Somerby seems to think Digby suffers from too much "blue tribalism" to want to accept that. And that's probably true, but at the same time I don't think she's wrong to be pessimistic about the potential for these two iterations of impotent rage to ever amount to anything. But the reason it won't matter doesn't have anything to do with Digby's distaste for Culture War incorrect Tea Partiers. Worrying about the difficulties of populist coalition building only matters if you don't know that we're living in a post-republic here and have been for several decades.
In a post-republic like ours, the political theater doesn't have any substantive effect on the direction of the government. The government is always selected from among the same class of elites who take largely the same policy direction from the same oligarchs regardless of whatever cultural tribe the theater claims is in ascendancy. To understand this, one need only read Glenn Greenwald's Salon column where he regularly describes in meticulous detail the remarkable continuity running through the Bush and Obama Administrations particularly with regard to civil liberties and foreign policy. This piece on the so-called "End of the Iraq War" is a decent example there.
Populist "movements" like the #Occupy protest or the Tea Party (which was actually more of a corporate astro-turfing stunt that grew into a populist movement but that's a meaningless distinction here) are ultimately irrelevant in the political calculus. This is so partially because 1) as stated above, the elected decision makers will govern according to the desires of the oligarchs anyway and also 2) because whatever message the participants think they're sending will be described by the elite press in a way that fits the tribal theater narrative. In regard to number 2, the inevitable scenario Taibbi describes here is already what's happening.
There is going to be a fusillade of attempts from many different corners to force these demonstrations into the liberal-conservative blue-red narrative.
This will be an effort to transform OWS from a populist and wholly non-partisan protest against bailouts, theft, insider trading, self-dealing, regulatory capture and the market-perverting effect of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks into something a little more familiar and less threatening, i.e. a captive "liberal" uprising that the right will use to whip up support and the Democrats will try to turn into electoral energy for 2012.
Tactically, what we'll see here will be a) people firmly on the traditional Democratic side claiming to speak for OWS, and b) people on the right-Republican side attempting to portray OWS as a puppet of well-known liberals and other Democratic interests.
So it may be true that the people in Zuccotti Park calling themselves "99 Percenters" and the people we saw marching around last summer at Tea Party rallies are disaffected as a result of the same mass robbery of working class America by a corporate and financial elite. But it is just as true that their political outrage is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme. Otherwise none of this would have been allowed to happen in the first place. Our elites take what they want because they can. And the reason they can is because they count and the rest of us don't.
But this has been true for many decades now which is why I tend to take such a dim view of the OWS protesters... or any protest movement for that matter. The futility of their impotent public rage is so obvious that one is forced to assume that they are either utterly clueless or, more likely, motivated by some misguided sense of self-importance. In a few years ("when feeding time has come and gone"), we'll no doubt read a New York Times Magazine feature on some young marketing careerist who got his or her start making contacts with other careerist "creative class" campers in the park this year. It will appear in the same issue where we read a review of MTV's Real World Occupiers.
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