Summary
The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet crowds ought to ignore their differences and concentrate on what they have in common: changing the current corporatist structure of American politics to better represent people instead of special interests.
My friend, Jim Harper, has an excellent post on where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street crowds have common ground that is anchored by this Venn diagram from James Sinclair:
This is a perfect reflection of something I thought over the last few weeks: the Occupy Wall Street crowd have good intentions, but are looking to government to fix the problem. The Tea Party (at least the grass roots people I know) have good ideas about limited government, but often miss the corporate-government complex (often called "corporatism") that is the root of the issue.
To that end, I'd like to point the #OWS crowd and the Tea Party crowd at the "change Congress" movement--now called Root Strikers. I think that changing the system to reduce the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics and government is the route to salvation.
That said, I think the Root Strikers are prone to left leaning and class struggle terminology that will turn off the right-leaning people that could and should be their allies. Of course, the Tea Party is suffused with ultra-right dogma. But there is common ground. The issue is too big and important to let disagreements over other issues drive us apart.
