Out of the Venn Diagram, Endlessly Rocking

Should the Tea Partiers and the Occupiers get together before we get much older? Sure, why not? I'm all for alliances that undermine the Red Team/Blue Team permanent pissing match, and if protesters can find common ground in the territory where opposition to expanding government meets opposition to Wall Street misbehavior, I'll be delighted.

A year ago I wrote this about the Tea Party movement:

The Tea Party isn't an actual party; it's an extremely decentralized movement with room for several different points of view. It is not libertarian in itself, but it has opened a space for libertarian ideas; it includes good guys like the Campaign for Liberty, and it includes its share of scamsters and authoritarians as well. And it includes a lot of people who are not pure libertarians but are motivated by a libertarian take on one or more pressing issues.

The typical Occupation probably has fewer scamsters and more authoritarians—right-wing movements attract entrepreneurs selling snake oil, left-wing movements attract sectarians selling Leninist newspapers—but the basic point is the same. It's an open movement. It has a lot of anti-authoritarian impulses. You can join it, engage the people there, and help make a space for libertarian ideas. To judge from the number of Ron Paul supporters who have been showing up at the marches, many people are already doing just that. At a time when MoveOn and other usual suspects are trying to transform the movement into a rally cum fundraiser for the Democratic Party, you can be one of the countervailing forces.

Two more thoughts on the general subject. First: You can chart a progression from the Netroots and the Howard Dean campaign, which were strikingly decentralized and deprofessionalized for their time; to the Tea Parties, which were more decentralized and deprofessionalized than the Netroots; to the Occupiers, which have been even more decentralized and deprofessionalized than the TPs. I'm not sure what the next step will be, but I'm going to go out on a limb and imagine that it will be even more decentralized, even more deprofessionalized, and even more closely tied to new media. It might also involve even more Guy Fawkes masks.

Second: In the wake of the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally and the Stewart/Colbert snarkapalooza, why are people still staggered by the idea of a demonstration without demands? You can't say it's unprecedented. There's a very fertile space between a protest, a carnival, and a revival, and it's getting more fecund as our increasingly decentralized activism collides with our increasingly decentralized pop culture. You should get used to it, because I don't think it'll go away anytime soon.