People continue to compare the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Tea Party movements. While both share many similarities, there remains a major distinction: OWS is a social media experiment that leverages grass roots support, but the Tea Party forged a grass roots movement that then leveraged social media. While this may seem like a trivial distinction, it’s a crucial one. The Tea Party proved it could exist beyond online forums and localized protests from the get-go, while OWS has yet to clear that hurdle.
In the coming weeks, as police crack down on protesters from Oakland to New York, as the weather worsens and media interest fades, OWS faces a crossroads. Can the movement move beyond the confines of a digital campaign and make a real difference in the political and policy arena, or will it fall short and dissipate?
Already, OWS has proven that social media has enormous power to organize and publicize a movement. What began as a Twitter experiment by Canadian-based magazine Adbusters is now a daily news story. But its organizers still fail to form a coherent message, to accept large donations, to hold formal talks with political leaders, to fundraise for current progressive candidates, or to endorse their own political challengers.
A recent Boston Globe op-ed, aptly titled "The Still-Leaderless Revolution,” notes that the movement “prides itself on its leaderless, consensus-driven approach.” Right now, OWS is content to live online and through the sporadic protests across the country. That’s perfectly acceptable, as long as they understand the limitations of such an approach. It remains that the U.S. political system still fails to recognize such digital clout.
Policy decisions are not made via social media — not yet, anyway. Recall that only three years ago the House and Senate Rules Committees authorized the posting of videos to YouTube, and even more recently that representatives sanctioned official Facebook and Twitter accounts. Certainly, most elected officials now employ social media, but few use it for anything besides a vehicle for pushing talking points and campaign announcements.
Leaders of the Tea Party understood the current disconnect between social media and policy, and devised different ways to ensure that its message would be seen by decision makers. The modern-day Tea Party gained traction in January 2009 (right around the time President Obama took the oath of office) with support from conservative bloggers and radio hosts. Almost immediately, long-time Republican politicians, fundraisers and third-party groups recognized the opportunity. Just two months after its inception, Tea Party organizers used Facebook pages to help coordinate the first wave of national protests, which called for lower taxes. They amassed between 250,000 and 500,000 people across 200 cities. The Tea Party used digital media again in the summer of 2009, when activists stormed town halls across the country to protest President Obama’s health care reform. They strategized by narrowly focusing each digital media campaign around a specific issue.
The group continued to evolve. Just seven months after its inception, The Tea Party played a major role in the congressional race for New York’s 23rd District. The special election should have been an easy victory for the Republican nominee, but when the Tea Party endorsed a third party (The Conservative Party), it changed the race completely. While the win ultimately fell to Democrats, it became clear that Tea Party influence was capable of extending beyond a local protest or online rant.
Three months later the Tea Party endorsed then-Republican candidate for Senate, Scott Brown – and claimed its first victory. The Massachusetts Senate race was more than just a validation for the Tea Party; it was a blueprint for how to transform a grass roots campaign into a national presence. Critics may question the real influence of the 60-plus members in the Tea Party Caucus, citing that they have done little to change the broader course of the 112th Congress. Regardless of how many bills Tea Party representatives author or coalitions they build, the point is that the Tea Party organizers understood the American political system – specifically, when to use social media and when to move beyond it.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, on the other hand, has a long way to go before having any hope of transforming its broad principles into actionable policies. If the protests are disbanded, the movement will have a tremendous opportunity: It will no longer be judged by the number of “occupiers” in a park, but by its ideals. In order for those ideals to grow into real reforms, however, OWS must be able to present a political leader or suggest specific public policy — and mobilize digital media to do so. Otherwise, six months from now, we’ll be wondering, “Does #OccupyWallStreet still exist?”