Chapter Six
Populist Dissent
Populist movements such as the Tea Party movement, Occupy, Stop the War, and others rely on popular, community support, and mainstream media coverage of their protests and political arguments. Though very different politically, Occupy and the Tea Party movement have relied on similar PR techniques, to varying success. They have both used public protest, they have both utilised social media, and they have both relied on grassroots support. They have also both faced similar animosity from the government, given that both were opposed to the government, albeit in quite different ways. As time went on, Occupy suffered from negative and alienating portrayals in the press. While the Tea Party had less of a problem with this, the interest in the movement from big business ultimately undermined its credibility and it was arguably absorbed into the Republican Party – the very people it was (mostly) against.
Occupy
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Occupy fell into the trap (as did Stop the War, Uncut, among many other groups) of being mocked as hipsters and dirty hippies, therein causing disruption and mess. As Jacob Greene for Solidarity US noted: “Many reports were redolent with discussions of the protesters’ waste, including everything from their trash and camping debris to their actual urine and faeces” (Greene, 2011). Greene points to an interview on CNN with Peter Greene, where he characterises the Occupy movement thus: “The entire tone of the demonstrations at Zucotti Park… living in their own faeces and urine” (King, CNN, 17/11/11). He also discusses a Fox News report in which the TV host Greg Gutfeld describes the protesters themselves as waste: “[The Los Angeles Sanitation Department hauled away] thirty tonnes of waste, and that’s not including the protesters!”
Various media reports of violence came to represent the movement in the mainstream, as opposed to its extensive reach, support and careful organisation. There was a tendency to fixate on rare instances of violence that happened during a protest, even if it was not connected to it. In November 2011, for instance, near an Occupy camp in Philadelphia, a 50 year-old man raped a 23 year-old woman. The Blaze reported that: “Sexual assaults and other violent incidents have been reported at a number of Occupy Wall Street camps around the country, though Philadelphia’s has been fairly peaceful, according to WPVI. The movement has been criticized for its responses to sexual assaults, particularly at Occupy Baltimore where it distributed pamphlets discouraging victims from coming forward to the police, instructing them instead to report incidents to the ‘Security Team’” (Morgenstern, 2011). Although Occupy Baltimore refuted claims that their pamphlets discouraged victims from reporting violence (Lewis, 19/10/2011), the Blaze article did not offer readers that comeback, or in fact Occupy statements or explanations regarding many alleged crimes and problems. Even when, in the case of the Baltimore Sun for example, a fuller story was offered (Hermann, 2011), the press nevertheless tended to report only on problems and negative developments within Occupy, rather than anything positive. The portrayal of Occupy demos and the wider movement was overwhelmingly negative, with a tendency, also, for papers and magazines to connect one instance of violence to every other known instance of alleged violence at any Occupy protest, anywhere.
A picture built up, therefore, of a reckless and dangerous movement in which young women were vulnerable to abuse, and people were unprotected by the movement itself as they were living lawlessly. While it was true that some occupations were attempting to self-govern and even experiment with alternative systems of reporting crimes or dealing with disputes, in the spirit of a new, more direct and communal form of democracy, this was picked up by the press and shown to be reckless, dangerous and harmful, rather than responsibly innovative.
Another interesting tendency in the press was to connect the Occupy movement with the Arab Spring, and even the threat of ‘terrorism’. As Heather Horn wrote in the Atlantic: “There’s a strong tendency in certain national presses to see Occupy as part of a global protest trend. Much of the language of the Occupy Wall Street protests, of course, has encouraged this, and protesters might be pleased to note the movement’s invocation of the Arab Spring” (Horn, 2011). While protesters might have liked the comparison, in the context of a country worried about threats from the Middle East, due to the media obsession with the threat of ‘terrorism’, being associated with ‘political dissent in the Middle East’ probably wasn’t conducive to mainstream, public support. The comparison worried people, and enabled a connection between Occupy’s mainly peaceful protests, and worldwide riots in the name of ideas a lot of people didn’t understand and didn’t consider relevant to their own lives.
