Occupy protesters vs. tea party: more similar than different?

November 6, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Contra Costa Times

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.

Sean Ackley is fed up with where America is heading.

He’s protesting crony capitalism and greedy banks. The 43-year-old Brentwood, Calif., computer systems professional even pulled his money out of a corporate bank and deposited it into a private, small community bank to prove a point.

He’s also a registered Republican and a supporter of the conservative tea-party movement, and he’s saving his tent for camping — not occupying.

Though you likely won’t catch a tea party-er sharing a beer with an “occupier” any time soon, the groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum have more in common than sunburns and sign-holding, say political experts and the activists themselves.

“I think the crossover between occupiers and the tea party is in how corporate greed has taken over the government. It’s no longer a government by the people; now it’s crony capitalism,” Ackley said. “Whether you are a liberal or a conservative, the government simply isn’t working for you.”

Such thinking isn’t that far removed from the views of the Occupy movement, which purports to represent the interests of “the 99 percent” of the economic spectrum united against the 1 percent of the richest individuals and corporations.

Most tea party-ers are members of the 99 percent, noted Occupy Oakland member Joshua Smoak, 30, an unemployed photographer who has lived for a week in Frank H. Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall in Oakland, Calif.

“Maybe the tea party could create a partnership with us so that we can help society in general,” he said, standing in the encampment where he provides security. “This is about the separation of classes.”

Is such a partnership a lark? Not quite, said a University of California at Berkeley political- movement expert.

“There’s an odd kinship in a sense between the two movements,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements.

“The tea party was largely about a feeling that something was being taken away from them,” he said. “The Occupy movement started with a feeling about something they’ll never get.”

Another political analyst said any similarities are more philosophical than practical.

“I would not compare the tea party and Occupy movement in a literal sense at all; they are completely different entities,” said Joe Tuman, a San Francisco State professor of speech and communications who ran for Oakland mayor in 2010. “But one thing they do share in common is the expression of the larger body politic in the country and the anxiety about and discontent of the direction of the country and the way things are. People are mad. People are unhappy.”

Two years ago, disgruntled conservatives began raucous protests at a grass-roots level, upping the conservative ante and giving rise to the “tea party” name for their opposition over taxation, Rosenthal said.

With no leader, the group was criticized for allowing pockets of racism, and many brushed the movement aside as conspiracy theorists who cared more about presidential birth certificates than real policy.

The group has since distanced itself from those with such extremist views, Rosenthal said, and has emerged as a political player with a significant role in the Republican presidential nomination.

While tea party-ers have the ear of the Republican Party, Democrats are paying lip service to the Occupy movement, the professor said.

“They say things like, ‘We understand the motivations of the movement,’ but they are hedging around that,” he said.

Democrats may be cautious because they do not believe protesters will occupy the ballot box, Tuman said.

The Occupy movement’s fringe may be more dangerous to its future, particularly in a leaderless organizational structure where everyone has a voice. The larger movement also needs to distance itself from the extremists, such as vandals who broke windows and caused other damage in downtown Oakland after a mostly peaceful general strike Wednesday, to avoid alienating the larger support base.