, at 54 percent approval, are more popular than the Tea Party. As The Examiner’s Phil Klein pointed out earlier this week, however, the numbers produced by the Time survey are quite misleading because of the magazine’s unusually vague but artful wording of questions. For example, Time’s survey described these anti-capitalist protests to respondents as being against the “government’s bank bailout and the influence of money in our political system.” The same description could be said of the Tea Party. In fact, other polls from reputable firms that used more objective questions have pegged OWS support in the low thirties — and with slightly negative net approval ratings.
We bring this up because Democratic officeholders considering encouraging or otherwise embracing the OWS demonstrators ought to think very carefully before doing so. For starters, they should take a thorough look at who the protesters are and what they stand for. According to a New York Magazine survey of OWS participants, a mere 3 percent described themselves as “liberal but fairly mainstream.” By contrast, 34 percent of them agreed with the statement that “the U.S. government is no better than, say, al Qaeda.” Do Democrats really want to march alongside of advocates of the 9/11 Truther version of recent American history?
More than half of the occupiers are under 29, and two-thirds of them are male. Compare this group of naifs to their counterparts in the Tea Party. Gallup found in April 2010 that the latter matched the national population almost precisely in age and income distribution, employment status, and educational attainment. In most respects, they looked like America.
Yes, Tea Partiers were generally more conservative than the population as a whole. But they clearly were the wellspring of one of America’s two competing mainstream ideologies. The OWS events, on the other hand, are replete with propaganda materials, web postings and speeches advocating “revolution” and the destruction of our free-market system. Anarchists are well-represented, and the flagship protest in New York City featured hundreds of pre-printed yellow and black signs from the openly Marxist Workers World Party. Sadly, when Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. — a respected veteran of the civil rights movement — tried to address the OWS throng in Atlanta, he was rudely rebuffed. In comportment, the columnist George Will observed, the Occupiers are to the Tea Partiers as Lady Gaga is to Lord Chesterfield.
As the New Republic magazine has pointed out, these are not liberals camping out in and despoiling our cities’ public places. These are radicals who reject liberalism, both small-L and large-L. Respected politicians from the left side of the aisle should think twice before they embrace a group that physically attacks the police, causes mayhem for local businesses, and makes life hell for local residents. In other words, this isn’t the movement for liberals who hope to be heard by mainstream America.
