Hypocrisy is Bipartisan

Hypocrisy knows no political party. I happen to think it’s an affliction particularly common among Republicans, but let’s not kid ourselves: If I had a dime for every two-faced statement made by a liberal, I’d still have a 200-foot yacht. If I made the same deal with conservatives, I’d have Paul Allen’s yacht, which reportedly comes with a helipad and two submarines.

The following people (repeat offenders, all) will be making contributions to the yacht fund:

1. Rick Perry.

After claiming that corporations outsource jobs not to save money on wages but “because they were over-regulated,” Perry went on to condemn the bank bail-outs: “If you are too big to fail, you are too big. I don’t care whether you are a country or whether you are a corporation.” The Times writes that “The comments appeared to be a suggestion to either prevent companies from growing so large that failure posed a systemic risk to the economy, or to break up companies that have already grown that large.”

Yeah, that’s called regulation.

2. Occupy Wall Street.

The Guy Fawkes mask popularized by the movie “V for Vendetta” has appeared on numerous anti-Wall Street protesters. The AP reports that, “while Warner Brothers holds the licensing rights to the Guy Fawkes mask, several protesters said they were using foreign-made copies to circumvent the corporation.” More specifically, members of the hacker group Anonymous have imported 1,000 masks from China so that the proceeds go “straight into the pockets of the Anonymous beer fund rather than the Warner Brothers.”

OWS: Anti-corporation, pro-outsourcing jobs. Presumably the college graduates complaining about a lack of jobs haven’t exactly been helped by off-shoring. And presumably the decimation of the manufacturing sector that has squeezed the middle class (sorry, the “99 percent”) is linked to shipping jobs to China. Made in America, anyone?

OWS Is Not The Tea Party (And That’s Not a Good Thing)

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson writes today that Democrats should show caution in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Liberals tend to equate tent cities and picket lines with idealism, he says, but “[m]any others, however, define idealism as something different from squatting in a park — as voting, walking precincts, volunteering in the community, supporting good causes and persuading their neighbors. These citizens may even share the discontents of Occupy Wall Street while rejecting its methods and culture.” At Slate, Anne Applebaum expresses roughly the same sentiment when she writes that the Occupiers have much in common with the indignados of Spain and the mobs in Greece:

In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but, actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary, and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul’s cathedral or chanting slogans on the Rue St. Martin in Paris.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the Wall Street protests (and I have to say I disagree), it doesn’t take a genius to recognize the danger in what Applebaum calls the “refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions.” The Occupiers claim that both parties are equally corrupt, that there are few differences between Republicans and Democrats. (To this, I would ask which party ran Elizabeth Warren out of Washington, or which party is trying to gut Dodd-Frank.)

In its avoidance of the establishment, Occupy Wall Street has thus far been content to (sort of) influence the national dialogue. If it really aspires to change political and economic reality, it will not only have to engage in the grubby work of setting goals and outlining demands but begin to work the more traditional levers of power. The Tea Party, to which Occupy Wall Street is often compared, made the transition from populist uprising to D.C. gamc-changer by co-opting the Republican Party. GOP insiders like Karl Rove dismissed the movement until the Tea Party marshaled its resources to defeat Republican incumbents viewed as insufficiently conservative. Three-term Utah Senator Bob Bennett laughed off his Tea Party challenger but went down in the primary, and sitting senators from John McCain to Olympia Snowe have moved rightward in an attempt to ward off similar challenges.

The Tea Party is powerful because it gets results. The no-compromise stance of the House freshmen forced John Boehner to reject President Obama’s last-minute offer of a “Grand Bargain” on the debt ceiling, and brought the country to the brink of default. Republicans ignore the Tea Party at their own peril, but there is currently little at stake for politicians who don’t follow #OWS on Twitter. As long as the protesters disdain electoral politics, New York Senator Charles Schumer, one of the biggest beneficiaries of financial-sector largesse, will not have to worry about Occupy Wall Street endorsing a more liberal alternative. Without playing the political game, there are limits to what the protesters can achieve. That might be OK with them; there’s little indication that the masses in Zucotti Park are interested in working within the system or developing a legislative agenda. After all, writing laws and devising bank regulations requires compromise, something that the so-called “99%” haven’t thus far encouraged. When the signs held aloft bear slogans like “Nationalize the Fed!” one has to wonder whether the protesters even know what Ben Bernanke does, or what percentage of the “bailed out” banks have paid back their tax-dollar lifelines.

This not to say that the movement will never develop political pull, but at the moment it is actually deliberately rejecting such involvement — which is fine, if it doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a street protest. The Occupiers say that the system is broken, that it no longer responds to the voices of average people, but the Tea Party — for better or worse — is living proof that the political establishment can be bent to popular will. Liberals argue that the Tea Party is bankrolled by the Koch Brothers, who have never had a problem getting the attention of the Powers That Be, but the fact remains that there are a lot of Americans who sincerely believe that Obama has put the country on the road to socialist ruin. These are the people whose voices are currently being heard in Washington. Occupy Wall Street can make its voice heard as well, but only if it climbs off its high horse and admits that the system is not so much broken as as designed to cater to those who manipulate it best. Right now, budget-cutting conservatives are winning. For liberals to have a fighting chance, they have to at least be willing to play the game.