Occupy mirrored the Tea Party’s anti-government populism while ignoring its commercialization of protest

Evidence

When the Occupy movement sat down in Zuccoti Park, they set out to wrest the title for Purity of Populist Expression away from the Tea Party, but almost instantaneously revealed a dearth of appreciation of what might materialize that could render them different. Indeed, many of the obsessions and even some of the language disturbingly mirrored those of their purported opponents. True, they did not immediately set about selling T-shirts, cocked hats, and placards, but the attempt to convince the masses that they should reinterpret their victimhood as a form of empowerment was an agenda without a narrative. In their quest for a more pure democracy, they renounced the existing structures of government, and consequently, abandoned the rafts of state and local unionized workers who were right then being shed by cash-strapped states and municipalities. The disparagement of government was one script practically plagiarized from the Tea Party. The gutting of government employment was an active political battleground (in places such as Ohio and Wisconsin resisting union-stripping and decertification) contemporaneous with OWS, but because it concerned unions, the Occupiers tended to act like it didn’t exist. But more to the point, the Tea Party was consciously organized to give its recruits things to do and upbeat political identities to inhabit, all revolving around the commercialization of protest. All OWS offered were endless feints toward an oxymoron of an anarchist powwow, complete with tents. It was a murketing ploy, only bereft of anything to sell. OWS did not sufficiently appreciate the topography and extent of its opponent’s political organization coupled with its cultural scripts, and for that reason made no coherent attempts to craft and supply an alternative. Or, to phrase it more cruelly, Occupy believed in the bedtime stories of the power of spontaneous order welling up from below, but was in the dark about the realpolitik of the modern privatization of protest. … Without meditating upon the sheer improbability of the Fed actually rebuking the heads of the banks that own and control it, we will focus here instead on the pedestrian mechanics of this attempt at the promotion of the simplest form of political protest. Johnson couldn’t organize the petition himself, so he outsourced it to a new-media website, change.org. The qualms begin when one learns that this is a private for-profit corporation, or as it states, “Change.org is a social action platform that empowers anyone, anywhere to start, join, and win campaigns to change the world. We’re proud to be a certified B Corp, using the power of business for social good.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 909

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about a ‘thought collective’ — here both poles of protest (Tea Party and OWS) converge on anti-government scripts and commercialization, which is relevant to the reader’s advanced goal of tracing how modes of protest themselves were absorbed into the neoliberal frame. — connects to: Occupy collapsed because it rejected theory and organization while ignoring its own neoliberal backers — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 904; The Tea Party fused astroturfing with grassroots entrepreneurship into a self-propagating franchise — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 908; Petty-bourgeois factions drove Tea Party and Occupy protests — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 188 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: how protest itself has been privatized and commercialized on both ends of the populist spectrum — the Tea Party’s deliberate commodification versus Occupy’s unwitting replication of the same anti-government script it claimed to oppose.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that OWS ‘believed in the bedtime stories of the power of spontaneous order’ — an oddly Hayekian framing of an anarchist movement; does the author substantiate this elsewhere in the book?

Broader Connections

• Petty-bourgeois factions drove Tea Party and Occupy protests #corroborates (0.78) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 188
• A worldwide wave of anti-establishment movements-from Tea Party to Gezi-Park broke out 2009-2013 #expands (0.70) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 167