In this way, then, a movement concerned with local, direct action, became linked to a global problem and a threat of national insecurity. The notion that Occupy was an ‘anti-American’ movement was particularly unhelpful for the group (King, 2011). As Peter Lehr has argued, groups that are seen to be incorrigible threats, such as groups whose ideas will challenge the establishment, are treated with more repression (from the state as well as established, mainstream media) than groups whose violence does not threaten the status quo. As Lehr has shown, right-wing groups generally do not receive the same kind of repression as left-wing groups, because while they are a serious threat to individuals, or even whole sections of society, they don’t threaten the police or the government. Lehr also points out that, as a consequence of seeming more threatening, left-wing groups are ‘othered’ more than right-wing groups, with the latter still being included as ‘us’ (Lehr, 2013, 188).
So while Occupy was a populist movement, the support it had was undermined by the media portraying it as ‘other’, and as threatening to the American identity (in the case of the US Occupy groups). A populist group needs to be seen to represent much more than a hippy minority. Although Occupy obviously tried to appeal to (nearly) everyone with its slogan “We are the 99%”, even this was undermined by the media focusing on whatever qualities supposedly made them ‘other’: dirtiness, youth, and a link to ideas popular with people in other countries – ironically, in the case of the Arab Spring, a form of democracy. Perhaps part of the reason for the public’s tendency to accept this narrative was that many people, while part of the 99% that Occupy tried to bring together, did not want to be associated with that multitude, and were more loyal to the 1% they aspired to be rather than the ‘masses’ along with everyone else. In a country traditionally bewitched by tales of the American Dream, it could be that the 99% (or a strong majority, anyway) prefer to identify themselves as followers of that dream rather than subjects of a poorer reality.
The Tea Party Movement
The Tea Party movement emerged around about the same time as Occupy, and had similar grievances, to a point. Both were discontent and distrustful of an apparent ‘political elite’ and corruption in banking and big business. The ideas they followed (in both Occupy and the Tea Party) have a long tradition in the US – a country founded on revolution, after all, and (on both sides of the political spectrum) a distrust of the idea of a corrupt, out-of-touch government.
Our country is in the midst of a massive, unprecedented, underreported, underappreciated, new populist revolt that has emerged overwhelmingly from the right, manifesting itself as Tea Party movement… as well as a smaller, and probably less significant reaction on the left. The means of expression for these two strands varies, as does the ideology that underlies the sentiments they cacophonously voice. Yet, together they comprise the new populist revolt. (Rasmussen and Schoen, 2010,19)
But while Occupy envisioned a new, more ‘in touch’ and democratic form of government as the solution, the Tea Party movement disagreed on this point and sought to limit government, to undermine its power. Interestingly, in this case, the right-wing Tea Party movement was a threat to government in its ideology, and so there was a greater degree of government repression than perhaps most right-wing groups would have received, in line with Lehr’s observations about the usually ‘corrigible’ rather than ‘incorrigible’ threat from the right. However, the US government (and the media) nevertheless dealt with the Tea Party and Occupy in quite different ways. While Occupy was often ignored or dismissed as a group of frivolous, naïve (and dirty) hippies, the Tea Party was given more approval in press (though Tea Party members have also complained of being misrepresented by the mainstream media).
This was helped by a perhaps more explicit effort to avoid violence and ‘mess’ by the Tea Party organisers, in part because they saw how an association with these negative traits (whether true or not) had affected the public image of the Occupy movement. As Paul Ibbetson, the Master of Ceremonies (and PR man) of the Kansas Tea Party, explained:
I think from the get go, the media has framed the Tea Party as potentially violent, [but] the Tea Party Movement and the Occupy movement [were] completely different. When we go to the Tea Party rallies, we leave the events spotless. They pay fees… and it’s not violent, there’s never been an arrest [at a] Tea Party movement here… certainly all the Kansas ones, they left things spotless because they thought that it was the right thing to do, but also the media was waiting for an incidence. Now with the Occupy movement, they would come and take parks… and hold property hostage. They would squat on it. They wouldn’t pay fees and they stayed as long as they wanted. They tore up the places, there was violence, there was crime, there were rapes, murders, thefts, all kinds of stuff. So the Tea Party has made sure that they separate themselves from the violence. If they were like the Occupy movement — politically it would be bad for them. But the movement itself is not about physical violence. The threat, if there is any threat to government, it’s being elected out of office, it’s the people who represent the Tea Party not putting their money into businesses or places that support these politicians that are doing things counter to the movement. The movement was never set up to be violent so it never seems to spiral towards violence. (Interview by the author, 13/11/13)
While the Tea Party perception of Occupy is bound to be biased, these observations do point to important differences in media strategy between the two groups. The Tea Party (perhaps partly because the members tend to be older – upwards of forty, often – and are usually Christian, and used to organising church and community events) were good at organising rallies. They were aware that the press was looking for stories, and so they made an effort to make sure that things like mess and violence were not there to be turned into stories against them. Occupy protestors, however, perhaps because of their self-identification with earlier ‘hippy’ movements, with their own ideas about self-governance and occupying space, were more vulnerable to a perception being constructed that they were ‘dirty’, ‘hippy’ and therefore anti-social.
