I was struck by the observation made in the following article: Occupy Wall Street vs. The Tea Party.
It seems to me that the Tea Party is a movement driven by Baby Boomers and the generation that preceded them. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is driven by Generation X and the Millennials. Why is this important? The Boomers inherited the post-New Deal corporate structures given to them as they became adults, and as they got older, they dismantled every protection invented during the crashes of 1907 and 1929. To them, the corporation was the vehicle for their successes, either as "company men" or as entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and financial innovators. Boomers invented the modern derivative markets, invented hedge funds, created credit default swaps. While Boomers went through a powerful teenage rebellious period (indeed, the term "teenager" was coined to describe Boomer teenagers), at maturity, they embraced the corporate lifestyle by co-opting it and making it their own. The CEO in jeans and a turtleneck is a Boomer icon. The "cowboy billionaire" is another.
To that generation, the only thing stopping the meteoric rise to wealth was government regulation. Whatever youthful rebellion still lingered in the Boomers in the Carter era was purged in the Reagan era. Boomers reacted to Ronald Reagan as powerfully as they did to JFK, but for totally opposite reasons. JFK saw their youthful idealism and capitalized upon it. Reagan saw that they were tired of Watergate/Vietnam introspection, tired of the Civil Rights movement, tired of rebellion, and capitalized upon that exhaustion.
Lenny Bruce once pointed out that Vietnam protestors were not really protesting against the war in Vietnam, but against the local policemen. Since Vietnam was far away, and the cop on the other end of the barricades with the truncheon and tear gas was right there, it was an easy cognitive shift to protest the person causing the protestor pain, rather than the nominative cause of the protest. Boomers, left and right were protesting the government. The government was the enemy.
The prosperity of the 1980s was the prosperity of dismantling all the wealth stored away for the future by the New Deal structures, and devouring it whole as soon as it could be liberated from long-term investment. This generated a lot of new wealth, at the expense of infrastructure, the commons, and long-term development. From this perspective, government was the enemy, as it kept wealth in public rather than private hands. The "guns and butter" of Eisenhower through Nixon, by the time of Reagan had become "guns and no butter". Why keep any social programs that didn't help affluent Boomers? With infinite promise of material gain, why allow any barriers to that potential gain to remain?
The economic crisis of 2007-8 showed what would happen if corporations were promoted at the expense of reasonable government regulation keeping their competition fair. Just as every crisis beforehand, a bubble was formed through a small group of actors working in their own inflated self-interest at the expense of the public good, and like every crisis before it, it popped and hurt a lot of people more than it hurt the actors who caused the bubble.
In the ruins of the old economy, the Boomers are furious at the government, because they've been furious at the government all their lives. Because they are facing retirement and old age, they are expressing that rage in a conservative idiom. Hence the Tea Party.
Generation X, on the other hand, grew up in the shadow of the Boomers. They reached adulthood just in time to watch the Boomers pull up the ladder the Boomers used to ascend, before they could use it to pull themselves up too. Boomers educated on their parents' GI Bill became deans of universities and dismantled the scholarships they themselves used, replacing them with easily-available loans, and let the tuition costs skyrocket. Educated themselves, Boomers insisted on educating their children, but under very different financial conditions than they themselves had.
Now, Millennials are the most educated generation ever, but come into the world $250,000 in debt, with new Boomer-written bankruptcy laws that do not allow them to ever evade their student loan debt. They graduate into a world where there are not nearly enough jobs for them, since the corporations run by Boomers have outsourced to the Pacific Rim and South Asia. The gutted infrastructure of this country lies in ruins, and the future promised to them is gone. They are waking up from a beautiful dream fed to them by a media culture fed to them by Boomers, and they are enraged. They are angry at the corporations that dominate their lives, from the bank that owns their student loans, mortgages (or that denies them a mortgage) and auto loans. They are angry at the corporations that moved the jobs they were promised overseas. They are angry at the cowboy billionaires and the rockstar CEOs, even while they are enamored of the myriad of commodities these corporations have dangled before them. Why?
The Boomers rebelled against their exhausted parents, and looked for ways to express that rebellion. They found modes of expression that were, at the time of discovery, too marginalized to be commodities. Blue jeans were worn by shop stewards and miners. Rhythm and blues was a form of music marginalized even within the marginalized African-American community. Volkswagens were too cheap to be part of 1950s car culture. The Boomers turned these things into the language of their rebellion. The older Boomers and those from a generation previous realized fairly quickly that by commodifying these expressions, they could commodify rebellion itself. The Boomers eagerly turned their rebellion into a series of commodities that would express their rebellion for them, exploiting rebellion into a demand for commodities that expressed that rebellion for them. By the 1970s, they had co-opted rock and roll into the ultimate commodity.
That proved so resilient that they were able to commodify punk rock, which was an attempt to shake off commodification of rebellion. They raised a generation who could only express rebellion by purchasing commodities that expressed that rebellion for them. Expression through purchasing commodities that express rebellion is not entirely satisfying. It created a powerful love/hate relationship with the commodities in question.
Millennials are drowning in debt. They are slaves to their car loans, mortgages (if they are lucky enough to qualify for them) and student loans, even when they cannot find jobs. They do not see business and corporations as part of themselves, as Boomers do. They see corporations and the commodities they disperse as the makeup of the universe that dominates them, for evil and for good. But the corporations who were at the center of the crash of 2007-8 who ended up benefiting from the crash (or at least were not punished for egregious mistakes) are the target of enormous hate. Corporations who outsource jobs overseas, who pollute our soil and water and air, who keep them in debt with arbitrary interest rates, are the subject of great anger. They see a gutted government that no longer controls our destiny, and they see a myriad of corporations who have seized that power from the government and now own the government. That makes them want to Occupy Wall Street.
That is why the Tea Party is the expression of the Boomers and the generation before them, and why Occupy Wall Street is the expression of Generation X and the Millennials. Boomers are afraid of growing old in a world that despises them, and Millennials despise Boomers and the world they have created/ruined.
That is why, although the two groups have a lot of common ground, and if they could agree that they should be equally skeptical of and vigilant towards government and corporations, while they might be on the same page, they face a generation gap much harsher than what Boomers faced with their parents.
