Tea Party, Occupy, and Molly Katchpole: A Study of Recent Protest Movements

How fast-moving protest movements can be these days! The emerging story of the 22-year old young lady (Molly Katchpole of Washington, D.C.) who successfully spearheaded but a month-long protest against global banking giant Bank of America's recent decision to enact a $5 fee (for making as little as only one debit card purchase a month) was simply flabbergasting (and especially encouraging) to me.

Her story and the ongoing headlines and controversies surrounding both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement got me thinking, how do these recent protest movements compare? Are they each so different that transferable generalizations are invalid and useless, or are there useful insights to glean for would-be protesters and our democratic way of life?

First, it would be helpful to briefly review each aforementioned movement:

Tea Parties to Wall Street Occupation to Molly

The so-called Tea Party Movement is widely considered to have launched in early February of 2009, when a Seattle-based life-at-home mother named Keli Carender (now known as Liberty Belle) used her personal blog to generate a populist protest (which she famously termed a "porkulist protest") against President Obama's proposed $750 billion stimulus package. Days later, as about 100 fellow protesters showed up at Carender's event, CNBC's Rick Santelli made an impassioned speech against the Obama Administration's proposal to help delinquent homeowners refinance their mortgages, vowing to organize a "Chicago Tea Party" that coming July in order to protest what he saw as a gross mis-prioritization of federal resources and energies. Reactions to each separate and individual protest soon conjoined and exponentially multiplied over the web, with inspired events occurring from late February to national Tax Day (April 15th, 2009) in Denver, Arizona, Florida and some 40 other locales nationwide, according to Tea Party organizers and publicists. And on Tax Day, some 200 to 750 events (depending on who you ask) took place involving a combined total of anywhere from 250,000 to over a million protesters. From there on through the 2010 elections and beyond, the Tea Party has managed to effectively garner enough public support to elect several candidates to Congress and to state office, and to continue to influence the tone of public debate with regards to their unrelenting focus on scaling back "Big", as in big government, big business, big national debt, and big taxes. According to a Harris Poll conducted in March of 2011, some 37% of Americans still say they support the Tea Party movement, and these individuals are typically older white males of above average income with some or no college education, and who are self-declared conservatives (69%), but may also be political moderates (27%) or liberals (20%)..(not sure why these percentages add up over 100%).

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street was supposedly launched in mid-2011 by the Canadian-based Adbusters Foundation, best known for its anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters. This group proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy, address a growing disparity in wealth, and the absence of legal repercussions behind the recent global financial crisis. Activists from the internet group Anonymous encouraged its followers to take part in the protests, calling protesters to "flood lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street." Other groups began to join in the organization of the protest, including the internet group, Hacktivists Anonymous, the U.S. Day of Rage, and the NYC General Assembly, the governing body of the Occupy Wall Street group. On September 17th, the first public protest was held in Zucotti Park in the Wall Street District. From that time, the movement's slogan has been "We are the 99%" to focus attention on the fact that some 40% of our nation's wealth is controlled by approximately 1% of our citizens. Since Sept. 17th, Occupy Wall Street had inspired similar demonstrations in an estimated 70 cities throughout the U.S. by early October and since has morphed into the Occupy Movement, allegedly spreading to some 2,400 towns and cities worldwide by the end of October (albeit in different forms with somewhat different goals from country to country). According to poll taken in Zucotti Park on October 10th and 11th, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are mostly under the age of 40 (72%), male (56-44%), self-identified Democrats, Independents, or non-party-affiliated (71%), and many are unemployed, underemployed, or are students (47%). Most observers present noticed that the great majority of protesters were white.

Molly Katchpole and the Fight Against Bank of America

Unlike the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, Molly Katchpole's recent protest against Bank of America was much more specific in its aim (i.e. derailing a proposed new bank fee perceived by Katchpole as unjust), and has already succeeded in achieving its goal (cancellation by the bank of this proposal). Also, Katchpole led this fight by herself with the support of over 300,000 signatures collected via Change.org, a nonpartisan website that allows individuals and advocacy groups to launch campaigns on any topic, per the site. According to Katchpole's reported story, she is a 22-year old graduate of a small liberal arts college named Roger Williams University of Rhode Island, who currently has been holding down two part-time jobs (one as a nanny) and has about $2,200 in the bank while living "paycheck to paycheck". She describes herself as a political progressive who identifies with the Occupy Wallstreet movement.