The Tea Party members’ utilisation of social media also helped their cause, especially in the beginning. The use of blogs meant that their ideas could be communicated without the traditional, mainstream media; speeches and interviews were put on YouTube and were received well, and the movement grew quite organically in a new form of word of mouth. The Internet meant that the movement could be grassroots but also widespread: “There would be no Tea Party movement had there not been a fundamental transformation of America’s media landscape. The birth and growth of the grassroots, bottom-up Tea Party movement is a perfect example of how everyday citizens can use the new technologies to shape political events… The almost spontaneous organization of the Tea Party movement had as much to do with the nature and extent of the way the new media operates as it does with anything else” (Rasmussen and Schoen, 2010, 225-6). In this case, then, new media did change the game. But old media (and its own use of new media) would fight back.
The Tea Party movement, as it gained momentum and attention throughout the US, was picked up by Fox News and other mainstream broadcasters and media outlets. While this raised awareness of Tea Party issues and therefore helped recruitment and influence, it also provoked a backlash against the Tea Party from some media organisations. Paul Ibbetson of the Kansas Tea Party suggested concern among grassroots Tea Partiers that their local agendas had been largely misrepresented by the mainstream media. He said that the media had at first denied their existence, using the term ‘astroturf’ to describe the apparent falsity of their claim that they were a grassroots organisation. When in 2010, however, the Tea Party helped sway a lot of mid-term elections and Conservatives began to replace Democrats, the story changed again. As Ibbetson explained it:
Then suddenly the Tea Party did exist! And it was a dangerous organization ready to start, you know, bringing back the KKK, lynching people, and hurting the poor, and all these evil things. And now, lately, with our… debate over spending… they say that the Tea Party has taken the Republican Party hostage. [So] now the TP’s this giant power, like Dr Evil. (Interview by the author, 13/11/13)
While the Tea Party remained unpopular and was demonised by much of the media, however, it at least gained exposure and support from Fox News; Occupy had no comparable ally in the world of mass media. This association between the Tea Party and Fox News possibly came at a price, though. The Tea Party, which had started out being against corruption and the ‘elite’, found itself supported by the media organisation responsible for and connected to those businesses and individuals.
There was, therefore, division within the Tea Party movement as to their relationship with the Republican Party. Some were more comfortable than others about the implications of the close relationship between the Tea Party and individual Republicans (such as Sarah Palin), as well as with ‘big business’. The Tea Party became divided between those who wanted to stay loyal to the original anti-corruption and anti-elitist ideas, and those who wanted to raise the profile of the Tea Party by compromising on these points and becoming closer to elements of the Republican Party.
Interestingly, both movements accuse the other movement of the same thing: while the Tea Party will argue that Occupy has infiltrated the Democratic Party (Rasmussen and Schoen, 2010, 22), those siding with Occupy will say that Tea Party ideals have changed the Republican Party politics. Perhaps there is truth to both ‘criticisms’ or observations; what is also true, though, is that these mainstream parties, originally the enemies of their populist counterparts, have usurped much of the movements, and it is unclear whether much real ‘change’ to the Republicans or Democrats is the consequence. The ‘risk from above’ was not only the threat of police repression; it was also the absorption of the populist movements back into the mainstream. It would seem that both Occupy and the Tea Party, in slightly different ways, have fallen victim to this.
Ultimately, both of these cases show interesting ways in which the authorities have undermined political movements, and importantly that these tactics change according to the particular characteristics or strengths of a group. Selfreflection and anticipation of these problems seem to be of high importance when planning not simply how a movement communicates to the wider public, but how it conducts itself at every level, for the smallest details (litter collection, for example) can have an effect on image and ultimate success. A group cannot be arrogant and expect that their vision will simply win everyone over, that the smallest of problems will not be depicted as catastrophes by the press, or that significant issues will be understood and forgiven. Optimism and vision may feel as though they will last forever, but unless they are accompanied by careful planning and realpolitik, they simply won’t.