Similarities and Differences Between the Protests

I chose these three prominent protests for analysis due to their recency and high media profiles, during this era that has witnessed the rise of social media as a powerful tool for mobilizing public support.

Movement Comparisons: Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

According to an October 24th national survey release by the Pew Research Center, slightly more Americans generally supported Occupy more than Tea Party (39% vs. 32%), and more expressed opposition to the Tea Party than Occupy (44% vs. 35%). Political Democrats supported Occupy more than Tea Party (52% vs. 13%), in contrast to more Republicans supporting Tea Party more than Occupy (63% vs, 19%), while Independents supported Occupy more than Tea Party (43% vs 30%). Although a majority of Occupiers voted for Obama, 73% surveyed disapprove of how he is doing his job.

In terms of perception, Occupiers are viewed by many Tea Partiers as unemployed, uneducated, and uninformed, and who happen to be more interested in fomenting anarchy than in working out problems via traditional constitutional channels. According to this broad analysis by Kate Zernike of the New York Times, these two movements essentially represent a new culture war between young and old, left vs. right, and communitarian vs. individualist (although the poll data cited does not totally bear this broad characterization out, with many Americans undecided or unsupportive of either Movement). However, Zernike points out that both Movements share key traits as well as differences, including:

(Both) emerged out of nowhere and quickly became potent political forces, driven by anxiety about the economy, a belief that big institutions favor the reckless over the hard-working, grievances that are inchoate and even contradictory, and an insistence that they are leaderless...and yet where they differ is in where they place the blame. While Occupy forces find fault in the banks and super-rich, the Tea Party movement blames the government for the economic calamity brought on by the mortgage crisis, and sees the wealthy as job creators who will lift the country out of its economic malaise. To them, the solution is less regulation of banks, not more.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the Occupy movement has been largely secular in composition, compared to the Tea Party, which leans evangelical Christian in orientation according to a Pew Survey, but is not synonymous with right-wing religion. The majority of Wall Street Occupiers have been white and middle-class thus far, which has raised concerns of disconnect between the movement's message and its most prominent messengers.

Protest Funding, Strategies and Use of Technology

Conservative oil billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are two primary Tea Party funders. Their money and that of many other wealthy and primarily conservative donors tends to be channeled primarily through two groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. Occupy Wall Street has been notably financed by money funneled through the non-profit organization Alliance for Global Justice, with specific donations by still mostly unconfirmed individuals. Meanwhile, Molly Katchpole used the free services of online petition facilitator Change.org to enable her campaign.

According to Change.org's website, the key to protest success is: 1. Focusing on an achievable and also compelling goal; 2. Delivering the message directly to a targeting population's email box; 3. Use social media resources like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to electronically spread the word ASAP; 4. Follow up with face-to-face contact as possible by one's self or through partnerships with motivated individuals and groups with their own networking channels.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street both were initiated at least in part by individuals (Keli Carender and Adbuster editor Kale Lasn) who used available electronic pulpits (personal blog by Keli, organizational website by Lasn) to call for protests on behalf of their personal causes. In both cases, other sympathetic organizations and energized individuals quickly responded in order to jointly create a groundswell of public support that mainly spread via social media networks, resulting in large and coordinated public demonstrations, that in turn inspired similar protests across the country within days and weeks.

A few lessons I am taking from this brief study of this contemporary protest movements are: 1. Movements require a convergence of like-minded individuals and organizations to truly go national and global on large scales, but can be initiated by a single individual or two; 2. You don't need money to start a protest movement in that social media usage can essentially be free of charge; however, to actually hold, maintain, and spread protest demonstrations, substantial financial resources and organization are needed for continued success; 3. If one is specific enough with their goal, a single individual like Molly Katchpole can garner enough widespread public support electronically to actual "change the world" (er, country, at least) on at least a modest scale; 4. One never knows if one's movement will "catch on". None of these three launched with specific national goals of inclusionary support and influence in mind.